"Oh, the days of the Kerry dancing
Oh, the ring of the piper's tune
Oh, for one of those hours of gladness
Gone, alas, like our youth, too soon!
When the boys began to gather
In the glen of a summer's night
And the Kerry piper's tuning
Made us long with wild delight!
Oh, to think of it
Oh, to dream of it
Fills my heart with tears!
Time goes on, and the happy years are dead
And one by one the merry hearts are fled
Silent now is the wild and lonely glen
Where the bright glad laugh will echo ne'er again
Only dreaming of days gone by in my heart I hear."
Should we look back at the good ol' days and mourn that they are gone? Are they really gone, or are we experiencing the same joy the musical of the past did? If we are mere "reenactors", are we really keeping the tradition alive or some perverted facsimile? Were there ever good ol' days like in the poem?
Has anyone had an authentic "traditional" experience?
Example, for illustration...several months back some of us were invited to play at a young ladies High School Graduation party. It was out in the country and we played in a barn-like structure. The graduate took step dancing classes almost all her life and so she invited most of her fellow students all of whom danced (no curly hair or neon costumes in site). There was set dancing, too. Neighbors came from all around. There was food, drink, dancing, laughing, tunes, songs, and friends, young men and women and old ones, too, until late into the night. The point is, we were not trying to re-enact "days of yore" as we imagined them, but gathered there to have fun and friendship and this "hour of gladness" just happened, unforced as the morning dew distills on the grass.
I would mention our local CraicHouse sessions in the basement of a banjo players house that was similar to the above, another session that brought tears to an elderly Son of Erin because it was exactly like the ones his father held in his cottage in the 1940's in rural Ireland. Etc.
Were there "days" that are gone that will never return or are we actually experiencing those gatherings that some mourn after? Are we like a museum piece, an urn, a product somehow of the past, but in, for to speak, in a glass case rather than on the shelf of a home filled with drinking water?
I can't speak for anyone else, but for myself I am not attempting to recapture anything, and I am definitely NOT re-enacting anything. I play the music now because I enjoy it now. I do not entertain any prejudices about the age or provenance of the tunes - it is the style of the music not its origin that floats my boat.
The days of yore were not different from today. We worry about our fuel bills / healthcare / mortgage payments / war in various places, they worried about where to get logs / dying of tuberculosis / paying the quarterly shilling rent / being invaded by Napoleon.
Some thousands of years ago the writer of what is now called the book of Ecclesiastes wrote "Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not enquire wisely concerning this."
Doubtless there will be others who do hark back to a golden age that never was, or see themselves somehow re-enacting some wonderful past. They belong in Renaissance Fairs and Civil War Re-enactment Societies.
The old recherche de temps perdu is a very common theme among the melancholy poets. This just in from our Shropshire Reporter A.E. Housman:
When lads were home from labour
At Abdon, under Clee
A man would call his neighbour
And both would send for me.
And where the light in lances
Across the mead was laid,
There to the dances
I fetched my flute and played.
Ours were idle pleasures,
Yet oh, content we were,
The young to wind the measures,
The old to heed the air;
And I to lift with playing
From tree and tower and steep
The light delaying,
And flute the sun to sleep.
The youth toward his fancy
Would turn his brow of tan,
And Tom would pair with Nancy
And Dick step off with Fan;
The girl would lift her glances
To his, and both be mute:
Well went the dances
At evening to the flute.
Wenlock Edge was umbered,
And bright was Abdon Burf,
And warm between them slumbered
The smooth green miles of turf;
Until from grass and clover
The upshot beam would fade,
And England over
Advanced the lofty shade.
The lofty shade advances,
I fetch my flute and play:
Come, lads, and learn the dances
And praise the tune today.
To-morrow, more's the pity,
Away we both must hie,
To air the ditty,
And to earth I.
Comely Maidens dancing at the crossroads. Sitting on the fence safe from the horrors of a War that was ravaging the World. (Good old Dev) On your knees every night reciting the family rosary. Getting the sh*t kicked out of us daily by both Religious and Lay teachers. Watching your parents forced apart by economic necessity. Watching your older siblings take the boat one by one as they reached their mid teens. Some never to return. Counting the years to the time when you could also feck off from such a depressing place. What was that slogan again, the one that was rammed down our throats daily......
The family that prays together, stays together.
( Didn't work for us)
Oh to think of it
Oh to dream of it,
Fills my heart with tears....it certainly does!!!!
Isn't that what a tradition is- something that reflects or celebrates the past?
Traditional music is obviously based on the past, the music and times of yore. But when I join a session, it's for the joy in the moment. The "moment" might be special because (in part at least) of the ties with the past, but it's not tied to the past in itself.
If you get my drift.
feardearg asks a good question: "Are we actually experiencing those gatherings that some mourn after?"
(I read this, incidentally, as "some *will* mourn after...")
Definitely. It is *we* who will be doing the mourning as and when we get older; at any rate, saying how great the sessions of our youth were, partly to impress other people and partly to buttress a feeling that what we did in our youth was important and worthwhile, maybe in the teeth of nagging feelings that it was neither.
Others, punters, may go away transported by the strains of a session and fondly talk about it to others many years down the line. These tend to be very impressionable people in the throes of mutual passion or who have just got degrees or something - a stimulus unrelated to the quality of the music, which curiously often has been unusually random and sub-par when such people come over and beam their gratitude.
The circle is unbroken dude, no worries. It's all perception. You perceive it was better back then. The young now, when older, will do the same, etc. Circle of life.
Authentic traditional experience? Everytime I gather with friends to continue the musical tradition, it's a traditional experience.
It is for you too, for all of us.
End of story. It's a living tradition. It was here before us and will be here after us. It lives in the hearts of the people that love it.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go scrub up, I seem to be covered in poetic wax...
The therapeutic mythology surrounding trad, to which I have referred, vies with that of angling in its indiscriminate fertility.
That is saying quite a lot.
Indeed, angling lore has the stabilising factor that the fruits of the chase (if any) are measurable by objective and universally recognised criteria.
Trad lore is not tethered to reality in this demeaning fashion, and has been free to boldly go where no man has gone before. Or where no man ever went.
"and partly to buttress a feeling that what we did in our youth was important and worthwhile, maybe in the teeth of nagging feelings that it was neither"
Gosh Nicholas.
Traditional Music - music to have a midlife crisis to.
Feardearg - you not familiar with Housman - I seem to recall that that one was titled Fancy's Knell. There's a lot of it in that vein - here's another particular gem from A.E. Housman (which I don't recall having any title):
On forelands high in heaven,
'Tis many a year gone by,
Amidst the fall of even
Would stand my friends and I.
Before our foolish faces
Lay hands we did not see;
Our eyes were in the places
Where we shall never be.
"Oh, the pearl seas are yonder,
The amber sanded shore;
Shires where the girls are fonder,
Towns where the pots hold more.
And here fust we and molder
By grange and rick and shed,
And every moon are older,
And soon we shall be dead."
Heigho, 'twas true and pity;
But there we lads must stay.
Troy was a steepled city,
But Troy was far away.
And round we turned lamenting
To homes we longed to leave,
And silent hills indenting
The orange band of eve.
I see the air benighted
And all the dusking dales,
And lamps in England lighted,
And evening wrecked in Wales;
And starry darkness paces
The road from sea to sea,
And blots the foolish faces
Of my poor friends and me.
I agree that we are definitely living something which is meaningful and joyful in the present. But just because the music is related to a tradition (and, in its current evolution preserves the name "traditional music"), it does not mean that it is an "authentic traditional experience".
The conditions in which we dance and play music in Europe and America (and in which ITM is evolving) are not the same as they once were. It's not played by people who have the kind of lives players of traditional music lived 100 years ago.
In that sense, the idea that it's a "living tradition" is just bullsh*t. It's a living music alright, but anyone who thinks that what we do is the same as what people did 100 years ago is delusional.
(differences include: global culture, largely middle class players, drawing a difference between "traditional music" and other kinds (there was a time, it was just "music"), teaching, sessions, going all "meta" about the music - ie thinking about it rather than doing it).
Of course it doesn't matter. We're playing ITM (or whatever you want to call it), but it's no more (or less) a "living tradition" than jazz or classical or any other modern music genre.
All the people I play with have to work for their living - so they're working class. Some are car park attendants, some are engineers, some are social workers, some are welders, and one is a driving instructor.
I remember evenings wrecked in Wales. Cwrw Felinfoel Double Dragon - untrustworthy stuff. I wonder if AEH knew all the connotations of what he was saying there.
PS Was Housman the one who wrote: And down in lovely muck I've lain.....And woke to find myself again......The world, it was the old world yet.....I was I; my things were wet? Pardon a faulty memory.
The Irish came to America. They lived in slums and played their music. They made enough money to move to the suburbs. They played their music. They had kids. They played their music. Now the kids lost all their money in the housing bubble and are back in the slums. Still playing the music. Where’s the break?
Of course conditions change, that's absurd. Have they ever NOT changed? That's how time works.
Yes Tirno, it's not a living tradition because we all don't live in over-packed tenements in the Five Points and hold Civil War draft riots, or cut turf and live in mud huts with no running water. Are you serious?
but it's not tradition. We don't have the same relationship to music which existed before - it doesn't perform the same social function, it is completely incidental to the fabric of the community as a whole.
There needs be no further proof than the fact we call it "traditional". Only people outside of tradition would call it that.
(although I will admit that the difference is probably not all that great - particularly when small "communities" do have music as one of the important element).
Put another way, we are not keeping the tradition alive (as the first poster asks), we are just playing music.
I beg to differ Tirno the tradition moves on ,if we were just playing music I would be playing the beatles as for alive I dont think traditions ever die just evolve into something else.
Marketing sharpies know that most of us have nostalgic feelings for happenings and places we've never personally experienced.
That's precisely how I was sold on picking up the Louis the XIV "Sun King®" wig now perched above my sweaty brow. Gives a fella rich, heavy, flowing locks, now don't it? (Brian May and Howard Stern—both frequenters of this web site—get where I'm at with this. Hiya, Bri.)
On a more serious note, the past doth indeed beckon: though cruel fate may have carried my family far, far from Ireland's emerald whatchamacallits, dropping my brothers and myself into lives of vacuous material success and shameful encounters with wild, wild babes of varying ethnicities, I still enjoy the simple potato, the Catholicism, and the stapling o' the shamrock to my nose each 17th of March. The music, too, is charming.
Tirno, you mean the social function it had in the 1940s and 1950s when no one in Ireland wanted to hear the music anymore? Or the social function it had in Boston in the 1940s and 1950s when the whole Irish American community would come out to attend dances?
Or the social function it serves my family and friends currently?
Or all that is wrong because we don't all live in mud huts and attend dances at the crossroads on fair days?
Social function? Yup. We got that. It’s only alive or dead if we nurture or kill it.
Now where's MY Louis the XIV wig? I ordered that thing MONTHS ago.
@Tinro
I play the music because i love it, because it's hugely social, and there are players of all ages willing and eager to play it, not because it's traditional.
Those reasons could be part of why the music can be called part of the living tradition. Alive and well in Clare.
Housman didn't write the following; Bob Marley did -- it almost makes the melody of "Days of the Kerry Dancing" palatable: "Old pirates, they rob I from the merchant ships...."
The Bright Glad Laugh Will Echo Ne'er Again
The Bright Glad Laugh Will Echo Ne'er Again
"Oh, the days of the Kerry dancing
Oh, the ring of the piper's tune
Oh, for one of those hours of gladness
Gone, alas, like our youth, too soon!
When the boys began to gather
In the glen of a summer's night
And the Kerry piper's tuning
Made us long with wild delight!
Oh, to think of it
Oh, to dream of it
Fills my heart with tears!
Time goes on, and the happy years are dead
And one by one the merry hearts are fled
Silent now is the wild and lonely glen
Where the bright glad laugh will echo ne'er again
Only dreaming of days gone by in my heart I hear."
-The Days Of The Kerry Dancing
http://sessionite.com/page.php?in=148
Should we look back at the good ol' days and mourn that they are gone? Are they really gone, or are we experiencing the same joy the musical of the past did? If we are mere "reenactors", are we really keeping the tradition alive or some perverted facsimile? Were there ever good ol' days like in the poem?
Has anyone had an authentic "traditional" experience?
Example, for illustration...several months back some of us were invited to play at a young ladies High School Graduation party. It was out in the country and we played in a barn-like structure. The graduate took step dancing classes almost all her life and so she invited most of her fellow students all of whom danced (no curly hair or neon costumes in site). There was set dancing, too. Neighbors came from all around. There was food, drink, dancing, laughing, tunes, songs, and friends, young men and women and old ones, too, until late into the night. The point is, we were not trying to re-enact "days of yore" as we imagined them, but gathered there to have fun and friendship and this "hour of gladness" just happened, unforced as the morning dew distills on the grass.
I would mention our local CraicHouse sessions in the basement of a banjo players house that was similar to the above, another session that brought tears to an elderly Son of Erin because it was exactly like the ones his father held in his cottage in the 1940's in rural Ireland. Etc.
Were there "days" that are gone that will never return or are we actually experiencing those gatherings that some mourn after? Are we like a museum piece, an urn, a product somehow of the past, but in, for to speak, in a glass case rather than on the shelf of a home filled with drinking water?
# Posted on September 4th 2009 by feardearg
Re: The Bright Glad Laugh Will Echo Ne'er Again
Oh, fer godsakes, feardearg, get yourself a drink, man, and a wench to sit upon your knee.
# Posted on September 4th 2009 by oldstrings
Re: The Bright Glad Laugh Will Echo Ne'er Again
Take some LSD, feardearg. It might just take you where you want to go.
# Posted on September 4th 2009 by leoj
Re: The Bright Glad Laugh Will Echo Ne'er Again
I can't speak for anyone else, but for myself I am not attempting to recapture anything, and I am definitely NOT re-enacting anything. I play the music now because I enjoy it now. I do not entertain any prejudices about the age or provenance of the tunes - it is the style of the music not its origin that floats my boat.
The days of yore were not different from today. We worry about our fuel bills / healthcare / mortgage payments / war in various places, they worried about where to get logs / dying of tuberculosis / paying the quarterly shilling rent / being invaded by Napoleon.
Some thousands of years ago the writer of what is now called the book of Ecclesiastes wrote "Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not enquire wisely concerning this."
Doubtless there will be others who do hark back to a golden age that never was, or see themselves somehow re-enacting some wonderful past. They belong in Renaissance Fairs and Civil War Re-enactment Societies.
£0.02p
# Posted on September 4th 2009 by showaddydadito
Re: The Bright Glad Laugh Will Echo Ne'er Again
The old recherche de temps perdu is a very common theme among the melancholy poets. This just in from our Shropshire Reporter A.E. Housman:
When lads were home from labour
At Abdon, under Clee
A man would call his neighbour
And both would send for me.
And where the light in lances
Across the mead was laid,
There to the dances
I fetched my flute and played.
Ours were idle pleasures,
Yet oh, content we were,
The young to wind the measures,
The old to heed the air;
And I to lift with playing
From tree and tower and steep
The light delaying,
And flute the sun to sleep.
The youth toward his fancy
Would turn his brow of tan,
And Tom would pair with Nancy
And Dick step off with Fan;
The girl would lift her glances
To his, and both be mute:
Well went the dances
At evening to the flute.
Wenlock Edge was umbered,
And bright was Abdon Burf,
And warm between them slumbered
The smooth green miles of turf;
Until from grass and clover
The upshot beam would fade,
And England over
Advanced the lofty shade.
The lofty shade advances,
I fetch my flute and play:
Come, lads, and learn the dances
And praise the tune today.
To-morrow, more's the pity,
Away we both must hie,
To air the ditty,
And to earth I.
# Posted on September 4th 2009 by showaddydadito
Re: The Bright Glad Laugh Will Echo Ne'er Again
The Kerry song somehow makes me think of zippywd at work in the business he calls The Sausage Factory; I wonder if he wrote it.
# Posted on September 4th 2009 by nicholas
Re: The Bright Glad Laugh Will Echo Ne'er Again
I sincerely hope that nobody here is experiencing enjoyment unless it has been generated in the traditional manner.
# Posted on September 4th 2009 by All Moldy
Re: The Bright Glad Laugh Will Echo Ne'er Again
Sheer unrelenting bloody misery mate. That's what it's all about.
# Posted on September 4th 2009 by showaddydadito
Re: The Bright Glad Laugh Will Echo Ne'er Again
Great. Now someone can google LSD, Wench, Drink and get Feardearg all on the same page.
Interestings posts.
I especially like the poem showaddydadito presented. I found this to be a common theme, too. Hence this thread.
But is it possible that the playing of the music creates something that was experienced in the past rather than the other way around?
# Posted on September 4th 2009 by feardearg
Re: The Bright Glad Laugh Will Echo Ne'er Again
Comely Maidens dancing at the crossroads. Sitting on the fence safe from the horrors of a War that was ravaging the World. (Good old Dev) On your knees every night reciting the family rosary. Getting the sh*t kicked out of us daily by both Religious and Lay teachers. Watching your parents forced apart by economic necessity. Watching your older siblings take the boat one by one as they reached their mid teens. Some never to return. Counting the years to the time when you could also feck off from such a depressing place. What was that slogan again, the one that was rammed down our throats daily......
The family that prays together, stays together.
( Didn't work for us)
Oh to think of it
Oh to dream of it,
Fills my heart with tears....it certainly does!!!!
# Posted on September 4th 2009 by Free Reed
Re: The Bright Glad Laugh Will Echo Ne'er Again
Isn't that what a tradition is- something that reflects or celebrates the past?
Traditional music is obviously based on the past, the music and times of yore. But when I join a session, it's for the joy in the moment. The "moment" might be special because (in part at least) of the ties with the past, but it's not tied to the past in itself.
If you get my drift.
# Posted on September 4th 2009 by RockyRoader
Re: The Bright Glad Laugh Will Echo Ne'er Again
feardearg asks a good question: "Are we actually experiencing those gatherings that some mourn after?"
(I read this, incidentally, as "some *will* mourn after...")
Definitely. It is *we* who will be doing the mourning as and when we get older; at any rate, saying how great the sessions of our youth were, partly to impress other people and partly to buttress a feeling that what we did in our youth was important and worthwhile, maybe in the teeth of nagging feelings that it was neither.
Others, punters, may go away transported by the strains of a session and fondly talk about it to others many years down the line. These tend to be very impressionable people in the throes of mutual passion or who have just got degrees or something - a stimulus unrelated to the quality of the music, which curiously often has been unusually random and sub-par when such people come over and beam their gratitude.
# Posted on September 4th 2009 by nicholas
Re: The Bright Glad Laugh Will Echo Ne'er Again
Feardearg, the only people who will mourn your gatherings are the ones that have to listen to them.
# Posted on September 4th 2009 by SWFL Fiddler
Re: The Bright Glad Laugh Will Echo Ne'er Again
HAHAHA! No no, I'm just yanking yer chain, sorry homey, just playing around.
# Posted on September 4th 2009 by SWFL Fiddler
Re: The Bright Glad Laugh Will Echo Ne'er Again
The circle is unbroken dude, no worries. It's all perception. You perceive it was better back then. The young now, when older, will do the same, etc. Circle of life.
Authentic traditional experience? Everytime I gather with friends to continue the musical tradition, it's a traditional experience.
It is for you too, for all of us.
End of story. It's a living tradition. It was here before us and will be here after us. It lives in the hearts of the people that love it.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go scrub up, I seem to be covered in poetic wax...
# Posted on September 4th 2009 by SWFL Fiddler
Re: The Bright Glad Laugh Will Echo Ne'er Again
The therapeutic mythology surrounding trad, to which I have referred, vies with that of angling in its indiscriminate fertility.
That is saying quite a lot.
Indeed, angling lore has the stabilising factor that the fruits of the chase (if any) are measurable by objective and universally recognised criteria.
Trad lore is not tethered to reality in this demeaning fashion, and has been free to boldly go where no man has gone before. Or where no man ever went.
# Posted on September 4th 2009 by nicholas
Re: The Bright Glad Laugh Will Echo Ne'er Again
"and partly to buttress a feeling that what we did in our youth was important and worthwhile, maybe in the teeth of nagging feelings that it was neither"
Gosh Nicholas.
Traditional Music - music to have a midlife crisis to.
Feardearg - you not familiar with Housman - I seem to recall that that one was titled Fancy's Knell. There's a lot of it in that vein - here's another particular gem from A.E. Housman (which I don't recall having any title):
On forelands high in heaven,
'Tis many a year gone by,
Amidst the fall of even
Would stand my friends and I.
Before our foolish faces
Lay hands we did not see;
Our eyes were in the places
Where we shall never be.
"Oh, the pearl seas are yonder,
The amber sanded shore;
Shires where the girls are fonder,
Towns where the pots hold more.
And here fust we and molder
By grange and rick and shed,
And every moon are older,
And soon we shall be dead."
Heigho, 'twas true and pity;
But there we lads must stay.
Troy was a steepled city,
But Troy was far away.
And round we turned lamenting
To homes we longed to leave,
And silent hills indenting
The orange band of eve.
I see the air benighted
And all the dusking dales,
And lamps in England lighted,
And evening wrecked in Wales;
And starry darkness paces
The road from sea to sea,
And blots the foolish faces
Of my poor friends and me.
# Posted on September 4th 2009 by showaddydadito
Re: The Bright Glad Laugh Will Echo Ne'er Again
Save your breath, Free Reed ... this is a thread for the great Irish diaspora as Mary put it.
# Posted on September 4th 2009 by the wounded hussar
Re: The Bright Glad Laugh Will Echo Ne'er Again
I agree that we are definitely living something which is meaningful and joyful in the present. But just because the music is related to a tradition (and, in its current evolution preserves the name "traditional music"), it does not mean that it is an "authentic traditional experience".
The conditions in which we dance and play music in Europe and America (and in which ITM is evolving) are not the same as they once were. It's not played by people who have the kind of lives players of traditional music lived 100 years ago.
In that sense, the idea that it's a "living tradition" is just bullsh*t. It's a living music alright, but anyone who thinks that what we do is the same as what people did 100 years ago is delusional.
(differences include: global culture, largely middle class players, drawing a difference between "traditional music" and other kinds (there was a time, it was just "music"), teaching, sessions, going all "meta" about the music - ie thinking about it rather than doing it).
Of course it doesn't matter. We're playing ITM (or whatever you want to call it), but it's no more (or less) a "living tradition" than jazz or classical or any other modern music genre.
# Posted on September 4th 2009 by Tirno
Re: The Bright Glad Laugh Will Echo Ne'er Again
What do you mean by "middle class"?
All the people I play with have to work for their living - so they're working class. Some are car park attendants, some are engineers, some are social workers, some are welders, and one is a driving instructor.
# Posted on September 4th 2009 by showaddydadito
Re: The Bright Glad Laugh Will Echo Ne'er Again
I remember evenings wrecked in Wales. Cwrw Felinfoel Double Dragon - untrustworthy stuff. I wonder if AEH knew all the connotations of what he was saying there.
# Posted on September 4th 2009 by nicholas
Re: The Bright Glad Laugh Will Echo Ne'er Again
The "Good old days" were very hard. Yet, they were the days in which this music was born.
# Posted on September 4th 2009 by Atahualpa Quigley
Re: The Bright Glad Laugh Will Echo Ne'er Again
PS Was Housman the one who wrote: And down in lovely muck I've lain.....And woke to find myself again......The world, it was the old world yet.....I was I; my things were wet? Pardon a faulty memory.
# Posted on September 4th 2009 by Atahualpa Quigley
Re: The Bright Glad Laugh Will Echo Ne'er Again
Not a living tradition? Nonsense.
The Irish came to America. They lived in slums and played their music. They made enough money to move to the suburbs. They played their music. They had kids. They played their music. Now the kids lost all their money in the housing bubble and are back in the slums. Still playing the music. Where’s the break?
Of course conditions change, that's absurd. Have they ever NOT changed? That's how time works.
Yes Tirno, it's not a living tradition because we all don't live in over-packed tenements in the Five Points and hold Civil War draft riots, or cut turf and live in mud huts with no running water. Are you serious?
# Posted on September 4th 2009 by SWFL Fiddler
Re: The Bright Glad Laugh Will Echo Ne'er Again
It's living
but it's not tradition. We don't have the same relationship to music which existed before - it doesn't perform the same social function, it is completely incidental to the fabric of the community as a whole.
There needs be no further proof than the fact we call it "traditional". Only people outside of tradition would call it that.
(although I will admit that the difference is probably not all that great - particularly when small "communities" do have music as one of the important element).
Put another way, we are not keeping the tradition alive (as the first poster asks), we are just playing music.
# Posted on September 4th 2009 by Tirno
Re: The Bright Glad Laugh Will Echo Ne'er Again
I beg to differ Tirno the tradition moves on ,if we were just playing music I would be playing the beatles as for alive I dont think traditions ever die just evolve into something else.
# Posted on September 4th 2009 by bazouki dave
Re: The Bright Glad Laugh Will Echo Ne'er Again
Marketing sharpies know that most of us have nostalgic feelings for happenings and places we've never personally experienced.
That's precisely how I was sold on picking up the Louis the XIV "Sun King®" wig now perched above my sweaty brow. Gives a fella rich, heavy, flowing locks, now don't it? (Brian May and Howard Stern—both frequenters of this web site—get where I'm at with this. Hiya, Bri.)
On a more serious note, the past doth indeed beckon: though cruel fate may have carried my family far, far from Ireland's emerald whatchamacallits, dropping my brothers and myself into lives of vacuous material success and shameful encounters with wild, wild babes of varying ethnicities, I still enjoy the simple potato, the Catholicism, and the stapling o' the shamrock to my nose each 17th of March. The music, too, is charming.
# Posted on September 4th 2009 by NEW Pure Drop® Ear Canal Oil
Re: The Bright Glad Laugh Will Echo Ne'er Again
Tirno, you mean the social function it had in the 1940s and 1950s when no one in Ireland wanted to hear the music anymore? Or the social function it had in Boston in the 1940s and 1950s when the whole Irish American community would come out to attend dances?
Or the social function it serves my family and friends currently?
Or all that is wrong because we don't all live in mud huts and attend dances at the crossroads on fair days?
Social function? Yup. We got that. It’s only alive or dead if we nurture or kill it.
Now where's MY Louis the XIV wig? I ordered that thing MONTHS ago.
# Posted on September 4th 2009 by SWFL Fiddler
Re: The Bright Glad Laugh Will Echo Ne'er Again
Atahualpa - yes that was Housman too.
He wrote for the most part about the golden age that some traditional music players hark back to. Same as Thomas Hardy.
# Posted on September 7th 2009 by showaddydadito
Re: The Bright Glad Laugh Will Echo Ne'er Again
@Tinro
I play the music because i love it, because it's hugely social, and there are players of all ages willing and eager to play it, not because it's traditional.
Those reasons could be part of why the music can be called part of the living tradition. Alive and well in Clare.
# Posted on September 7th 2009 by RockyRoader
Re: The Bright Glad Laugh Will Echo Ne'er Again
Housman didn't write the following; Bob Marley did -- it almost makes the melody of "Days of the Kerry Dancing" palatable: "Old pirates, they rob I from the merchant ships...."
# Posted on September 13th 2009 by Atahualpa Quigley
Re: The Bright Glad Laugh Will Echo Ne'er Again
Marley made a heroic effort for the first few notes, but even he had to bail out on that tune.
# Posted on September 13th 2009 by Atahualpa Quigley