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Timmy McCarthy’s shop in Cornmarket Street sold second-hand clothes, wide-brimmed hats and those green military jackets beloved of children of the sixties. I suppose it was a statement of solidarity with the proletariat. Chris Twomey had pronounced that the uniform of our band, Stokers Lodge, should be black shoes, navy blue trousers, a CIE waistcoat burnished by silver buttons and a collarless blue shirt. Obsessed with most things from the past, I was looking for a brass stud or two with which to fasten the neck of my Guard-blue collarless shirt. One charmed day I left the workshop for a ramble over to the Coal Quay at lunchtime.
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Photograph: courtesy of Evening Echoīridgie Murphy of Monard, near Blarney, Co Cork who sang The Half o’ Crown and a version of the Yellow Rose of Texas. Not only was there a city way of talking: there was a city way of singing too and I consciously emulated the more colourful exponents and cast off my Dublin brogue, which I had hitherto employed from listening to heroes like Johnny Moynihan, Al O’Donnell and Ronnie Drew.īarrack Street, Cork in the 1950s. Propitiously in the late sixties, I was serving my time as a cabinetmaker and there, at Buckleys’ Furniture and Bedding, Brown Street, Cork, among the glue-pots and aprons, I heard and collected fine songs, both local and “parallel” ballads songs like The Bold Trouper (no 311 in the Roud Index of classic ballads), The Ball of Yarn (Roud 1404) Johnny Jump Up, Boozing, Let’s All go Down the Marina, etc. He gave me a starter pack: the words of Connie Doyle’s Armoured Car about a harrier from Fairhill and bid me search the lanes for more. Chris went to pains to remind me that these were not the parlour ballads of the bourgeoisie, as supposed, but had been embraced by the people in their soirees. My mentor, even more significantly, told me that Cork City had an urban ballad tradition that embraced sporting heroes, the didactic muse, the heartrending love of the Beautiful City that John Fitzgerald (the bard of the Lee), Fr Prout and “honest” Dick Milliken evinced and a vibrant broadsheet legacy. Then he took up his autoharp and sang me the Appalachian version. He played me the Copper Family in Sussex singing A Week before Easter and explained to me how it was a first cousin of The False Bride, sung by John Connell in Baile Mhuirne. In Roinn an Bhéaloidis in UCC, the Northside Project proudly furrowed a new field in ethnography, mapping dialects, phonetics, skipping songs, exploring the arteries of inner-city cosmology.Ī long time ago a great man called Chris Twomey told me that what was local was universal. Urban studies, street ballads, urban legends, inner-city cants, rants and raps are now being collated and studied with the same fervour that people employed for the singing of Seán de hÓra or Joe Heaney in the sixties and seventies. The position of folklore studies, thankfully, has come a long way since. Urban folk didn’t believe in banshees, fairy forts and cared little about eggs planted in the corners of fields to soften the coughs of the people who did you a wrong turn.
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Commendable and pioneering as they were, (the methodology of Séamus Ó Duillearga and his team was followed in many emerging nation states who sought to preserve an indigenous culture), they cared not a fig for the people of Ireland’s cities who apparently didn’t have a cosmos beyond what they aped and emulated from the trans-marine music hall stage. The Irish Folklore Commission undertook an ineffable body of work when they dispatched collectors to the four corners of Ireland to collect “what remained” of songs, music, calendar customs etc. Songs like Farewell to Ballymoney and I am a Youth who’s Inclin’d to Ramble lay the course to True North and make us wish for a different accent. And everyone who knows anything about singing will tell you, that the best songs in the world are in Ulster on the banks of sweet Lough Erne on Dobbin’s flowery vale, and on the shores of Lough Bran. In “Con’s Half”, that’s anywhere above Clonmacnoise, and burnished from the west by the pulsating lighthouse of Connemara, sean-nós, that elusive, uncertified approach to singing, kept the Irish language in the ears if not the mouths of the people. That fervent, pervasive Jacobite feeling, even today, still haunts the hedges of the Maigue River of Sliabh Luachra, Muskerry and Corca Dhuibhne. “Modh’s Half”, as we used to call Munster, still cherished the lost hopes of the exiled Prince: the Pretender and younger Stuart. Until quite recently, as far as folk singing was concerned, Ireland was overwhelmed by its rich and capacious rural hinterland.