Floating down to the towns along the Shannon in a packed Cortina

At the Carrick Water Music Festival, Charlie McGettigan was taking Michael Hardingon a trip to his youth in an old Cortina

There was a lot of music in Carrick-on-Shannon last week. Irish flute tunes, and German songs. An orchestra from Slovakia, and enough jazz to make all the dead clergy spin in their graves.

A band in blue suits played music by Big Joe Turner and Bill Haley. There were saxophones, cellos, and an opera by Handel, a band on a boat in the river, and a long-haired violinist flashing his beautiful eyes in the Bush Hotel.

When I hear jazz in Leitrim I think of Hitler and Fr Conifrey; the former banished jazz from Paris, and the latter tried to get de Valera to ban jazz in Leitrim.

But I wasn’t there for the jazz; I just wanted to meet Charlie McGettigan. In fact there was a time I actually wanted to be Charlie McGettigan. So on Thursday evening I decided to go to the Variety Performance, and tell him the story.

In 1973, I used to have a Cortina, and I often squeezed five girls into it, and we’d float down the slopes of Cuilce mountain, to the towns along the Shannon, bound for dancehalls where we could jive and sweat. Sweating was a quaint form of arousal for a sexually repressed generation. Sometimes we’d go to singing pubs, and get plastered; and it wasn’t easy keeping the Cortina between the ditches on the way home.

At that time, Charlie McGettigan used to gig in the Silver Swan in Carrick-on- Shannon. All the girls in my Cortina adored him. And that’s why I wanted to be Charlie McGettigan.

Last Thursday evening, McGettigan sat in the dressing room of the Dock Arts Centre, tuning his guitar. A crowd of other performers milled around. He was nervous. It didn’t seem like the time to tell him anything important, or that when I was 20, I dreamed of being him.

McGettigan’s hair is grey now and his face is etched with life’s ups and downs. When he walked into the glaring spotlights, he seemed shy, as his eyes focused on the audience.

“I recognise a lot of people here,” he whispered. The audience murmured with affection. “Anyone remember this?” he inquired, as he plucked the chords and softly let the words out: “How many roads must a man walk down, before they call him a man? How many seas must the white dove sail, before she sleeps in the sand?”

He delivered every song as if he was talking to someone he loved, in an easy one-to-one intimacy. It didn’t feel like a performance. It felt like real life.

Then, all of a sudden, he got funny. He remarked on the vast amount of bathrooms there must be in all the big mansions built in Leitrim over the past 15 years. “In our day,” he said, “the only en-suite was a chamber pot. And we must have stunk to high heaven, because we were only allowed into the bath when someone else got out. There would be scum on the surface of the water, if you lay still for more than two minutes.”

This led him into an old song, about a mousetrap, hidden in a chamber pot beneath a bed. The last verse left the audience in stitches. And then he introduced one of his own famous songs, with the modesty of a countryman.

“Maura O’Connell was in my house one night,” he said, “and she found this song in an old notebook.” As if all life was an accident. His fingers plucked the strings, and he began: “I hope you find the feet of a dancer. I hope you can sing in the rain.”

When the concert was over I drove around town. The floodlit car parks near Tesco looked like some bland nowhere in America, but along the waterfront, the moon shone on the Shannon, and I could understand why my father and mother came here, in 1951, for the first night of their honeymoon.

I parked the jeep and was walking towards the Landmark Hotel to hear the Swinging Bluecats when I saw McGettigan again; he was putting his guitar into the boot of his car.

We talked for ages, about Bob Dylan, and ‘Cinema Paradiso’, and the days when it cost 3p to travel by train from Ballyshannon to the beach at Rossnowlagh. We were looking back, as rock’n’roll kids do.

Both of us are too long in the tooth now to be bothered with who or what we once dreamed of being. That was “once upon a time,” before we knew “what life had in store”.

There was no point in mentioning the girls in the old Cortina; I suppose they’re all soaking merrily in the bathrooms and jacuzzis of modern Leitrim; but I’d lay a bet that they still love Charlie McGettigan.

mharding@irishtimes.com