At McDermott’s Pub, in the little town of Doolin on Ireland’s rocky western coast, we knew our quest had ended.
The room was packed, and the musicians, squeezed into a nook under the front windows, ripped through a lively reel with a delicious combination of elan and nonchalance. Bows and fingers flew over strings and frets and stops. We were at the home office of traditional Irish music.
Since my wife, Laurel, and I had arrived in Ireland four days earlier, we’d been pub-hopping in search of this music, with only mixed success. Back at home we’d listened to Cherish the Ladies and the Chieftans, so we had some idea what we were looking for: the lively jigs and reels (“tunes,” we’d learn to call them) that set feet to tapping, and the often somber ballads (“songs”) that tell much of Ireland’s story, a story that has a lot to do with want and stoicism, plus emigration, especially to America, and repression, especially by the British.
Our quest had started unsteadily, in County Waterford, where we’d booked two nights at Buggy’s Glencairn Inn, which a guidebook had (accurately) described as the quintessential Irish bed-and-breakfast. We’d chosen Buggy’s for the charm and food, not proximity to good music, but we’d heard there might be something doing at Madden’s Pub in Lismore, a sleepy “heritage” town a few miles away. No, we were told when we arrived a little after 9, but you can try the Lismore Hotel.
There we settled into a banquette, bought pints of Smithwick’s Ale and waited while the bar filled up with an expectant crowd. Everyone around us was smoking, most aggressively the four teenage girls who sat down at our table. (There would be a good deal of smoking in all the pubs we visited, but never again anything like this.) Eventually a musician showed up, uncovered a keyboard and began to bang out some nondescript if highly amplified folk-rock. Above his head a muted television played on, showing young men hurtling through some gymnastic bicycle competition.
The next night we did better, finding the Marine Bar on Highway N25 just outside of Dungarven. “Home of traditional Irish music,” read one sign on the wall, and “If music be the food of life, welcome to the kitchen.” As we arrived about 9:45, a young man with a guitar and his senior partner, a raconteur with curly gray hair, an irresistible smile and an accordion, were about to begin.
“I’m a rambler, I’m a gambler, I’m a long way from home,” they sang. “And if you don’t like me just leave me alone.” The evening bounced jauntily along with traditional Irish pub songs like Whiskey in the Jar, plus the occasional jig or reel. As things wound down, the musicians invited an angular, dark young man who had married just the day before to come forward. A cappella, he sang a pair of stirring ballads.
The evening ended at midnight. As we were leaving, a fellow drinker waved me back.
“You’ve left some money on the bar,” he said, gesturing to a few small bills. Lesson learned: no tipping for drinks in pubs. Tipping musicians is another issue.
Kenmare was our next destination, and we heard some good music there, though still not exactly what we sought. At the two pubs we visited, what we again found were performances rather than true “sessions.” Short for “music session,” a “session” is the Irish idiom for music played in pubs, and it implies an informality, with musicians gathering to play more for their own enjoyment than for an audience, and with all comers welcome to join the playing, assuming they follow proper protocol.
“The Irish like to drink and talk in pubs,” Mark Wayle would tell us during the “Musical Pub Crawl” we’d take in Dublin at the end of our trip. “Musicians sit in a circle, playing for themselves, really.” This pub crawl, which would have made an excellent introduction to our odyssey, had we done the trip in reverse, is more a lecture and performance in rooms provided by Temple Bar pubs than a crawl (we visited just the Ha’penny Bridge Inn and Isolde’s Tower, though three or four venues is apparently more common). Our evening featured Larry Shaw on fiddle and bodhran (an Irish drum), along with Wayle on guitar. Both sang.
“The guitar is a recent arrival in traditional Irish music,” Wayle explained. “In the ’60’s, only hippies and Spaniards played guitars. In the traditional music, the rhythm is in the melody, the ornamentation.
“When I was a child, singing was unaccompanied. Ireland was very poor,” he said, “so we played whatever instruments we could find. Button accordions, concertinas, whistles — all were cheap, virtually child’s toys. Fiddles were omnipresent, easy to come by. Wooden flutes were inexpensive after they were replaced in classical music by metal ones.”
In Kenmare, on our first night, we squeezed into Moeran’s Pub in the Lansdowne Arms Hotel to hear Natural Gas, a vocalist with a guitar and a fiddler, playing mostly songs, some tunes. A good and lively time. (At the pub crawl, we’d learn that reels are in 4/4 time and jigs generally 6/8 — “say rashers and sausages” was Wayle’s tip.) The next night, down the street at Foley’s, two young women — one played the guitar, the other played the accordion and sang with a lovely plaintiveness — mingled traditional tunes with songs that included John Denver’s Country Roads.
Then to Doolin, where we arrived not by accident but by design, as so many aficionados and practitioners of traditional Irish music had before us. Doolin is bracketed by the Cliffs of Moher (we saw 12 tour buses of varying sizes in the parking lot there) and the Burren, natural features that draw significant tourist attention, and is a port for ferries to the Aran Islands, so tourism is not all music-based. But with two excellent music shops and three pubs routinely hosting sessions, this is the mother lode of traditional Irish tunes and songs. In the Fisherstreet section of the little town are the slightly musty, altogether admirable Traditional Music Shop, where sheet music and instruments are available in addition to CDs; and the newer, less atmospheric but well-stocked Magnetic Music, “County Clare’s first traditional record company.” (Run by Germans, who also sponsor extensive annual Irish music tours of Germany and Switzerland, it’s another example of the music’s internationalism.) Gus O’Conner’s, Doolin’s most famous pub, founded in 1832, is just a few doors down from the shops.
I wandered into the Traditional Music Shop — “The Original,” its sign proclaims — and chatted with Skip, who was manning the counter. I asked him how Doolin had gotten to be at the epicenter of Irish music.
“There just happened to be great players around here,” he said. “A lot of these guys didn’t even own cars. They never traveled. Then Micho Russell, perhaps the greatest of the locals, went to a few festivals and became known. After that, players began to move to the area.”
I asked him which of the three local pubs he recommended.
“McDermott’s,” he said. “People are mad to play there. You have to be an organized group; then you get a slot. The other pubs are open sessions, where anyone can join in. But in that setting, too,” he was quick to add, “some wonderful things can happen, one-time-only things.” While we were talking, the mailman ducked in with the day’s delivery.
“The singing postman,” Skip said after he’d left. “He has his own band. Plays at McDermott’s.”
We were there that night and aced a good spot by carting in stools from an adjoining room. A substantial group of players gathered: four fiddles, flute, bass, guitar, bodhran and Irish harp. Other than a talented busker we encountered as we climbed to the lookout tower at the Cliffs of Moher, this would be the only harpist we’d hear. The harp is the most traditional and beloved of Irish instruments. It appears on Irish coins. Playing the harp was a crime during the period when the British, in charge, were bent on extinguishing Irish culture. Naturally, this made the Irish keener than ever to play it.
As 10 o’clock approached, one and then another fiddler started in casually, almost as if tuning up. Then the flute and guitar joined in, and suddenly the group was cooking, beginning a transporting evening dominated by jigs and reels. The patrons were packed in, heads nodding, feet tapping, hands tapping, rapt expressions. Though there seemed to be no floor space, one intrepid couple managed a bit of step dancing. Before the session was over, a man with a banjo and a woman with a guitar, pint of Guinness in hand, had joined in.
We left McDermott’s about 11:30 p.m. to check out the other pubs. McGann’s (in Doolin’s Roadford section, like McDermott’s) we rejected right away as too noisy, so we took a 10-minute walk through the soft evening back to Fisherstreet and Gus O’Conner’s. There, sitting at a banquette under a framed sign reading “reserved for musicians,” were players with flute, accordion, guitars and mandolin. As we listened, a Norwegian joined in adroitly on the spoons.
The following night at McDermott’s, the group was smaller — flute, guitar, fiddle, bodhran — and local.
“The fiddler is a grandmother,” offered Anne, a loquacious woman from Dublin who, with her husband, was spending four days in Doolin for the music. “She teaches the zither.
“The musicians don’t get paid, you know. They just do this because they love it. You can see it in their faces, particularly the fiddler’s. We just buy them a pint or two, and they get a few pounds from the tip jar.”
We saw no tip jar there, though later, in Dublin, at Gogarty’s, a pint glass was passed and at O’Donoghue’s on Merrion Row (an intimate, ancient pub, walls lined with pictures and posters) a small wooden Bewley’s Tea box, lid up, collected coins and bills. At O’Donoghue’s, we sat down at the table with the musicians, including one playing the Uillean pipes — our first encounter with this exceedingly difficult, uniquely Irish instrument. In contrast to the better-known Scottish war pipes, they were developed in the 17th century as a chamber music instrument, have a much finer sound and are mind-bogglingly complicated to play.
“Pipers tend to be a little mad, God bless them,” Larry Shaw had said during the pub crawl.
Tucked into the cozy nook, we witnessed again the traditional sessions ritual as Maura, a pint-sized American redhead arrived. (“I’m Scotch-Irish” she answered when asked where she was from.) After a few tunes — protocol insists on this waiting period — she uncased her fiddle and was invited to join in. Later came the “noble call,” the time when the new arrival is asked to perform something special on her own.
“Let’s hear that classical piece you do,” suggested the piper, and Maura obliged. The musicians listened with respectful attention, in the wonderful brotherhood and sisterhood that easily crosses lines of gender and nationality, of practitioner and listener, all in the thrall of traditional Irish music.
Karl Zimmermann’s last story for Travel was on riding vintage trains in Cuba. He lives in Norwood, N.J.
