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Séamus Connolly: Beneath the Surface |
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I think of Séamus Connolly’s musical presence as a geologist might think of tectonic plates; beneath the surface but still exerting huge influence. His great success and technical precision in competitions in the 60’s was, to me, hugely influential in setting the high standard of craft expected from today’s players while his connection with the older generation of musicians preserved the earlier values of the tradition. His presence and committed teaching in Boston has been influential up and down the East Coast, making it a badge of honor for the area’s musicians to have a tune from Séamus, and his work with the Gaelic Roots Summer Program at Boston College makes the tradition accessible to an ever broadening circle. We spoke at Boston College. The Senior All-Ireland Fiddle competition at the Fleadh in 1961, in Swinford, Co. Mayo, was probably the most dramatic in the history of the competitions. Yourself and Brendan McGlinchey were competing and were so evenly matched that the judges couldn’t decide who was better. So they called you up to play a second time, and still couldn’t decide, and still hadn’t reached a decision when everyone had gone home. That’s right, we read it in the papers the next morning. Brendan was gone home and I was gone home, and they said ‘Fleadh Cheoil crux ends at midnight.” I mean, you’d think there was nothing else going on in the world, here it was on the front page. You see, there’s different types of jigs; a double jig, a slip jig, a single jig. They are all in 6/8 rhythm, except for the slip jig, which is 9/8. I think that the real story would be that the ruling was to play a double jig, but I don’t think it said to play a double jig. I think it was very unfair; Brendan played a slip jig, and then when they recalled us he did the same thing. The decision could have gone the other way, but Brendan played a slip jig when he should have played a double jig. I happened to play a double jig. Brendan could have won it too. It’s all a lot of nonsense you know. How old were you at the time? I was seventeen. It just happened that I was the youngest ever to win it, and I won the Junior and the Senior in the same year. They changed the ruling again after that, so that you couldn’t play in the Senior competition if you were under eighteen. So it got serious now after that. Luckily I was over 18 the following year when I played in the fiddle competition. Brendan won it that year. To me there’s too much emphasis on the rules. There’s a competition frame that you have to play in that has been passed down through the years; an expectancy that you have to play like this. It kind of inhibited me from being what I wanted to be, or doing what I wanted to do with the music. I was pigeonholed, boxed into a certain way of playing. You did quite well in competitions – you won ten All-Irelands. I did. But competitions didn’t mean a thing to me. I went in to hear people like Brendan McGlinchey and to learn from them, and to try and improve my playing. I didn’t have an interest in winning. That might seem strange. Why did you compete if you weren’t interested in winning? I competed so that I could go to the Fleadh Cheoils and hear the good fiddle players. There were a lot of great fiddle players at the time. Right, but you could have been a punter in the crowd. No – I could have been, but I felt like there’s no point in sitting down and being like the hurler on the ditch, criticizing. The only way I could improve myself was by practicing, and getting into the competition. So I kept practicing. There’s a lot of misunderstanding about music. People think it just happens and become upset with themselves when it’s too difficult. It takes practice. It just doesn’t happen overnight. Brendan and I practiced all the time. We put an awful lot of pressure on ourselves. And the competition was pressure in the sense that there were people following Connolly and another camp following McGlinchey, and that was fierce pressure. Every time we played, if we’d be playing in the streets at the Fleadh, there’d be a tape recorder stuck over your shoulder, and you’d know it was there. That was fierce pressure, and you felt like if you played a wrong note they were going to take home the tapes and compare them and all. I hated that. I hated that pressure. So Brendan stopped playing for 17 or 18 years. You think because of that pressure? Well it had a lot got to do with it. And so I kind of fought that pressure, till one day I decided to say to myself ‘I’m going to play my own music, I’m going to play the way I want to play instead of being told how to play.’ My father many times said to me, “Sit down there and play for me, play O’Rourke’s Reel till I see that you play it as good as Coleman.” That was an abuse in a sense. He was well meaning, but that was hard to sit in front of your father, who knew music and was comparing you to Michael Coleman. So everytime we played, everytime I went on the stage, I was my own worst enemy. I might look relaxed on the stage, but I hated the pressure. I was being so hard on myself. That’s gone from me now. I’m enjoying my music now. How did that come to be? I don’t know how did it come – I would imagine suddenly waking up one day, at a certain age, and saying I should be enjoying music. I shouldn’t be putting pressure on myself. People say to you that you have to make another record; you owe it to the public to make another record. You don’t owe it to the public to make another record. It’s great when people say that – it makes you feel good, but we don’t owe anything to anybody. I feel that we’ve kept the music alive but we don’t owe anything to people. When I came to America I loved some of the great fiddle playing that I heard here; French Canadian fiddle playing and the great fiddlers from Cape Breton. I wanted to emulate some of the things that they are doing and incorporate it into my own playing. And I’ve done that in the sense that it might have changed the style that the older people were listening to, but underneath it all I have the foundation of the old styles that I used to sit and play with Paddy Canny at home. I feel now that I’m more free with my music and that I want to go back and be where I was when I was a young fella listening to Paddy Canny and listening to Sean Ryan. That’s the kind of music that I get the most enjoyment out of. It’s like a complete circle for me; I’d like to go back to what I heard when I was younger. Let’s go back and get the life story. No, let’s just finish this same thing. I feel that Irish music should stand alone and Scottish music should stand alone; these musics are great and there isn’t any need to incorporate other licks and styles into them. Of course, the whole world is different now and people are making money with their music and the whole context is different from when I was a kid. We never got paid for playing and I find that when I get out there to perform, you’re playing a different kind of music than you are when you’re sitting down in the kitchen with people you’d like to play with. How is it different? People are paying to see you, and they expect some flashy fiddling – this is what it’s like in America, I find anyways. They want to hear some of the things on the cds, and you feel well, ok I have cds to sell, I don’t want to bring them home with me. We all want to make a few bob. It’s a different kind of music. There’s a very small following of people that understand the older tradition and so if you’re making a living as a professional musician you have to approach it differently. So you’d be more likely to play the trickiest reel you know rather than a simple little jig? Well maybe something like that, but then people had said to me, ‘ah, don’t be showing off.’ It’s unfair for people to say things like that; you want to be able to play what you want yourself, if there’s a tricky hornpipe that you feel like playing then why not play it, but then you’ll get criticized. It’s a catch 22. I do what I want to do now, and I don’t worry as much about the criticism of audiences. The most important thing is for everybody to be themselves. And I encourage young musicians to be themselves. They’re brilliant, they’re opening up the music to the world by incorporating other things; adding drums and synthesizers and guitars and it’s altered the music. But they’re still playing music and they’re very, very talented, the young people today. And I encourage them to go out and do what they feel like doing and not to worry about the criticism. Because they can also sit down with the older people and play traditionally as well. It sounds like Comhaltas has had a big role in your life. Well it did at the time. I think Comhaltas have done a tremendous job in preserving the old music, but sometimes they are criticized for having pigeonholed it, and I would share that criticism. Would you say that the competitions have changed the music? I think it has changed the music. I don’t think there is a need for it anymore; the music is at a very high standard and there are thousands of young people playing. That’s a tribute to Comhaltas, but personally I don’t believe in competition at all. I think the overall effect has been to narrow the style; there’s a standard competition style and if you play outside the lines you won’t do well. The music is on a strong foothold and there’s nothing to fear for it, so I think the job that Comhaltas should be doing is collecting of the old music –videotaping these old players, getting the old music out of the archives. People need to hear it. I know that’s it’s a little bit more difficult now with the complexity of copyrights and all that, but Irish music was never meant to be copyrighted. It’s turned into a big business now, and if someone’s making money out of it, I think it should be the musicians who make the money out of it – and they’re the ones who get the least out of it. You’re from Killaloe. I’m from Killaloe, County Clare, which is an area close enough to Feakle, Co. Clare where Martin Hayes and Paddy Canny and P.J. Hayes came from. The Tulla Ceili Band would come to Killaloe when I was a young fella and P.J. Hayes would always have me up there in the front row, playing and I wouldn’t know half the tunes, but it was a great honor to be sitting up there as a thirteen year old with the Tulla Ceili Band. Was there music in your family? There was. My father played the flute and the whistle, and he played the accordion. He was a great sean nos dancer. I have his flute and I have his father’s flute. My mother’s father also played flute and I have his flute; a lovely boxwood flute made in London. There was music in our house all the time. With all those flutes, how did you get a fiddle? Well, in 1954 my father’s brother and his family emigrated to America, to New York, and he played the fiddle. So we had something of a party, but at that time we used to call them ‘American wakes’ because we thought we were never going to see these people again, it was like a death in the family. During the night there was a break for tea and a few jars of something, and there was a fiddle sitting on the chair; so I picked it up and pretended to play and people thought I was playing. So I said to my parents would they get me a fiddle, and they did. I’d always be walking around the house with two sticks, pretending to play. My father used to collect the old 78 records. He worked on the canals from Limerick up to Dublin and he’d always be on the lookout for the 78s that came from America. We had an electric gramaphone; you could pile up ten 78 records, one on top of the other, and they’d all fall down one after the other. My father put a couple of records on, like Leo Rowsome, then all of a sudden I heard this fiddle player, and I started to cry. I had never heard anything like it. And being a young fellow at the time, maybe eleven, it hit me emotionally so much. It just went right through my body, this is what I want. That was Michael Coleman. And so what I used to do was slow down the record from 78 speed to 16, and tune down the fiddle and play along and try to get that same sound. It was very hard to get down that low because the strings were very slack and you could barely get a sound out of it. I taught myself all this stuff, so I had this thing in my head that the fiddle should be tuned do-mi-so-do in fourths instead of fifths. I played for ten months with the fiddle tuned in fourths. I didn’t think that I had to use my small finger at all, so I used to stretch up the third finger up to where the fourth finger is. I used to keep my little finger in the palm of my hand, ‘cause I never saw anybody playing the fiddle. My uncle Fred Collins was the local barber, so all the men would go in to get their hair cut. This one day a man went in who was a stranger in town, his name was Tom Tuohy, and he was a fiddle player. My uncle was telling him about me so Mr. Tuohy said ‘ Will you bring him in so I can see him. I’d love to hear him.” My uncle brought me down to the house that night, and I played a couple of tunes for him; one of them was The Boys of the Lough, because my father grew up in a Lough House in Shannon Harbour, Co. Offaly and that was one of the first tunes he taught me. So Mr. Tuohy’s looking at me, and he couldn’t figure out what I was doing. It was all sort of backways, but the tune was coming out. So he says to me, let me see that fiddle. So I gave him the fiddle and he was going to play a tune and he couldn’t play it at all. So he tuned it up and he played away, and God, I thought he was great. And then he gave me back the fiddle again and God, I couldn’t play it all. So I went home and my mother says ‘How did you get on with Mr. Tuohy?” and I said, “I have to start all over again from scratch.” “What do you mean,” she says, “aren’t you playing alright?” I said, “No, but I’m playing it wrong.” My brother was learning piano at the time, so before I went to bed I went into the room where the piano was and I got a pen, what we called a biro, and I hit the strings on the fiddle and found those notes on the piano, and I put a little dot on the corner, where my mother wouldn’t see it, and when the fiddle went out of tune I’d go in and get that note and try and tune it up. Eventually I got that sound into my head, and I started all over again. How old were you when you started from scratch the second time? About twelve and a half. In four and a half years you were winning competitions. How did you get so good, so quickly? I practiced. But I also feel that I have a gift from God, which I want to give back to people by teaching and by doing things. I think we need to give back. I was lucky. I practiced; I had great people to listen to. Were you able to listen to people at sessions or house dances? No, when I started going to the Fleadhanna Cheoil I’d get to know different musicians. They’d be all following me around, cause that was kind of the thing at the time. They’d be following McGlinchey around and following me around, and there wasn’t that many young people playing, and so I think they were fascinated with our playing and with how good we were. So you’d meet these people, and they’d invite you to sit in with them sessions, and they’d make tapes for me. I had the honor of learning from these people and watching them play. And at seventeen you started playing with Paddy O’Brien. Right, Paddy had emigrated to New York the same time as my uncle did, in 1954, and he made three recordings. I’d never heard accordion playing like that before; I remember my father cycling twelve miles, into Nenagh, in the rain one day, to get one of them. They were only available in Nenagh, so that was twenty four miles just to get the Sally Gardens and the Yellow Tinker, on a bicycle, on a wet day – that’s the kind of a man my father was. A friend of mine in Killaloe, his name is Jimmy Kennedy, used to bring me out to Paddy’s father in Newtown every weekend, and I’d learn tunes from Dinny O’Brien. He played concertina and fiddle. I’d be asking him all about Paddy, who was in America at the time. I learned a lot from Dinny and it was a strange coincidence that Dinny with his sister owned a house in Killaloe on the same street where I used to live, and in 1953 I have this vision of this man up on a ladder, plastering the side of the cottage. We were playing hurling on the road and the ball went into the yard. Of course we were afraid when the ball went into someone else’s yard because there was a woman down the street where we’d be playing and she would take the ball and never give it back to us. She’d yell at us and everything – but I remember this so well cause this ball went into the yard where this man was up on the ladder plastering, and he says ‘ Come on and get it,” And who was it, only Paddy O’Brien. That was the only conversation I had with him, and after that he went off to America. In 1960 then, Paddy came back with the New York Ceili Band and was visiting Jimmy Kennedy. Kennedy sent up a message for me to come down, that Paddy O’Brien was there and he wanted to meet me. Paddy was one of the greatest people I ever met. He loved his music, he thought music, he thought about it all the time. The following night there was going to be a music session out in Newtown so he said, “why don’t you come out and play with me?” So I said I wouldn’t be able to play all the tunes, I didn’t have that many. So he made a two hour tape for me and there was hardly one tune that I knew. He came back in 1962 for good, back home to his old place, outside Nenagh. It wasn’t far for me, and I’d go out there and we’d be chatting, he’d be plastering, we wouldn’t even play a note. I just liked the man. We became very friendly and then we started to play a lot, and then we did some concerts. We had a little band with Paddy Canny, Paddy O’Brien on accordion, Peadar O’Loughlin, George Byrth on piano, and myself. We called it Inis Cealtra, which is an island, a monastic settlement, off Scarriff Bay. The other influence in my life was Ben and Charlie Lennon. In 1960 I was on a radio broadcast on Raidio Eireann and a couple of days after these two men appeared at my door and they introduced themselves, and they were the two Lennon brothers, Charlie and Ben. Ben was living in Limerick and I think Charlie was living in Liverpool at the time, studying for his PhD and playing with the Liverpool Ceili Band. So God, they played music for me and I thought their fiddling was just great. We became great friends, and musically great friends. So they gave me over the years, when I was young fella, what was collected in America as being one of the most complete recordings of Michael Coleman –there’s tunes on there like Coleman playing the Contradiction and things that aren’t available today, so this was a great source of learning for me. I’d be in Ben’s house and we’d be playing together, we’d stay up until three or four in the morning and we’d be sometimes just talking and analyzing Coleman’s playing, and trying to keep ourselves warm by lighting newspapers. What I know about Coleman’s fiddle playing I learned from Ben and Charlie. They were the biggest influence in my life, and Paddy O’Brien. What got you to come here, to the States? I came to America in ‘72 with the very first Comhaltas tour and loved it. I came again in ’74, and stayed on for a couple of weeks. At that time the economy was very bad in Ireland, so I stayed on for a couple of weeks and got a couple of gigs, and sure I made more money in three weeks than I did the whole year at home. There was an uncertain future for me at home, so I decided to emigrate and we eventually found our way into Boston. I came to friends in Connecticut first and stayed with them for a few months. I ended up getting a job in a glue factory; I had this mask on my face, filling barrels of glue, and I said to myself, "What did I do to my family?” I felt so guilty ; I took my family, my wife, my children, all away from a nice house in Limerick to come to here, filling bottles of glue. Eventually we all moved up to Boston, my wife and the three children and I, and I was teaching for Comhaltas part-time and I got a job at Polaroid working at night. I went then to one of the St. Patrick day parades and ended up going to the home of Senator Bill Bulger, who was the majority leader at the time, and we got talking, and I ended up working for him. It was great—Sen. Bulger was a very generous man—but I wasn’t playing much music. I had made up my mind that I wasn’t going to be a professional musician because I had a family to raise. Then I was asked to be part of a tour called The Masters of the Folk Violin, with Alison Krauss, Michael Doucet, Kenny Baker, Joe Cormier, and Claude Williams. This tour was great, and the music was mighty altogether. We did that tour for two or three weeks and then we did two more later on, one in the Midwest and one on the west coast. I’d come back then to work after these tours, but I was getting to the stage where I hated it. I loved the touring and I wanted to be playing music so I decided, okay I’m going to pay off my bills. This was around 1990, and I’m going to see if I can get a part time job and do some traveling, do some playing. At this point Michael O’Suilleabhain was at Boston College as a visiting professor for a year, and he brought me in to help put on a fiddle festival that resulted in a recording, My Love is in America. Soon after that Boston College hired me to work with their Irish Studies Program, where I am now. We do the Gaelic Roots summer program, and other things throughout the year. Let’s talk about your playing. What did you take from Coleman’s playing? So, the big question still remains whether Coleman put the two preceding notes to a treble on an upbow or a downbow. It’s always down-up-down for the treble itself, but you don’t play all three notes equally. The first note gets a bit of grit. You flick your hand there, and there’s a thing about lifting your fingers off the stick. I spoke to Andy McGann about it – when Andy was a young fellow he took a couple of lessons from Michael Coleman. Andy said he remembers the two preceding notes being upbow from Coleman, but Andy does them downbow. [Essentially three notes are slurred together, the two eight notes preceding the treble and the first note of the treble, but the first note of the treble is accentuated with a wrist flick.] Coleman’s trebles were very crisp and very tight, and Andy’s is very crisp and very tight, as are Charlie Lennon’s. Charlie decided that it was down, down; Ben used to do them up, so Ben changed to down down and he told me it took him five years to do it. I have this terrible hang-up that my bow trebles are not sounding the way they should be, not sounding the way Coleman’s did. My final conclusion is that it’s down-down, which I can’t do because I never practiced it that way I hear great lift in your playing. How do you get that lift? I played with the Kilfenora band from 1960 to 1976. They were a great dance band and known for the lift in their music. The bowing has a lot got to do with it. It’s a weaving bow, slurring across strings. Do you teach actively now? I do. Americans like to have the music in front of them, and for me having the music would only be a reference if I can’t think of the tune. I recommend listening, listening, listening; try to learn by osmosis. I never learn a tune by looking at a paper, because I can’t remember it. If I get a tune on a tape I don’t know, I play it in the car over and over again to get it in my head – and then some night I might wake up in the middle of the night and the tune is there, and when I get up in the morning I can play it. I used to get up out of bed years ago to play it, but I don’t do that anymore. What is your approach to teaching? My approach to teaching would be to break down the tune first and play a simple version. First you have to make sure that the right note is being played, so you can do it with all separate bow strokes. Then I play it a bit differently and say, “What did I do here?” And you get them listening and they say, well you didn’t do anything, it’s the same as before. And I say, “No, listen again.” So then they’d listen and they’d watch and they could see where you’re doing some slurs. It’s just a question of listening to hear what someone is doing. When I was young I listened to the old fiddlers playing and I could almost visualize what they were doing with the bow. Another thing— people want to learn how to do a roll and it’s almost like there’s nothing else in Irish fiddling only the roll. You can play some beautiful music, like what’s played in East Galway, and it may not have a roll in it. And what I’m hearing in the rolls today is different. When people go to do a third finger roll, they’re putting down the finger underneath and leaving it there, and you don’t hear the fourth note at all because they’re not lifting the finger enough. What I do, and what the older people did, is to use ‘independent fingering’ [Seamus demonstrated this technique for me several times. When he rolls on a note, only one finger is on the string at a time; if the roll is on the third finger, he places his third finger, brings down the fourth while lifting the third, back to the third, brings down the second while lifting the third, and then back to the third while lifting the second.] If you leave your fingers down on the string you don’t have the freedom in your hand. What this does is make the roll sound more open, like the playing of Morrison and Killoran. Tell me about the records you’ve made. I was actually on the first Comhaltas album that came out, called the Rambles of Kitty. I played four reels on that one, and I think they’re going to bring that back out. I made a recording called Warming Up with Jack Coen, Martin Mulhaire and Felix Dolan. We were in the studio and I thought we were doing okay but when I brought home a copy of the tape I noticed that my fiddling had changed from the old style, and that’s the style those guys played. Luckily it was isolated on separate tracks because I had to go back and do the whole thing over again and change my fiddle style to the style they were playing. Of course, your music changes with all the influences, and the other thing is that I can’t hear in my left ear. I have very bad tinnitus and I can’t hear a thing out of the left ear, so doing that recording I found that I was out of tune and I didn’t hear it in the studio. And when I made the two solo albums, I was losing my hearing at the time. When I heard them I just hated them totally, hated the sound of them. I think that one of them isn’t available anymore – but then, why would they want to be? I have to adjust my position now so that I can hear, and I don’t always play in tune. I have to hold my head a certain way the whole time, because the least movement in my head changes the sound – it either goes flat or high. It’s actually devastating, but aren’t I lucky to be alive. It’s like in Ireland when they ask you how are you doing and you say, ‘Sure, aren’t I grand, aren’t I over the ground.’ What He PlaysMy fiddle was made in Paris in 1922 by a bowmaker, Prosper Colas. I like it – it’s very bright, which I need because I can’t hear the highs well, so it suits my playing. Discography
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© Brendan Taaffe, 2005. All Rights Reserved. |
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