Mighty men of music – An Irishwoman’s Diary on Waterford’s Flanagan Brothers

Waves of traditional Irish music will wrap us in a blanket of nostalgia in Waterford this summer. With the roll-out of a couple of unusual events, feet will be tapping in tune on flagstones and pavements in places stretching from the Copper Coast up into the foothills of the Comeragh Mountains.

Plaque

On Friday, there’ll be great fanfare and nostalgia when music lovers, historians, relatives and friends gather to honour the mighty Flanagan Brothers of Waterford city when a Civic Trust blue plaque will be erected on the house where they grew up on Summerhill Terrace.

They’ll be eulogised and fondly remembered as these men in the 1920s and 1930s were famous Irish traditional musicians, huge throughout the western world, selling records in Australia, New Zealand, America, the UK and in Ireland as well.

They emigrated from Waterford to New York in 1911 and were soon packing concert halls and dance halls, clubs and bars, playing for various radio stations and recording for several record companies too.

In all, they made over 50 recordings.

Playing together originally just for fun in informal sessions, they soon found that they could earn a few dollars with their music and they started to play in bars and dance halls. Demand for their services grew quickly and before long they were playing regularly all around New York.

As musician and folklorist Mick Moloney recalls on the sleeve notes of a reissued album from 1978, An Irish Delight: "They arrived in New York at the end of an era which had seen the demise of the vaudeville and music hall circuit but they found that audiences still expected the slickness in presentation, which was so characteristic of both these domains. As Irish entertainers, they faced the additional audience expectation that they perform stage-Irish material. So they dressed up in green, white and gold costumes and did just that".

Their repertoire ranged from Irish ballads, jigs, reels and hornpipes and they also sang. They were all self-taught musically.

There were seven children in the Flanagan family, four boys and three girls. Joe the eldest, played the accordion; Mike, the youngest, played the banjo and the mandolin; while Louis, who sometimes joined them, played guitar and banjo and occasionally the more exotic harp-guitar. As Moloney explains on the reissued LP, the Flanagans “played regularly at places such as the Innisfail Ballroom on 56th and 3rd Avenue in Manhattan; the Galway Hall on 125th Street on the West Side and at the Donovan Ballroom (nicknamed “The Tub of Blood”) on 59th and Columbus Avenue. They would play for five or six hours a night, often in crowded humid conditions, which made performing extremely difficult and tiring.”

“We got plenty of work, there’s no doubt about it”, recalled Mike Flanagan to Moloney when they met once, “but we were only paid ten dollars a night and we worked our heads off for it. They were rough days.”

Meanwhile, students young and old from centres such as the flourishing Dungarvan School of Trad are taking part in the Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann in Ennis.

Tour of Australia

In addition, five masters of tradition – renowned uilleann piper David Power from Cúl na Sméar in west Waterford, guitarist Dennis Cahill, fiddle player Martin Hayes, legendary singer Maighréad Ní Dhomhnaill, and her sister, Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill, of Skara Brae and the Bothy Band – will kick-start an upcoming splurge of gigs as they get ready to sing and play together music about love, loss and rebellion, all in honour of the commemorative year that’s in it. Then a tour of Australia is in the pipeline.

So if you’re driving through the Déise any time soon, listen out for snatches of Seán Ó Duibhir a Ghleanna, Róisín Dubh, Na Conneries or The Boys of Barr na Sráide because there’ll be music in the air.