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Touchline Archives

May 2007

Hello friends and fans; thought I’d never touch with ye again, didn’t ye? Well, there was so much travel since the last Touchline entry, so much pickin’ and chantin’ and trains, boats and planes that I had enough on my plate with travelling and singing alone.

Most of the gigs have been in America where I love to work and the extremes of weather this spring have seen myself and Donie Carrol like Tom Creane and Shakelton on rough snow-snookered commutes to Long Island, NY, for a Patrick’s Eve concert to a few weeks later in Tampa, Florida where you could fry a mackerel on the car hood in a short time; all you’d need is the brown sauce and soda bread.

After celebrating our national saint New York style in the genial company of my dear friends Donie Carrol and Theresa Ward in Sunnyside, I headed off to sunny California. There were some sweet weeks there in that orange girth, lightsome,laid-back State where I was hosted in style by my friend Gloria Rosson.Bob Breheny of the Celtic Society had arranged a few nice house concerts around the area where people spoiled me with attention, interest and appreciation especially the Sanding Stones people,my particular friends and musicians Micheal and Viki Robinson. It felt good to be on the road representing the old and new music of Ireland. It’s really staggering how interested people are in Irish history and language, the realisation, as my dear, departed pal, Frank Hart had it: that history was written by the winners and the ballads by the losers. Thus the narrative ballad tradition is a subaltern construct, a thorn in the side of the establishment and traditionally always has been.Whether it’s anti-war songs; songs about human rights in America or songs about the H-block protest in Northern Ireland, the stark,temporal truth, the keel of the narrative ballad is no friend of the oppressor or the forces of hegemony.

Gloria and myself took a few lovely drives between San Jose and Santa Cruz went to see the Redwoods ,dined at amazing Mexican restaurants and she and Mike Robinson were very patient with my passion for visiting American guitar stores like More Music in (www.moremusic.com) eclectic Santa Cruz. Had a great craic there with the proprietor who is a wonderful character; an altruistic man supporting all the live music around not least the gig planned for tonight with Mick Moloney and friends and the present writer.David Handloff took me downstairs in his store to the ‘bowels of the ship’,as he called it and we had a pleasant time pickin’ old vintage Gibsons, Martins and some classy, new top-shelfers some “as thin as a rish” (rush),as my mother says. But my eye fell on a lovely,mellow, world –weary Harmony Sovereign from the early sixties, a little bit down from the jumbo size and in a second, we had her strung up, a bug installed, brass endpins shipped which do wonderous things for the sound, according to Martin Carthy and Martin is right about most things in this life. David did some overnight tweaking steam work on the neck of the guitar and replaced the horrible tinny saddle with natural bone, gave her much more poke. By the way, I’m responsible for introducintg the word “bug” to America. Imagine! they never heard of it beyond the context of the VW classic or maybe the love bug! They call ‘em pickups and transducers here .I’m sentimentally attached to Harmony Sovereigns because an early Stokers Lodge(circa 69) which featured my cousin Smiley Daly on mandolin and concertina, myself on squeaky fiddle and mandola and Mick “Tana” O’ Brien on Harmony Sovereign underwent a traumatic time when some villian, one dark night in the city of Cork, robbed Tana’s guitar. There was “a great thump off it” ,as he used to say, and it was part of our orchestral cosmos and how I loved to lamp that goldy crown on the head stock and the other quaint, sixties Harmony motifs contagious- and the way ‘twas all given down in gold leaf. So, when I saw the goldy lettering on the headstock in that store in Santa Cruz on a commensurate guitar, I was moved to purchase it and despite the holes and knocks and splits, it served me well for the rest of the tour and she’s as sweet as Walnut plug tobacca. Visited my friend,Corkman Fr. Mike Carrol at his parish in Auburn, California where I gave a concert for his community and great people they are up there. Isn’t it amazing how Catholics in America take the whole thing much more seriously!They realise they are part of a world community of belief. In Ireland,where we are still half-pagan, people would get indignant if Mass lasted more than a half and hour; but the Irish were always rebellious and one of the popes had to call a special synod of bishops in Whitby, Yorkshire (where they have a mighy folk festival)-I said he had to get the Celtic church to toe the Papish line because our version of Christianity was too imbued with paganism and so autonomous that it threatened the hegemony of Rome. The mediaevel monks got something right: they lived sensibly, wrote the gospels out with beautiful ornate embellishments and on the margins or glosses, the first written records of the Irish language were given down.

Then, as fast as you’d say “around the ruggged rocks the ragged rascal ran”, I was in Tampa, Florida. It seemed twice as hot as California and it still only the end of March.A different light too; more Eastmancolor as opposed to the Pacific technicolor. Did a few shows at Four Green Fields, a friendly, authentic Irish bar owned by Colin Breen related to the great Dan Breen one of the most formidable characters in the Irish War of Independence. Patsy and Connie Dunlea took great care of me down there in the tropics,hosted me and I have some lovely memories of Connie’s unforgettable tropical,evening dinners in their garden with good wine and conversation and a slip of a moon rising over the orange trees.Patsy Dunlea is a fabulous cabinetmaker and carpenter and a ballad singer and musican to boot who has performed all over America, and or course, a neighbour’s child, as we say, in Cork city.I have a feeling I’ll hang me hat on a palm tree in St.Petersburg or Clearwater Beach.

I called my son Jamesy and told him to contact the Guinness Book of Records. He’s well-used to my queerness. Said I was on the longest bus ride ever-or so it seemed!- thirty one and a quarter hours from Tampa,Florida to Kansas City Missouri on a Greyhound bus. Most fellows of my age wouldn’t stick it, but I’m on a balladeer’s budget and I have to combine my flying and train rides with busing it when I leave it too late to get the cheap flights. What I like about Greyhound beside the price is the restriction on noise that you don’t have on Irish buses.And you do see the real America. The Greyhound conductor respectfully advises his passengers to limit noise and music to personal headphones which must be at a civilised level.In Irish buses which I dread now, we are subject to the banalities of innane eegits like Gerry Ryan on the radio and frantic advertising even though you don’t want it. I sat back, looked out at the Swanee River, Dixie, Montgomery Alabama, Nashville Tennesse, swathed in spring sunshine ;had a burger, took a pee, read a lot (my escape is romantic , nautical literature from the early nineteenth century like Patrick O’ Brien, Julian Stockwin, Dudley Pope,Clarke Russell and those boys; and always have a light travel blanket with you and if you are lucky enough to apportion the adjacent seat, you’ll sleep away independent. I have just finished reading The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly and it knoced a bit of a shake out of me. I couldn’t reccommend it more, a staggering, profound novel which will change you forever for the better, God bless your pen, John Connolly.

What wonderful rich associations flit through my mind when I read place names like Swanee river, Dixie (they really do exist!) Birmingham Alabama-could a Northern Europen survive a summer in these murky climes? Nashville, Tennesse,St. Louis and before I knew it I was having breakfast with my genial young colleague and pal, Máirtín de Cógáin at Chubby’s diner in Kansas city with Merle Haggard whining disonconsolately from the jukebox about honky tonks, gals and whiskey.

After a nice little break, catching some fine jazz at the Blue Note.blackguarding the customers at Eddie Delahunt’s Cafe And and getting back to the swimming, Máirtiín de Cógáin and myself took off on a fine tour of the midwest and the beautiful south. I saw places I’d always longed to see: “Far away places with strange sounding names” and I laughed my way across Texas at Máirtín’s impersonations of some well –known Cork people-and I’d better not mention whom they might be! We did a rosary of house- concerts thro’ Missouri and Illinois, down with us to Memhis and New Orleans and places I’ve forgotten, staying with friends of his mostly and some fancy hotels whenever they came with the contract. Played some nice coffee houses, folk clubs and even a few decent bar joints and our show got tighter with the road ;two generations of Cork bards, we were bringing the threads that weave our heritage along with us and dangling them before unsuspecting Texans and Mississipians not to mention all the rest. Along the way, Máirtín tried to get me into the twentyfirst century and convinced me that my horrors of the digital universe were unfounded .Bit by bit he taught me a few more computer skills,assuaged my paranoia as we went along and the majic of wireless communication. Serious makeovers were on offer including my website for which I’m forever grateful to Tim Canniffe of Banshee Designs in Dublin for it’s conception, for setting up the Freestate on-line shop and encouraging me to keep in touch with yourselves out there. Máirtín’s particular friend, Valerie Plested has become Tim’s successor and has already kicked the site into a new domain. This all began in lovely, laid-back Jackson, Missisipi when we were staying with Val and Don her partner and when Scott their friend, a formidable hand with computers very kindly took poor old confused Max, my Apple iBook, under his wing span and fixed him up good and tended his wounds. His poor pothead was confused by years of aberrant orders from the present writer but now,I have a new resolve: to acknowlege internet and email and all the wonders of a computer as an extraordinary comprehensive tool, library, filing system etc ; but I do wish someone would make a computer with about 15percent of Max’s capabilities!Scott took us out sailing on his lovely, beamy sailboat on what looked like a freshwater fiord and we took some nice snaps-might get a few of ‘em up on the site.

After Little Rock, Arkansas, we visited Jimmy Driftwood’s festival in Mountain View in the Ozarks, a bit out of our way but well worth the diversion.It’s a fantastic get-together of country,mountain people bringing theiir music and song into town for this weekend to honour the great ethnomusicologist, singer and writer. I was delighted to record Jimmy Driftwood’s St.Brendan’s Fair Isle on me nautical Coast of Malibar album. After Branson, Missouiri, we headed back to Kansas city for a wee respite and then I took a solo midnight train down to old Santa Fe where I was hosted in great style by Doug Jeffords and his wife Jane. What an exotic, charming,distinctive part of America is New Mexico and I really enjoyed a fine few days in bohemian Santa Fe where I did a cafe gig and a house concert. A highlight was going to a real Western swing dance and being introduced by Doug to the legendary Bill Hearne and his Roadside Review. I wish someone would teach me the Texas two-step! How I envied Doug and Jane and all the other dancers.Doug says I might yet make a reasonable honk-tonk singer whatever about a dancer.

Flew up to New York finally and had a farewell dinner at the Grandstand in Queens with Donie Carrol, my particular friend and host and my cousin Martin Daly, or “Smiley”, as he’s better known. . I showed him the old Harmony Sovereign from Santa Cruz and it got his approval.We had a great ould chin-wag, gossiping about old characters from the village of Douglas, south of Cork, where all three of us grew up. And that was the end of it ,and I’ll be tellin’ ye more soon.

Thanks to all the people in America who posted messages on Myspace and Máirtín’sspace and for turning up to see us. What a wonderful world!

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