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Concertinas And The Sea


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On Gearoid’s Clare concertina players map: Looking at his map, I see that it bears out exactly what I said. The bulk of the plots on it are in the Cree/Cooraclare region, inland to the north of Kilrush, with hardly a player shown on the banks of the Estuary.

Are we looking at the same map?

Dan,

 

Let me start my reply by stating that historically the playing of traditional music in Ireland has been an activity of country (largely farming) people, and something that tended to be looked down on/sneered at as old-fashioned by townspeople. One might not think so from attending the Willie Clancy Week today, but in his lifetime Willie would himself have been a victim of this attitude in Miltown Malbay.

 

Also, virtually all the "sailors" in this part of the world came from neighbouring Kilrush, Cappa or Scattery Island, but the only older concertina players that I know of in Kilrush came originally from the surrounding countryside, not the town (or the sea).

 

Yes we are looking at the same map, but it's a pity Gearoid doesn't put names (or places) to the plots on it as it would be useful to know more about the players in question, in fact I'm even finding his symbols hard to read. :wacko:

 

one player located near Carrigaholt

Carrigaholt is a picturesque small fishing village, with two piers (harbours) and a castle (I thought of moving there at one stage), but Gearoid's player appears to have been a "Migrant Female", so not a fisherman (and not from the locality?). But I'm surprised he doesn't seem to show John Kelly who was from Rehy, a little to the west of Carrigaholt (in fact they have held commemorations for him in Carrigaholt).

 

another near Moyasta

Presumably Ellen (Nell) Galvin. Born Ellen McCarthy, she originally came from the townland of Ballydineen (north of Cranny, between it and the main Ennis road), Knockalough and played both fiddle and concertina (but was much better known for her fiddle playing). She was a pupil of the famed blind piper Garret Barry from Inagh, and both John Kelly and Willie Clancy visited her house at Moyasta (I pass it every day at the moment) to learn tunes.

 

Of the three or four shown ‘north of Kilrush’, we’d have to ask Gearoid, but some of these may actually be in Kilrush …note how he puts several symbols around Ennis because otherwise they wouldn’t show properly because of crowding.

I'm not referring so much to them but (as I'm sure you know) to the Y-shaped group of players just above them, around Cooraclare and Cree (I'm sure you must have those places on your map ;) ). It's where most of the well-known older West-Clare players have come from, including Tom Carey, Solus Lillis, Tommy McCarthy, Tommy McMahon, Sonny Murray, Bernard O'Sullivan, Stack Ryan and "Mrs. Crotty from Kilrush" herself (born Elizabeth Markham, from the townland of Gower near Cooraclare).

 

And the question for me isn't so much "how did the German concertina come to Clare", which (as I've said) I think was more likely by conventional means and the same as the rest of Ireland, but rather "how did the later tradition of Anglo playing in West Clare come into being, and with it the strong association between the concertina and Co. Clare" (in the 1940s when the rest of the country was largely abandoning the German concertina and melodeon in favour of the two-row "button box")? The answer to my question seems to have been largely down to the efforts of one man; Ned Falvey, in making them available.

 

Bernard O'Sullivan was the first player who mentioned Ned Falvey to me, when he told me that Ned had emigrated to England (London?) from the locality, and when he came home (at Christmas?) he'd bring secondhand Anglo concertinas with him in his suitcase. Apparently he had offered one of them, a four-row Jeffries, to Mrs. Crotty but she couldn't get on with it (having been used to playing twenty-key German instruments until then) so Bernard bought that one, and Mrs. Crotty bought her 30-key Lachenal in preference!

 

Tom Carey has also told me that the 38-key Jeffries he plays came originally off Ned Falvey (Solus Lillis had it first), and Vincent Crowley (senior), who sometimes fills my car with petrol at the garage in Kilrush, remembers him too (though he would have been young at the time).

 

For that matter, one of the tunes on track 27 of the Mrs. Crotty CD is called "Ned Falvey's"!

 

I shall have to try to learn more about him, but I'm afraid my "collecting" has tended to be on the very informal level of simply talking to the people I meet (rather than "recording it for posterity" :unsure: ).

 

I envy you being able to travel those roads; its lovely countryside there.

The countryside might be, but the roads are anything but... :rolleyes:

Edited by Stephen Chambers
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Hi Stephen,

 

Not sure where this thread is going now, not that it matters; it is fun and I’m happy to let it pleasantly drift like a leaf on a slow moving stream…

 

Let me start my reply by stating that historically the playing of traditional music in Ireland has been an activity of country (largely farming) people, and something that tended to be looked down on/sneered at as old-fashioned by townspeople.

 

That is so, of course, but the same cannot be said of concertina playing. From what I am seeing from looking at old newspapers and such, German concertinas were played across society in Ireland in the late 1800s to the early decades of the 20th century as highly popular instruments, when they were a bit newer (lets dismiss the obvious aristocratic leanings of the English concertinas, which are well covered elsewhere… the story was no different in Ireland). In digital newspapers I have found period sightings from Clare to Clare Island to Cavan to Meath, Cork and Dublin, by farmers, townfolk, cityfolk, officials, publicans, women, men, prisoners and magistrates. They were sold by jewelers, pawnbrokers, and music stores, and given away by convent lotteries, raffles, and in music contests. Complaints of their use abound in towns and cities, many ending up in court or in hot letters to the editor (just as in the US and UK). An eccentric wealthy Galway Anglo-Irishman played a concertina, Pan-like, to his bullocks in this pasture in 1905, trying to entice them to dance (the bullocks were having none of it). Policemen in the ‘congested districts’ of 1895 Clare Island played them even as they were involved in evictions, while in 1905 Dublin some patriotic anti-eviction activists played one as they barricaded themselves and prepared for battle with the police. Gaelic nationalists didn’t know what to make of them, saying via one speaker in 1908 that Irishmen “should go back to their native music. (The Irish) were at one time the most musical nation when a harp hung in every home, but now they had got down to the concertina and melodeon, and even to the mouth organ. They had thrown away the music of their great (native) composers for the abortions and abominations of the English music halls’. No, back in that time the concertina was clearly not solely identified with rural folk playing traditional music.

 

But it has made that transition, certainly. From sightings in newspapers, it looks like that general playing of the concertina became ‘old fashioned’ pretty much the same time as it did in the US…with the advent of gramophones, radio, and jazz (1900-1930). It is at this time that it nearly disappears in accounts of the day. The people who continued to play it were the then-largely poverty-stricken rural folk of western Ireland. Electrification that brought radios and other music came pretty late to some of these places. In the 1970s, my relatives in Ballymakea (just down the road from the Annagh Cross) had a TV, phonograph and radio, but my great-aunt well remembered the time when they did not have them. She played melodeon, and her brother an inexpensive German concertina.

 

Why Clare for concertinas? First, let us remember that numbers of surviving players by the middle 1900s were very small (Gearoid has only a few dozen on his Clare map, for example). The arrival of radio and more wealth in the midlands and the Pale to the east pretty much wiped out the ‘old-fashioned’ instrument there by the 1950s, from the looks of it. This would include the rural area where William Mullaly grew up, near Mullingar Co. Westmeath, for example. But what about other equally poverty-stricken areas of the west, like Connemara and Mayo? Others more knowledgeable than me would be better sources! However, my wife’s mother comes from Mayo, in a remote little village in the far northwestern part. Some of my best musical memories come from a little pub there…a stark place with a stone floor and a single naked light bulb hanging from the ceiling…where the local farmer-musicians would gather (amongst them her late uncle, who played melodeon). From what I could see, by talking to these guys, there were fewer players per capita in that part of Mayo than in Clare in the 1970s-1980s. Maybe (and I am grasping at straws) you take a once ubiquitous and country-wide instrument, then double-decimate the playing population via economic-cultural means discussed above, and the remnant playing population in poorer areas is so small that it is only noticeable in the areas where music was strongest. Certainly having a catalyst like your Ned Falvey coming along at the right time would, in this instance, have a very large impact. Just speculating…

 

One thing is clear to me, though. Present day living memory, gained from talking to living musicians, just doesn’t reach back far enough to map out the 19th century. Players who were alive at that century’s end, like Elizabeth Crotty, are no longer around for us to pepper with questions. Newspapers and diaries are the only reliable sources, just as they are for seagoing concertinas. It is not ‘recording it for prosperity’, but just trying to figure out how concertinas came to be what and where they are (and aren’t)…a hobby and vice of those of us who like history!

 

On the ‘first courier’ stuff about concertinas coming to Clare via the sea, I can only quote those oral rural legends offered by others; there is no hard documentation that I have seen...so who knows. I agree with you that, however first established, the spread of the German concertina was largely through the standard merchant route,as I mentioned earlier.

 

I’ll try to document all my Irish ‘sightings’ from those earlier times soon, and get it online somewhere. It might help fill in the gaps a bit for existing accounts.

 

Dan

 

Ps. Regarding your ‘lovely countryside’ and the roads that “are anything but”, be careful not to wish for better. They’re upgrading a local highway here to 26 lanes!

Edited by Dan Worrall
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...just trying to figure out how concertinas came to be what and where they are (and aren’t)…a hobby and vice of those of us who like history!

Any chance of getting this Topic moved from General Discussion over to History? That would make it easier to find in the future (once new posts to it become infrequent).

 

Dan? Stephen? Paul? Ken?

 

Ps. Regarding your ‘lovely countryside’ and the roads that “are anything but”, be careful not to wish for better. They’re upgrading a local highway here to 26 lanes!

And in so many other places they're "upgrading" lanes to highways. :ph34r:

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Any chance of getting this Topic moved from General Discussion over to History? That would make it easier to find in the future (once new posts to it become infrequent).

 

Dan? Stephen? Paul? Ken?

 

Sure, no problem shifting on from my perspective, Jim. Stephen, me, and some o' the other boys were just having a leisurely chat. I think we had just about done chewing the fat anyway!

 

Thanks for the tips on the quotes function.

 

Dan

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  • 3 weeks later...

English concertina on Ebay with a nautical connection:

 

"This Concertina has a label on it which says J Russell London,Improved concertina at the other end in the recess it has the number 6800 (this can also be read as 0089!), this concertina belonged to my grandfather who didnt to me seem to be the slightest musical , he had it with him as a marine in the first world war at Scapa Flow ( where the German fleet was scuppered) and was still able to play it when returned home. I think from my brief research that it was probably made by Lachenals and retailed By Russell, it has 48 keys/buttons, one or two are stuck down and there are a couple of holes in the corner of the bellows but not that bad , but definately in well used condition and requiring restoration, please ask any questions you may have, NR "

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This might not help the historical connections of concertinas & the sea, but it does show a modern (three weeks ago) connection.

 

Its me playing the 'tina, with Steve (crew of the "Matthew") playing the Pokerwork on the topsail schooner "Vilma", sailing out from Sea Bangor in Belfast Lough

 

Peter

post-986-1183633537_thumb.jpg

Edited by Nutmeg
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OOh that's rather nice, a squeezebox with connections to the Grand Fleet. Did it attend Jutland, we ask?

 

Can you give us an Ebay reference to look it up?

 

Edited to add Sorry, simultaneous posting going on there!

Edited by Dirge
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Why Clare for concertinas?

...

From what I could see, by talking to these guys, there were fewer players per capita in that part of Mayo than in Clare in the 1970s-1980s.

Fewer oncertina players, or players of all instruments?

 

When I was preparing for a trip to Ireland in the mid-1970's, I of course inquired of my Irish friends where to find music. Those from Kerry said the best music was in Kerry; those from Donegal said the best music was in Donegal; those from Connemara said the best music was in Connemara... but they all said that the most music was in Clare. :)

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  • 6 months later...
According to Stan Hugill, black sailors were common enough ...

True enough, in fact somewhere amongst my books (in storage) I have one about an African-born sailor who (around 1800) learnt to play the fiddle and settled in England as a musician and music teacher...

Update: I've now found the fascinating book I mentioned, it's called Music and Musicians in Early Nineteenth-Century Cornwall; The world of Joseph Emidy - slave, violinist and composer by Richard McGrady.

 

The man's name was Joseph Emidy and he was taken from Guinea, Africa into slavery by the Portuguese, first to Brazil, then Lisbon. He was playing his violin for the Lisbon opera when he was kidnapped by the British Navy (to play for the sailors' dancing) in 1795, and held captive aboard ship before being abandoned in Falmouth in 1799. He went on to become a leading figure on the music scene in Cornwall, for the remaining thirty years of his life.

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The man's name was Joseph Emidy and he was taken from Guinea, Africa into slavery by the Portuguese, first to Brazil, then Lisbon. He was playing his violin for the Lisbon opera when he was kidnapped by the British Navy (to play for the sailors' dancing) in 1795, and held captive aboard ship before being abandoned in Falmouth in 1799. He went on to become a leading figure on the music scene in Cornwall, for the remaining thirty years of his life.

 

Great story. You can read all about it here. Thank you google, and Stephen too of course.

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