With the passing of Frank Patterson also passes, finally, the era of the Irish tenor. Singers with tenor voices singing the repertoire of Irish music hall ballads no doubt will still be heard; but they will not be of the species, just imitating it, as some today imitate the three tenors from Italia'90 without convincing anyone that they are of the Latin singing tradition.
Frank Patterson was of the tradition which he so splendidly re-created in the film The Dead. It is of music of the drawing-room. It is of music gathered around the family piano. It is a celebration of Irishness in what today seems obsolete and irrelevant forms, not least because that kind of Irishness is all but extinct. Frank Patterson could sing the often winsome anthems of Irish balladry because he was not merely of that tradition, but because he believed in it. He was an authentic exemplar of a musical form; he was raised within it, and adhered to its loyalties and its cultural priorities. That is what made him so popular. It is a music which, for all its naievety, demands authenticity: the bogus, the insincere, the mere imitator, are soon rumbled.
Invented Ireland
So, aside from having a lovely voice, he was entirely of the species he represented. He was its laureate and its bard and its ambassador, and if the Ireland which he represented was an invented Ireland, are not all groups' identities based on conceits and deceits and the flattering falsehoods of legend? Of course, there was never the blameless, fault-free, unworldly world which is celebrated in the songs of the Irish ballad; and in their hearts, the adherents of that world knew that. But it was an agreed fiction which united audience with singer; and inasmuch as there will never be another Frank Patterson, neither will there be an audience which subscribes so wholeheartedly to the amiable fantasies of which he sang. It is not so much that Frank Patterson is dead, as the audience to which he sang is dead also: indeed, in Ireland, he long outlived it.
I met Frank Patterson a couple of times. He was a ridiculously nice man. His niceness in part explains his popularity. He was unaffected, and unaffected by shame. His niceness wasn't of the toe-curling glutinousness of Daniel O'Donnell. It wasn't laboured or precious or created or self-conscious or irritating or tiresome or ingratiating. It was what he was. It was the niceness of simplicity and the niceness of honesty and the niceness of unfeigned modesty and the niceness of unselfconscious and uncontrived goodness.
I suspect that part of Frank Patterson actually half-believed in the world of which he and others sang: that world of the Kerry dances, and gardens where the praties grow, with Ballyjamesduff waiting forlornly for Paddy Reilly to come back, in which three lovely lassies live in Bannion, where also resided Mary of the Curling Hair and the Country Leitrim Queen, where both Lagan stream sings lullaby and bright waters meet. That world shimmered in the collective folk memory of the Irish people up until a generation ago, a better and preferable place, an invented Tirna-nOg of gallantry and beautiful women and plaintive love songs.
Congenial fiction
Though nobody believed in that world in reality, in the seance of a concert hall or a drawing-room beside the upright piano, it became possible to subscribe to its fantasies, an agreed myth which united people around a congenial fiction; and there was since John McCormack no finer medium to conjure up the spirits from an invented past, held in common and created in common, than Frank Patterson.
That was why Frank Patterson was better at singing these songs than he was at lieder or the more technically complex music which dominated the earlier part of his career. He was a believer. The church he sang in was the church of other people's imaginations: among his audience he evoked memories of things that had never happened and which belonged to the realm of the purely fabulous. But while he sang, he and they shared an agreed vision; and in recent years, it was easier to have that vision of a mythic past of Ireland in the US than it was in Ireland itself, with the depraved realities of Irish life, awful and self-inflicted, too inescapable to be removed by song alone.
Essential narcotic
Virtually no-one in Ireland has subscribed to that musical version of Irishness for a generation or more; certainly nobody under the age of 30 would have the least idea of the topography or the population created by Percy French, Joseph Campbell, Johnny Patterson, and others. And though that landscape and those people were not real, the idyll they spoke of for decades released generations of Irish people from the irksome captivity of political and economic failure. They were the essential narcotic which made life bearable.
We have no more Frank Pattersons because we need no more Frank Pattersons. But to have lost the childlike belief in a never-never land is not necessarily a good thing. Credulousness makes all art possible, and Frank Patterson was an artist, his singing was artistry: when he sang of Gortnamona or the Green Hills of Antrim or any other mythic place of song, for that brief shining hour, his audience believed him. That is art, pure and simple. Of very few people can you say that they were an unmitigated blessing for their country. Frank Patterson was one such person.