Brendan Taaffe - Interview with Junior Crehan




Junior Crehan: The Soul of Clare

Any oral tradition is rich with icons, and each successive generation of Irish musicians has left us with a host of names and stories. The first recordings in the twenties and thirties gave us such giant figures as Michael Coleman, James Morrison, and Paddy Killoran. The next generation gave names like Sean Ryan, Willie Clancy, Seamus Ennis, P.J. Hayes, Micho Russell, and a fiddler from West Clare named Junior Crehan. A lot of people outside of Clare were probably first exposed to the name when Planxty recorded a tune called Junior Crehan’s favourite on their 1972 debut album. Liam O’Flynn, the piper with Planxty, is related to Junior on his mother’s side and would go on to record a number of other tunes that he learned from Junior. The other thing that people will know about him is that Junior composed The Mist-Covered Mountain, the popular session jig in A minor. The fellow behind these tunes was a farmer in western Clare, a fiddler, concertina player, and storyteller. Junior was deeply concerned that the heritage of music and story be passed on, and was actively involved with Comhaltas Ceoltoírí Éireann (pronounced, roughly, “Kyol-tas Kyol-tori Erin) and the Willie Clancy Summer School. His influence is hard to overestimate; his music has been a big influence on people like O’Flynn, Kevin Burke, and Martin Hayes, to name a few of the influential players of today. Of Junior, Martin has said, “He knew where the heart and soul of music was. If you could understand Junior, you could understand the music.” Martin ‘Junior’ Crehan was born in the townland of Bonavilla, Mullagh, County Clare on January 17th, 1908. He passed away on August 3rd, 1998.

The town of Mullagh is in West Clare, south of Miltown Malbay. It was a rural, farming community where set-dancing was popular. Junior’s first musical influence was his mother, Margaret “Baby” Crehan, who played concertina and came from a musical family. At the age of six, Junior started learning concertina from his mother, and was exposed to the fiddle playing of Paddy Barron, a mendicant dancing master. Barron was in the area for two extended periods from 1914-1918 and again in 1935. Junior learned much from Barron, but his biggest influence was John “Scully” Casey from Annagh, Bobby Casey’s father. The way his daughter tells it, Junior would hang outside Scully’s door until he would get called in and showed something on the fiddle. Through Scully Casey and his cousin Thady, a fine dancer and fiddler, Junior began playing for house dances in his teens. The dancer’s expectations of the fiddler were high, and it was only when Junior was playing fairly well that he was invited to play. Junior’s father, Martin Senior, was a schoolteacher and a strict man who always hoped that Junior would follow in his footsteps, so Junior had to hide the fiddle outside the house in order to sneak off to the dances, and rely upon his supportive mother to cover for him on his return.

The house dances at the time, in the way sessions are now, were the core of the tradition and the community. In 1935 the Fianna Fail government enacted the Public Dance Hall Act, declaring that 'no place...shall be used for public dancing unless a public dancing license... Is in force in respect of such a place.” Mostly the law was passed because of the church’s moral concerns about dancing, and because of rumours that funds from private dances had been given to the I.R.A. A license was issued only to those whom a district judge considered of 'good character' and often licenses were refused to rural communities based on the difficulty of supervision. In some instances, the only person who could obtain a license was the parish priest. Even though the act did not specifically cover house dances and dances at the cross-roads, local clergy and gardai (police) used it to ban these as well. Junior was strongly opposed to the act and said that, "the Dance Hall Act closed our schools of tradition and left us a poorer people." Many felt that that the underlying reason behind the law was that the government wanted a cut of the money if money was to be made. In response to the spurious argument about a lack of ‘sanitary facilities’, Junior is rumoured to have said, “You could make your water in the chimney so long as the government got a piece of the money.” In a recent conversation. Liam O’ Flynn said, “I often heard Junior talk with regret at the loss of the house dance and how the clergy, the church really, were responsible for the demise of the crossroads dances and the house dances. It was the center of their social lives and existences. Those house dances were wonderful, community events. When the dancing moved to the dance hall it had to change, of course.”

The Dance Hall Act, in forcing dancing to larger, licensed halls, gave rise to the ceilidh bands, and in the 1950’s Junior was a founding member of the Laichtín Naofa Céilidh Band, which included Willie Clancy and Martin Talty from Miltown Malbay. The Laichtín Naofa won the Oireachtas Gold Medal in Dublin in 1956. But Junior was a farmer, by reputation a skilled and meticulous steward, and traveling to competitions was difficult as “no-one had yet invented the five-day cow.” As the music gained in popularity and people began recording commercially, Junior “felt a mixture of delight and a strange curiosity,” this from Liam O’Flynn, “towards the end of his life that the music was becoming so fashionable, where it been anything but fashionable when he was young. The whole commercialization he would have found difficult, for he was someone who only ever played for the pure love of it, and now there are powerful commercial interests involved, selling celtic this and celtic that. That word celtic had no meaning for Junior. He never would have described his music that way.”

Unlike many musicians of the time, Junior composed his own tunes. Junior was taken by the sounds and sights around him, and his first composition was a reel called The Mowing Machine, inspired by the sound of the machine mowing the hay. His daughter, Angela Crotty, says that, “he would have been in his mid-forties when he composed that one. He’d been playing a good while before he started composing. He would have been playing pretty good I’d say at the age of eighteen or nineteen.” Speaking of another composition, a jig, she said that, “The Sheep in the Boat is one that he took from Anach Cuain, a slow air that tells the story where they were out on a lake and the sheep puts his foot through the boat and the boat sank and the people got drowned. He was good for changing things around, like changing a tune from a slow air or something. I don’t know if you’d call that composition or not.” Kevin Crehan, Junior’s grandson, said, “To me it’s one of the great things about Junior, and essentially that’s how Irish dance music came into being. People adapted old airs into dance rhythms.” When I asked how the tunes would have been received and taken up by other musicians, Angela said, “They would have liked them, but remember that they only heard the music at that time by maybe going to an area or going to a dance. They had no transport at the time; they had no way of meeting. It wasn’t until the Fleadhs, which was in the 1950’s, that they met. They went to the Oireachtas in 1956— you see he played with the Laichtín Naofa Céilidh band and they won the Oireachtas in 1956. It would have been around that time that musicians would have met up with one another. So they had no way of hearing the tunes really. People would go to the Oireachtas for the competitions and would get together and play. Otherwise they would just be around home. People wouldn’t have known until later on that he had these tunes composed. A lot of people have recordings of Junior, but I mean the man would come in from working hard and his hands would be stiff— he was farmer, he worked very hard and had a small farm, cutting the turf— so on the recordings like that he wouldn’t be really into the music, he’d need about an hour and a few pints of Guinness to get him softened out, and then you know he really played well. There were five of us in the family, four now. We all played, we all started playing tin whistle, because instruments were scarce in the house. We had a piano and a tin whistle and his fiddle, so we just sat around and picked up tunes- you know the way it is, you say I have this one, and someone has another. And he really encouraged us all to play, just to play music. My mother would play a little bit on the fiddle, but she was a very good dancer, a set dancer and all her family, who were the Walshes, loved music. They loved the music and loved singing and dancing.”

Kevin Crehan talked at length about how conscious Junior was about passing on the tradition. “A big part of Junior and what he brought to us was not just the music but the social context. I mean back then you didn’t go out to a concert; people were together at the house dances. It was a completely different thing. For him playing the music and being able to share it was the most important thing. The last time we saw him, Junior called my wife over and was worried that people wouldn’t be interested. He asked her, “Do you think people care? Do you think people are interested in this music?” Both Liam and Kevin spoke of listening to the man for hours and hours. “Junior had a huge amount of lore and stories about where the tunes came from, something associated with the particular tune. That added a huge amount to it for me. The context of the music is as important as the music itself, and that’s what Junior brought to the music.” Kevin went on to talk about Junior’s playing. “Junior’s playing was very unusual, a very distinctive style. He had a plainer style than most but with very clear execution of his ornamentation. The West Clare style has a characteristic sadness, and tends to be minor and played a little flat, emphasizing the sadness. There was a lot of room and air to his dance music. Even though it was played slow it had a lot of lift, and it was played surprisingly slow if you were to set a metronome to it. But where Junior was absolutely unique was in playing the slow airs. He was one of the greatest air players there ever was. He had a depth of emotion that I’ve never heard anyone else get at. Junior was very good at playing for dancers, set dancers in particular. And for the sets rhythm was much more important than ornamentation. He was very solid tempo wise; once he set a rhythm he stayed there.”

Liam O’Flynn had this to say about Junior’s music, “ I remember his playing as having a very relaxed quality, an almost lonesome quality. I always associate Junior and his music as something that was very happy, very content. It was an extension of himself, and as a person he was very laid-back. Junior was a very quiet, unassuming man and he was all those things that are missing in the modern-day world where the emphasis is so much on the individual, where there’s so much aggression and competition—you just didn’t find that in Junior. He was a farmer and lived on the land and his whole way of thinking and living was in keeping with nature and the turn of the seasons and the land. I found all that hugely agreeable about the man. I loved that in Junior. All that calm came out in his music, there was nothing frantic about it. I suppose that back in those times there was more time. Songs could have twenty verses because people had the time to listen. Junior’s music had an unruffled and meditative quality about it. I was definitely influenced by Junior Crehan. I loved the music, but I loved the man as well.”

Junior Crehan: The Soul of Clare