Searching high and low for a song

ON JULY 2nd 1942, a young man named Seamus Ennis leapt on his bicycle in North County Dublin and cycled westwards at high speed until he reached Kilbeggan, where he stopped for tea, before continuing on to Ballinasloe and a good night's rest. The following day he reached Oranmore, near Galway, and immediately set about fulfilling his employers' requirements, writes PATRICIA CRAIG

"I spoke to an old man," he wrote. "He sang Is Í Nóirín Mo Mhianfor me." Seamus Ennis was 23 at the time, and abundantly endowed with energy and idealism, qualities necessary to the successful completion of his work. He was one of a team of dedicated music and song collectors dispatched to remote Gaeltacht areas by the Irish Folklore Commission, founded in 1935.

Their mission was to seek out, transcribe, record and preserve every aspect of an indigenous folklore, before this endangered resource went the way of the woods of Kilcash, or the last wolf in Ireland. It still amounted to a living tradition, but only just; and, as yet, its importance to the country’s psychic well-being wasn’t widely acknowledged.

(Actually, the context for Ireland’s song-collecting was as much international as national. A similar preservationist drive in relation to folksong and dance was affecting other places, including England, parts of Europe and America.)

Among the assets Seamus Ennis brought to the job was his own expertise as a singer, flute player and uileann piper. His musical gifts, along with his proficiency in Irish, helped him to gain the confidence of local “tradition bearers”, who weren’t always inclined to be forthcoming about the riches of song and story entrusted to them by earlier generations. People coming in from outside to observe, to marvel and to appropriate local idiosyncrasies had been a Gaeltacht hazard for a good many years. And the work of the Folklore Commission, though undoubtedly good in itself, was in some instances faintly tarred with the same provoking brush.

Was there a point, tradition carriers might have worried, when dissemination equalled devaluation? Was a fiercely guarded culture in danger of having its lifeblood diluted? For example, one old man, a fiddle player from Dungloe, Co Donegal, was willing to pass on a particularly cherished air ( Sliabh Sneachta) to Seamus Ennis as a fellow musician, but wouldn't have it going anywhere near the Commission or any other "official" body. He was adamant about that.

A fear of handing out something precious to all and sundry was one thing, but there was also simple exasperation brought on by a stream of pestering folklorists: “. . . I am tired of teaching you songs. Someone comes to bother me nearly every day,” said one old Donegal woman, whose proximity to the Irish College at Gaoth Dobhair made her a target for earnest gaelgoirí arriving in droves. Other performers, confronted by Seamus Ennis and his Ediphone Recording Machine, simply “will not play for me” – or required considerable coaxing to come up with the goods. But these were the exceptions. Most people were disarmed by the young man’s evident appreciation and knowledge of the subject, and collaborated with his project willingly. Perseverance pays off, he found, tracking down elusive singers who constantly seemed to be away from home whenever he called on them. Sometimes the dogged collector ended up sitting in the middle of a field of potatoes with a whistling farmer whose whereabouts he had finally located after many digressions, or taking down material from a man cutting turf in a bog.

IT'S ALL PARTof his pursuit of authenticity – he wasn't interested in songs learned from books, or those already widely familiar. Anything rare, distinctive or enduring is what set his collector's nose twitching. The pages and pages of song titles included at the end of his Field Diarytestify to his status as a champion song collector and conservationist.

In the 1940s, the whole Gaeltacht civilisation was on a cusp between continuity and modernity, though the most extreme forms of modernisation wouldn’t occur for another 30-odd years. The imposition of a bungaloid, garden-pond makeover on the west of Ireland was a long way in the future. The mid-20th century was still a time of innocence and a kind of rugged glamour, when turf smoke ascended from every chimney, and the men of the place were adept at planting, seafaring, gathering scallops, road-making, building walls and interior decorating, making querns for grinding and much else besides. And nearly every family included one or more tradition carriers, those in whose keeping are the pure true notes of a vibrant singing culture.

The brilliant sean-nós singers and fiddle players and dancers were a focus of interest for strangers – outsiders – and the thing that drew them in to applaud, to learn what they can and to record for posterity. Seamus Ennis, himself among “the greatest pipers of modern times” (as Ciaran Carson has it in his book on Irish traditional music) – was valued as a guest in the Gaeltacht for his powers of playing music, and also for the ease with which he accommodated himself to local life. In every Gaeltacht area from Carna in Connemara to Tory Island, he rolled up his sleeves and went out on the bog to cut turf, join people in potato-digging and hay-making, or spend a morning helping to launch a curach beached on dry land. All that requires prodigious stamina. So does hardihood in the face of constantly atrocious weather: “The storm and rain were very strong . . . I had to take shelter from hailstones . . . It poured in the evening and turned to heavy snow . . . As Colm said [Colm Ó Caodhain, one of Ennis’s dearest friends in Connemara], I had paid dearly for the songs I had written from him this evening.”

WHILE IRELANDkept out of the war that was raging elsewhere, "the Emergency" meant an absence of non-essential cars on the roads, and frustrating shortages and delays (two weeks for a bottle of ink to arrive from Dublin).

It meant the cut-off communities of the west were even more acutely driven in on themselves, with consequent enhancement of age-old attributes and activities. “We had spent the afternoon in the old world, among people such as our ancestors,” Ennis observes after a visit to an old Donegal woman, Nora Gallagher, whom he pictures sitting on a stool by the fire with her back to the bed in the chimney corner, “wearing the dark clothes of former times”. It’s true that, at the time, the settle bed and the chimney corner co-existed with broadcasts from Raidió Éireann and Ediphone recording machines, but the spirit of the Gaeltacht places was still geared to an immemorial pungency and self-reliance.

It was also awash in Catholicism, with processions and confessions, gatherings of friends and neighbours after Sunday Mass an important social ritual, and St Brigid’s crosses made of rushes hanging buoyantly above every half-door. As a way of life it had much to commend it – especially if you didn’t have to live it, hardship, poor sanitation, terrible weather and all – but it wasn’t equipped to survive in the modern world. It hasn’t survived, but something of its essence has – the songs and music gathered from the old custodians of ceol dúchasach. And this survival is due to the efforts of visionaries, scholars and collectors such as Seamus Ennis.

Going to The Well for Water: The Seamus Ennis Field Diary 1942-46, meticulously edited and translated into English by Ríonach uí Ógáin, is a stupendous production, full of insight, gusto and intrepidity on the part of the author – and it comes complete with its editor's valuable end-notes, and with evocative images (mostly old photographs) on nearly every page.

Some of these images are in colour and – sadly – show desolate landscapes and roofless houses where feats of piping, singing and conviviality once took place. But to set against the depredations of the present, the loss of a building heritage, we have Seamus Ennis’s enthusiasm and discernment, his ability to put us in touch, time and again, with a bygone exhilaration, “a great night’s fun and a full hall”.

Going To The Well for Water: The Seamus Ennis Field Diary 1942-46, is edited by Ríonach uí Ógáin, Cork University Press, 595pp. £44.00

Patricia Craig is an author and critic