Diarmaid Ferriter: The perception of traditional music and of what constitutes authenticity has been transformed

From Séamus Begley and Tony MacMahon to Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin to Riverdance, Irish music has grown immeasurably in status, range and confidence

The traditional music bursting through January gloom is to be savoured. RTÉ viewers were reminded last week of what the Late Late Show does best with its hosting of different generations of Irish musicians communicating their vitality and virtuosity, managing to lift clouds with a trad version of the Beatles’ Here Comes the Sun and much else. They gathered, not just in advance of Tradfest Temple Bar later this month, but the day before the funeral of one of their towering figures, Séamus Begley, whom singer Aoife Scott warmly described as “the chieftain”.

The wind and rain were unforgiving in west Kerry last week, a reminder of the wetlands that produced Begley and the terrain he remained wedded to, his funeral another version of the ability to gather and perform to lighten dark days and tired spirits and cherish deep roots. It could hardly have been any other way given what he and his family represent. Begley, as the accordionist playing his instrument in such a local manner, was able to maintain the physicality and confidence of a man in tune with his people’s land and airs. He often saw it as his main mission to provide a beat for the dancers but was also capable of extraordinary nuance and tenderness in his singing.

Begley’s 1992 album with Australian-born guitarist and didgeridoo player Steve Cooney, Meitheal, was described after its release by Irish Times critic Joe Breen as “world music on a small island platform. Miss it at your peril.” Redeploying tradition was rarely so skilfully done and it reached out well beyond their west Kerry hinterland.

That was part of what Begley came to represent. As well as with his own family, he went on to collaborate widely with other guitarists and fiddlers and singers. The experiments and the discarding of caution allowed for expanded audiences and a platform for the Irish language. The new aural marriages went global and new opportunities were created, powerful antidotes to Steve Cooney’s recollection that “I had a great sense of failure when I came to Dingle, that as a musician I couldn’t make a living”.

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Tony MacMahon, the brilliant button accordion player, recalled that in an earlier era, ‘in Ennis it was referred to as Tinkers’ music’

During Begley’s lifetime, the perception of traditional music and of what constituted authenticity was transformed. Musician and historian of traditional music Fintan Vallely, at the height of the Celtic Tiger era, traced these changes and how the music moved “a long way from the sub-cultural ambience of a besieged, righteous, purpose-driven comfort” to an industry, driven by a momentum born of national and international recognition and expansion. Tony MacMahon, the brilliant button accordion player, recalled that in an earlier era, “in Ennis it was referred to as Tinkers’ music”.

There was a Scottish parallel too; Vallely quoted the singer Robin Morton, a leading figure in the Scottish Folk scene, who spent his early life in Armagh; he had observed the tendency to “treat traditional artists here as noble savages at best”.

This music of ours possesses the power of magic: it can put us in touch with ourselves in ways no other Irish art form can do. It can touch the pulse of ancestral memory

—  Tony MacMahon, button accordion player

As was evident in some heated debates in Ireland in the 1990s, there was a degree of discomfort with the experiments and Tony MacMahon was vocal about his qualms. MacMahon had been schooled by the renowned Uilleann piper Séamus Ennis and was later responsible for music programmes The Long Note and The Pure Drop, and in 1979 memorably travelled around Eastern Europe with Barney McKenna of the Dubliners in a Citroen 2CV for the programme The Green Linnet. In 1995 he suggested “innovation is taking over, steamrolling tradition… Irish traditional music is being lost”.

Bold energy

This was in the context of a BBC/RTÉ collaboration, River of Sound presented by pianist and composer Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin (another great innovator) and as the bold energy of Riverdance was entrancing audiences. MacMahon was not hostile to collaboration – he played a version of Port na bPúcaí with the San Francisco group the Kronos Quartet in 2004 – but he did not want Irish music as background, “as an aural carpet, a sort of ear chocolate to soothe our nerves in pubs, traffic jams or shopping centres”.

But as he also outlined elsewhere, “this music of ours possesses the power of magic: it can put us in touch with ourselves in ways no other Irish art form can do. It can touch the pulse of ancestral memory, allowing us to redefine our dreams of what it is to be Irish. It can bring the lonely Famine landscape to life, it can soothe the trauma and trouble of existence, it is possessed of the veiled eroticism of tenderness. It can adorn a moment of joy; it can sharpen a moment of sorrow. It is a gift of nature dispensed with the abandon of wildflowers.”

Begley, who like MacMahon was so generous in sharing his gifts with other musicians, personified that power, and the generation following can both pay homage and do their own thing, such is the robustness and cultural versatility of the tradition they represent.