It’s green. Fern, myrtle, vert, chartreuse, swamp. Platonic-Kelly. Shamrock on steroids. And it’s everywhere: Derbies, balloons, twirlers, t-shirts, rivers, buttons, sneakers, bunting, beer, livers, vests, glitter, boutonnières, smoke. On the lime-lit stage, the band cranks up. The lead singer sports spiky hair and a harlequin kilt. The butt of the tin whistler’s jeans is spray-painted K.M.R.I.A. (he must be the lit. kid—it’s Joycean for “Kiss My Royal Irish Arse”). Tonight is the high holy moneymaker and they’re making the most of it, crooning and ululating and diddlydydaying. Right now they’re deep into a Guinness book-length medley of It’s No Nay Ireland Says The Wild Colonial Unicorn’s Galway Danny Where It’s A Long Way To Mother Macree And Has Anybody Here Seen My Wild Irish Rose—nuggets of such dreck they must have spilled out of a date-expired box of Lucky Charms. The emerald mob congeals to climax, chorusing that old Irish folk tune, Gilligan’s Island. Wild applause.
Did anybody ever think any of this was good? Were any of these tunes once hummed on an April afternoon by a gossoon walking the twelve miles from Cavan town on the road to Killeshandra? If so, by what process were they strained of flavor and nuance, and injected, like a 24-hour flu, into the aesthetic arteries of an entire population? If this sexless bacchanalia represents an invocation, what is it calling for? If it’s a ritual, what does it reenact? What is it we yearn for?
Right now I can relate to one particular yearning—to be anywhere else. Maybe that’s how it begins. Growing up in Flushing, which my parents pronounced “Sligo,” the theme song was “Everybody Knows This is Nowhere.” The row houses, the triple-digited streets, the plastic Pegasus gas stations, the unpithed hearts and TV dinners, seemed proof that only by fictive flight could we propel ourselves toward a home that was not completely sanitized of meaning. For me, that fantasy was incarnated one Sunday morning as I thumbed through the remainder rack of LPs in Korvettes’ emporium. Amid the mindblowing covers of Iron Butterfly, Procol Harem, and Jethro Tull was an album featuring four men in Aran sweaters in front of a canvas backdrop. There it was, the place I didn’t come from, where I wasn’t born and raised, where I knew no one: Home.
I wedged that LP into the cabinet Hi Fi and played it raw. Afternoons at a time, I rocked on hands and haunches, back and forth, speed adjusted to song.
My father would roll his eyes and say, “Up the Rebels."
My mother hissed back, "Narrowback!"
With money shaved from lunch I collected the entire Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem opus, Hearty & Hellish; Isn’t It Grand, Boys; The Boys Won’t Leave the Girls Alone; The First Hurrah; Home, Boys, Home; along with Paddy Noonan, The Dubliners, The Irish Rovers, The Merry Ploughboy.
I listened so hard I believed I understood the words: moonshine, porter, poteen and sassanach made sense. I was langers; peelers, pishogues and fenians harried and cocked; I roved; I stood and delivered—a bloody briny daft shoneen with an eye peeled for a crubeen or a colleen, a dragoon, an omadon, a quay.
Soon I began to understand Gaelic and ad fiason la port laragot, fa dow, fa dee, fa le god-e-lum was clear to me as with houls ime shoos ame tows peepin troo siyin shinnymarinkadootaloffin ould jonny doo.
At school, I became the ambassador of fantasy—plucked by Sr. Miriam Eileen out of the third-grade back row and ushered into the sixth-grade to preen like an exotic bird and croak O’Donnell Abu to the apprentice thugs and prom queens. Though I hewed strictly to routine, walking straight home after school to boil franks with Dinty Moore and watch “Speed Racer,” I lived in a phantasmagoria of faeries, warriors, wild geese, turf fires, and bathos. I mimed step-dances. I named our dog ‘Wolfe Tone.’ I said Gaelic Mass in my bedroom with a tissue box tabernacle and bathrobe vestments while Wolfe served as acolyte. My mother thought I’d had a stroke when she saw my fourth-grade school picture, because I’d curled my lip in what I took for an Irish smile. Life sailed on between Innisfree and Flushing until fifth-grade when the Masterson twins from Limerick enrolled. If they looked like a pair of snivelers who didn’t know a bunt from a burrito, they were certifiably more Irish than I was. I never got the nerve even to say hello.
The desire to be somewhere authentic without moving isn’t limited to children, or once-a-year-Paddies, or the denizens of faceless suburbs. I’ve seen a whole country overwhelmed. The flag was green there too—olive drab, with a jaundiced circle into which a black arm thrust a torch. Painted on walls, flying above office buildings, stenciled on t-shirts, it was omnipresent. Where you didn’t see the pennant, you saw the portrait of the man behind it, wearing a leopard skin hat and gripping a tribal staff. He’d changed his name from Joseph Mobutu to Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Benza Waza Banga (Mobutu, He Himself, The Cock That Fears No One). He was President for Life and Father of the Nation. When the Katanga province revolted, he renamed it Shaba. He transformed his native village into an animist shrine. He rechristened the entire country, thwarting cartographers by erasing The Congo on account of its colonial taint, in favor of Zaire, a word with no definitive history—though some said it came from a Portuguese mispronunciation of the Congolese word for “river.” He forbad cravats, preferring Nehru-style abacosts. Political rallies featured drumbeat-driven dances performed by women wearing traditional pagnes silk-screened with the leader’s portrait. Autenticité, he called it, implying that the war-torn, impoverished post-colonial country which the “Zairois” experienced every day was merely a façade. If the vision that Mobutu strove to incarnate was a figment, it was no less real and elusive than his nation’s bounty, sequestered in the President’s Swiss bank account.
While autenticité usually tints the present through the lens of a monochromatic past, sometimes it peers into the future. Describing communist Czechoslovakia, Milan Kundera links programmatic political thought with a cultural aesthetic he calls ‘kitsch.’ Kundera’s ‘kitsch’ results from an effort to cleanse; it is, as he says, “a categorical renunciation of shit.” Every institution has its ‘kitsch,’ he contends: there’s communist ‘kitsch’ and capitalist kitsch’ and Christian ‘kitsch’ and even perhaps Buddhist ‘kitsch.’
‘Kitsch,’ or autenticité, or merely sentimentality, all renounce the messy, the frayed, the unclean. But I wonder if there isn’t more. Maybe the desire for autenticité emerges from a dissatisfaction with the present, an argument with here and now—that prison from which none escape, and from which we seem eternally excluded. When the kaleidoscope of this absent-present makes us dizzy, we shut our eyes tight and envision some edenic past or utopian future, even though the squint turns everything green or red. Depending on how you spin the palette, it’s not that far perhaps from Flushing to Zaire to the Communist bloc to the autenticité of the Third Reich or Bush’s America where demagogues have rallied millions in the name of a fantastic past and future.
Easy now, boy. Take a sip. I can’t get all wound up. After all, I’m not merely a spectator here at this St. Patrick’s Day free-for-all in Youngstown, Ohio—itself a Hittite anagram for ‘nowhere.’ My band’s up next.
Yes, despite the Masterson setback, I find myself propped once again in front of overgrown sixth-graders to flog the ould songs. We’ve been at it for years, and it’s great craic. Living rooms, bars, churches, auditoriums, parking lots, theatres, and festivals, we’ve hit all the hot spots of Northeast Ohio and even beyond. Not to mention the occasional livening up a moribund faculty reception. But tonight’s different. After watching the first band cudgel the crowd into a frenzy, my band mates eye me warily. It won’t be original ballads or poems set to music or jazzed up arrangements tonight—not with this crowd, not on your life. Nothing but schlock will do. And I’m a veritable jukebox of schlock.
The prospect of reliving my own version of autenticité highlights the contrast between tonight’s gig and the tunes we play on the other 364. In fact, sometimes I wonder if we’re an Irish band at all. My fellow band-members come from very different angles altogether. There’s Jim Andrews, a physicist; Kelly Bancroft, a fiction writer; Will Greenway, the poet laureate of Georgia; and Istvan Homner, a Transylvanian mandolin player. Not a green strand in the helix. And what about our long-haired musical leader and composer, Steve Reese, who also ‘digs with the other foot,’ as they say in Flushing?
When I imagine Steve Reese’s childhood, I think of a different kind of autenticité altogether. He grew up in Ithaca, in the Finger Lake District of upstate New York: a hamlet, as it appears from the greenish distance of time and envy, of steeples, ivy, antique shops and cafes. Set in a valley between two campuses, it is replete with presentness, nearly living up to its Homeric etymology as a byword for home. While I was bussing around meadowless ‘Fresh Meadows,’ waterless ‘Bayside’ and dystopian ‘Utopia,’ Steve Reese biked home from his red-bricked, white-columned schoolhouse down Cayuga Street, named after the local Indians, onto Willow Ave, lined with real willows. Arriving at a home that must have been colonial cedar, he too was immersed in music. But there was no autistic bobbing on threadbare carpet (a practice which, by the way, has had the collateral effect of fitting me perfectly to play the bodhran). Instead, Steve Reese learned to play a guitar his brother had hand-crafted. The Reese brothers hunched over reel-to-reel recordings of James Taylor, Dylan, Joan Baez, and a thousand other troubadours, slowing the tape down to amplify each lick until they had absorbed a quadrant of the airwaves. Reese honed his gift playing in country and rock bands while grinding out an Eng. Lit. PhD at the University of Delaware, where by strange fortune our paths almost crossed—Steve arriving just after I lit out from Blue Hen country for Zaire and autenticité.
Late at night, buttery with whisky, our rehearsals often melt into a song-fest from those days, as Steve rocks through unholy medleys—everything from “Take a Letter Maria” to “The Inessential Woody Guthrie” to “Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road.” He has a chunk of Americana by heart, making up for everything I missed.
His solo album, The Feast of St. Monday, is an eclectic blend of ballads and alternative rock. Reese’s home-made guitar speaks like a lucid voice, textured with fiddle, bass, and drums, and there’s not a song on the CD whose lyrics wouldn’t stand on their own as spoken poetry. But as much as I love The Feast of St. Monday, the work he’s done with the band is, for me, the thing I can’t account for.
It’s wildly inauthentic. Reese clamps some electric chords on James Clarence Mangan’s “Rest Only in the Grave” with enough juice to jolt J.C.’s liver back to life, and restore bits of Davis and Ferguson too.
He’s added a stave to that bottomless barrel of whisky encomiums (matched in number only by curses spit at the same commodity) by composing a paean that goes both ways: Each verse, in claiming how “the whisky rescued me,” savors the misery it renounces. “For love no man I’ve met is fit/ Long of wind and dim of wit,” sings Kelly, our lead soloist, (and for those on the inside, the irony’s tarter since Steve’s her husband). Kelly’s quip, like the other stanzas, featuring unrequited love (Steve), poverty (moi), and loneliness (our happily married physicist) is punctuated by a harmonic toast, “A drink before I leave this world,” and “A drink before I go.” It’s the only drinking song I know that curses what it praises.
More ambitious still, “Heart of the Stranger” draws from Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days to relive an encounter with an Irish soldier who came to America “to fight for Lincoln in ’63.” Mid-way through, the melody yields to a spoken stanza of Whitman’s “Reconciliation,” mediating song and speech, documentation and interpretation. Because the Whitmanesque refrain, “Little he knew, poor death stricken boy,/ The heart of the stranger that hovered near,” reveals the sensibility embodied in all these songs, Heart of the Stranger became the title of our latest CD.
Another composition mixes the structure of a contemporary ‘alternative’ song, including bridge, morphing refrains, harmonies, and dueling instrumental breaks, with lyrics that echo the testimonial narratives of 19th century sheet ballads. The result brings to life the voice of a woman about to board one of the infamous ‘Famine Ships’.
In the end we’d grown desperate,
Having for our only meal,
A handful of Peel’s brimstone,
And whatever we could steal.
My husband left us at the workhouse door,
And the child growing weak,
I staggered the road down to Dublin,
The famine ships to seek.
Unable to extinguish his academic instincts, Prof. Reese has nosed volumes to uncover elements that seldom reach contemporary ballads. Peel’s brimstone, for instance, refers to the indigestible grain that Sir Robert “Orange” Peel imported to feed the starving Irish. Likewise, Reese links nodes of oppression, observing that ‘The boat smelled of sugar and molasses/ From its West Indies port of call.” Personal and immediate, the suffering that “Famine Ship” evokes ripples far beyond national borders.
Then there’s the blues number laid on the 14th century Welsh poet, Dafydd ap Gwilym. Opening with a bass riff that Dafydd’s descendant, Muddy Waters, might have jammed, Reese wails,
A plague upon the women of this parish.
What’s wrong that they don’t want me.
Not just the girls, but the wives and widows.
It’s unnatural; it’s villainy.
“Dafydd’s Lament” moderates a quarrel between the poet and his accusers, who respond in a lighter modality, “To lie between a maiden’s legs is the one thing on his mind./ In his eyes the fire of lust is all that you will find.” When the women finish flaying the arse off him, the instrumentals descend back into the blues to preface the next chapter from the aging poet.
The inventiveness of this hybrid becomes more apparent if we peek back stage at some sources. Here’s a sample, translated by Patrick Ford in The Celtic Poets.
Furious and indignant am I!
A plague on the women of this parish,
For I never had one of them, ever
Nothing but failed endeavor,
Not a prayer with a tender maid,
Nor girl, or wife or hag!
Not hard to see the grain Reese works against: the stilted ‘furious,’ ‘indignant,’ ‘endeavor,’ and ‘never had I one.’ Yet, in unvarnishing Dafydd’s lust, Reese hasn’t merely sanded down the diction; this is no ‘beat’ version. ‘Plague,’ ‘parish,’ ‘unnatural,’ and most delicious of all, ‘villainy,’ ink the colloquial lines with a kind of medieval slang.
Unlike the first-person lyric format of the translations in The Celtic Poets, “Dafydd’s Lament” reframes an ancient practice: the poetic contest. Such sparring tournaments take place in The Odyssey; they provide the template for Oedipus’s riddling; and they appear in many medieval poems, perhaps most famously in Brian Merriman’s bawdy The Midnight Court, where early feminists put the male gender on trial, deciding we come up (cough) short. Such contests are frequently featured in rap, and “Dafydd’s Lament” incorporates a strand of this genre by devolving into a spoken brawl: “Look at him with his oily eyes; more white hair than my grandmother,” say the women; to which Dafydd can only pluck a ‘G’ and splutter, “Oh, it’s unnatural.”
Reese digs further back into the canon to give voice to “The Old Woman of Beare,” an anonymous 8th century Irish poem. Again, it’s instructive to see the material from which his lyrics are culled. Here’s a stanza from The Faber Book of Irish Verse.
Ebb tide has come for me:
My life drifts downwards
Like a retreating sea
With no tidal turn.
This post-modernist translation bends the slant-rhymes of Gaelic verse into jagged lines. Reese takes the simple tone, along with more fulsome treatments by Frank O’Connor and Kuno Meyer, and gives the poem a new spin, based on a ¾ time signature that syncopates accented and slant rhymes against a complex melodic pattern.
The sea it crawls away from shore,
Leaves weeds like a corpse’s hair.
That desolate, withdrawing sea is in me,
I’m the old woman of Beare…
Of course, exegesis can’t convey the pleasure of sitting around my living room, as we did last night, encircled by vocal harmonies, two guitars, mandolin, bass, and bodhran, knowing that this place in rainy March in Ohio is the only spot on earth where this 8th century poem is being played in the spirit (and with the spirits!) that ensorcelled the windwracked Beare peninsula 1200 years ago. Last night, it felt palpable: the tensile strength that comes from the melding of influences.
Often, popular music erases any trace of absence, insisting, in an inversion autenticité, on being spanking-new and original. As a result, lyrics cluster around the same themes, and narrators occupy the identical posture, gender, time-frame, and attitudes as their singer-songwriting progenitors. If it’s been done before, the industry thinks, it’s been done to death. That kind of thinking leads to smaller, more crowded niches, until the guitars burn. But as our bass-playing physicist expounds, atoms are composed mostly of empty space. We are shot through with absence, eternal and as chimeral as Odysseus’ fantasy of Ithaca. Even the is is not.
Not that there aren’t other bands out there splicing traditions. The airwaves and i-tunes stream Celtic chord progressions. The Afro-Celtic Sound System comes to mind; or the older band Horslips, which did a rock version of The Tain bo Cualnge; or Rory Gallagher, The Pogues, Fairport Convention, Flogging Molly, Gaelic Storm and their many imitators; or at the new age end of the spectrum, Enya, Loreena McKennitt, and Clannad. Even the Chieftains have gone mainstream, recording sessuins with Roger Daltry, Van Morrison, and Tom Jones.
Some of these potions are powerful and they all have a kick. But at times, I wonder if the malt has been aged long enough. Even amped up, stand-bys like “Whiskey in the Jar” or “Courting in the Kitchen” have a hard time overcoming their hackneyed origins, notwithstanding the synthesizers and didgeridoos. At its best, the blend should develop a more complex palate, suggesting a bouquet of absence, and letting the poet—whether anonymous or merely on the road to anonymity—dissolve into myriad conditions, times, genders, species and states of life and death.
One characteristic of genuine folk music (meaning anything that’s been loved so deeply by so many that the names have rubbed off) is that there’s not much skin between the living and the dead. Just as Reese writes in the voice of an 8th Century crone, or a homeless drunk, or a great American Civil War poet, so the tradition glides over ephemeral distinctions: male, female; human, animal; living, dead. One verse might open, “So dig me a grave and dig it so deep…” and in the next, “they dug her a grave...and maybe by now she’s forgotten.” A shipwreck lament might embark with the conventional imprecation, “All you who live at home on land, come listen unto me/ While I relate of hardships great/ All on the raging sea.” But by the end of “The Ship Pomona,” which Reese found in a ballad sheet and set to new music, we realize that we’ve been listening to a ghost.
I’ve been listening to ghosts so long I’m prone to pronounce “Ireland” “Ohio.” Maybe we all slur on the late-shift: Reese, Andrews, Bancroft, Homner, and Greenway: ex-pats from homes that never were. To remind ourselves that we live in the presence of absence, we’ve forsworn shamrocks, shillelaghs, saints, and sheela-na-gigs, and dubbed our band after a rest area on Interstate 80 headed west from Youngstown. The place is called Brady’s Leap, and if you don’t believe me, the inside jacket of our first CD, The Road To Killeshandra, mapquests the very parish. Of course, we can’t snuff out the rumors: a certain Captain Brady leapt across Ohio to escape Indians; his distant descendant once dunked a basketball against the Cork Blue Demons; a heart-sore Ithacan once biked over the wine-dark sea.
Perhaps we have fed the heart on fantasy, as Yeats laments. The heart’s grown brutal from the fare. We know now, living in this America at this time, that brutal can mean coarse as well as violent. I don’t boast that art will save us from tyranny, or that we’re in danger of succumbing to a surfeit of shamrocks; but the mandate behind autenticité always serves a distortion that is oppression’s prime requisite.
So, tomorrow night, or the night after that, we’ll go back to singing Dafydd and Whitman, Browning and Cathal Bui and Sheridan and Greenway and Reese. It will be a small gathering. Plenty of seats available.
As for tonight’s gig, it’ll be fine. We’ll hang our green banner, stiffen our spines, and belt out the old tunes, as we do every year. Through the embellishments of Istvan’s mandolin, or through the scent of the goat-skin drum, or through the intercession of physics, tonight we will harmonize the real and make-believe. And if the green glare’s too much, I’ll day-dream about strolling down Cayuga Street and Willow Ave in Ithaca, caught up in the fantasy of a return home; feeling as shot-through with absence as I did as a child on 194th Street. I’ll dwell on the years spent in Ireland—making friends, tending bar, studying and teaching, and yes, playing basketball. It did feel like home; but still I would find myself sometimes standing stunned at a crossroads of the here and not.
There really is “a town called Castlemaine,” and “a road to sweet Athy.” And “One evening of late” I really did “stray out of Bandon/ bound for Clonakilty, making my way.” Yes, it’s true, “At Ballinascarthy some time I delayed,” but not to “wet me ould whistle with porter,” merely for a petrol stop at a plaza that might as well have been Brady’s Leap. As the fuel pulsed through the nozzle, my foot came alive and my tongue found an old melody and I drifted through words and sound that came not from airwaves, nor from the cabinet Hi Fi; but from beneath, through knees and hands, into the limbic node, as my head sank to hear them better—the dead, singing—of what is past, and passing, and to come.
Copyright (c) 2007 by Philip Brady