The slave may bend in abject fear, And he may hug the chains that bind him.
The coward may run his base career,
No flag of freedom find him.
But while above us floats the flag
Of green and orange blended,
No tyrant, nor no knave, its folds shall drag
While our stout arms defend it.
That song, sung in the room of a pub in Swanlinbar, Co Cavan in 1973 was Peter Flanagan's way of linking the past with the present and insisting on a deeper truth and an older music than was often heard in that place at that time. There to witness and record the song and singer was Henry Glassie, "the Yank" who had entered the lives of a small community in south Fermanagh the previous year. Glassie would go on to become one of the most respected folklorists in the world; that night he was one of the crowd, observing the young people dancing to The Men Behind the Wire, recording the singing on his reel-to-reel machine, noting "a nearly beautiful young man" among the people jostling in the hallway, who says softly to no one, "When I hear the old men sing, I love Ireland more."
Glassie had come to Fermanagh in the year of Bloody Sunday, a young American folklorist who wanted to experience and record life in a place of conflict, observe how people got on with the business of living in a larger landscape of violence and division. He settled on a hinterland around Enniskillen and went wandering in a place called Ballymenone, close to the river Arney and Upper Lough Erne. Peter Flanagan was the first person he met, his house at the end of a steep, uphill journey through ditch, muck and briar. The townland of Drumbargy.
Peter and his brother Joe were at first intrigued and suspicious of this strange Yank, but they gave him a stool by the hearth and set to a gentle interrogation. Later they told him they thought he might have been a detective or a spy, but they saw the good listener in him and in little or no time Peter was playing the fiddle for the stranger, then the tin whistle; and in less time again they were firm friends and a road of trust and understanding opened before them.
Out of such meetings come turns of life, nights of music and talk and laughter, but out of that particular meeting came an extraordinary harvest of words – five books – and a huge amount of recorded material, making for one of the most insightful, sensitive and sustained studies of a place and people ever achieved anywhere. The five books include Glassie's masterful study of mumming in All Silver and No Brass, a book I first read in my early 20s and which was to later prove vital to writing the play
At the Black Pig's Dyke. Peter Flanagan had been a mummer in his day, playing and relishing the role of Miss Funny in the straw-costumed folk dramas that played out rituals of conflict, death and resurrection in the houses of south Fermanagh. But it was from another Ballymenone man that Glassie learned all about mumming, the rhymes, the rituals, the costumes, the routes: Michael Boyle was in the Erne Hospital when Glassie first visited him, having been told that Boyle was a noted local historian, interested in history "from he was a cub".
In Glassie's marvellous book The Stars of Ballymenonehe recounts how it seemed as if Boyle had been waiting for him, waiting to set down his store of knowledge. So they set to, with little time for small talk, Michael Boyle talking and talking and Glassie threading tape, pushing buttons, asking the occasional question and keeping quiet. Over months they continued their work and Boyle's meticulous memory and fine turn of phrase illuminate Glassie's masterworks of Ireland, including the groundbreaking Passing the Time in Ballymenone.
I attended a talk given by Henry Glassie in Enniskillen seven years ago, a talk in which his love for the people he lived amongst for over a decade was clear and understated. All of his “stars” are dead – Ellen Cutler, Hugh Nolan, Peter and Joe Flanagan, Michael Boyle – but they all live vividly in Glassie’s books and recordings. He continued to visit them long after the main work was done, coming back through ageing and illness and death, coming back to comfort and console, to laugh about old times and share the burdens of time and sorrow. He also shared his royalties from the books with the givers of story and life from Ballymenone, and there’s a lovely, wry aside to this: one of the recipients, Hugh Patrick Owens, said to him on a visit back, “I’ve lived a long time, and I always thought royalties was sons of bitches, but now I come to learn that royalties mean a lock of drinks at Christmas.”
All of this is by way of saying that Henry Glassie is the perfect choice to give the commemorative lecture to mark the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Irish Folklore Commission. Apart from his extraordinary work in Fermanagh, Glassie has worked in Turkey, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Japan, India – and has just retired as college professor of folklore at Indiana University in Bloomington. Books such as The Potter's Art, The Spirit of Folk Art and Vernacular Architectureare works of art in themselves, as is his latest book on the Nigerian artist Prince Twins Seven-Seven.
Glassie brings a universal understanding to local experience and is wise enough to see the immense value of the local in and for itself. Witness the work in Ballymenone, where he made a small world blossom and captured the passing and stillness of time.
The Folklore Society of Ireland Commemorative lecture by Prof Henry Glassie, runs tomorrow at 5.30pm at the National Library of Ireland, Kildare Street, Dublin. Admission free.