Sandpoint duo visits Emerald Isle

IRELAND - Jim leaned away from his button accordion and took a long sip from his pint of Guinness. His moustache disappeared under his lower lip as he wiped away the foam before lifting the glass for another draught of the stout beer.

"Ah, that was lovely, that last song," he said as he put the drink at his feet. His dark eyes sparkled from under a pair of bushy brows. He twitched his head ever so slightly to one side in an Irish idiosyncrasy that doubles as a both a nod of greeting and a way to underscore a compliment.

"Just lovely."

Jim slid his instrument back to the center of his lap. He played a few notes, lifting his gaze to All-Ireland Singing Champion Donie Lyons, who had joined in on the Irish flute.

We were sitting with the two men one drizzly afternoon outside the Collins Pub in the small, riverside town of Athea. My wife and musical partner, Tami, and I had just begun trading tunes with Jim and Donie. They graced us with a steady stream of instrumentals and we answered with Celtic vocal tunes we had learned over the past couple of years.

As the flute and the button accordion coalesced around a new melody, a stocky fellow with his hand wrapped around a golden glass of Harp beer stepped outside and stood in the doorway to listen.

When the song was over, he moved closer to the circle of musicians.

"Sing us a song, then, John," Donie said as he lowered the flute and laid it gently across the top of his legs.

The man tilted his glass for a drink, wiped the back of his hand across his lips and said: "I will. I'll sing ‘My Father's Cabin Small.'"

Jim picked up his Guinness, sat back and nodded his head to the side.

"That's a fine tune," he said. "A wonderful tune."

John sang unaccompanied for the players-turned-audience around him.

See MUSIC, Page 2

Throughout the song, Jim intermittently sipped his beer and interspersed a running commentary between musical phrases. His words came from the heart - bubbling up like a spring - as he encouraged the singer with "very good" and "well done, John" and, most often, "lovely."

It's a delight to listen to, in his deep-throated brogue, and comes out sounding like "loo-blee."

John closed his eyes and wove the old tune around this verbal obbligato. The melody itself was simple, but the ornamentations he added made it as intricate as a Celtic knot.

"Sure it's of my father's cabin I will softly sing to you," he sang.

"The walls a little bit slanted and the thatch a golden hue …

The turf is burning brightly and the fiddle is by the wall

Sure we'll sing and dance ‘til morning in my father's cabin small."

As the mist turned into rain, we trundled ourselves and our instruments inside, led by our hosts, John and Kathleen Selman of Ardagh, County Limerick; Tami's mother, Babe Belzer of Cando, N.D.; and Roger King of Sandpoint, a veteran of 15 trips to Ireland and long-time friend of the Selmans.

Kathleen - a fine singer in her own right and champion-level Irish dancer - had taken the role of impresario and music agent on our behalf and arranged ahead of time for Tami and I to trot out our musical duo, Bridges Home, in a variety of settings. We played at sessions of traditional Irish music, appeared on a regional radio program and met several of the music folk from nearby towns. The gathering in Athea was one more opportunity she brought our grateful way.

Along with a knack for locating music, she packs a wickedly dry wit. When it was pointed out that she had walked outside and left her purse sitting wide-open next to her Guinness on the bar, Kathleen turned around, looked back inside, shrugged and sat down with no hint of concern.

"It's not the purse I'd be worryin' about," she said, completely deadpan. "It's my pint sittin' there on the bar that I'll be keepin' an eye on."

Inside the snug little pub, we sat on either side of a long table and settled in for more tunes.

"The music has come inside!" a lady at the adjoining table announced to the room. The barstools and remaining tables were beginning to fill up with people coming in out of the rain.

"What'll it be then?" she asked, angling forward and placing her hands on her knees. "What'll you play for us?"

We kept the cultural exchange going, alternating songs with Donie and Jim until someone in the room called out to a friend:  "Brendan - will you sing one for us?"

An auburn-haired man in a striped shirt just shook his head and smiled.

"Aw, just one song for the Americans?" we pleaded. That brought him to his feet.

"Right, then," he said. "I'll sing ‘Spancil Hill.'"

Brendan had chosen one of Ireland's prettiest aires, a song about a young Irish immigrant who had traveled to America and dreamed he was spirited back to see his family, friends and a former lover, only to be pulled from slumber and have it all disappear.

"Last night as I lay dreaming of pleasant days gone by," he crooned,

"My mind, it bent on rambling, to Ireland I did fly,

I stepped on board a vision and followed with my will,

‘Til next I came to anchor at the cross in Spancil Hill."

Brendan closed his eyes and took us deeper and deeper, verse-by-verse, into the heart of the dream. Abruptly, he thrust us back to reality with the words:

"The cock he crew in the morning, he crew both loud and shrill,

And I awoke in Californ-eye-aee … many miles from Spancil Hill."

Throughout the song, the listeners averted their eyes, letting the solo singer enter a sort of trance state as we all tagged along, singing the last line of each refrain as a group. By the time Brendan was through, the room was blinking away tears. He slowly opened his eyes and lowered himself into his seat.

"Now then," he said with a loud smack of his palm on the table, "do you know any Johnny Cash?"

Seeing this big, fat softball coming our way over the plate, I swung hard, picking out the opening riff to "Folsom Prison Blues" on the low strings of my guitar. The pub erupted into a raucous sing-a-long, with feet stomping the floor on the downbeat and pint glasses hammering out the off beats on the bar.

The Irish are huge fans of American country music. Not the gussied-up, maudlin dross that oozes like an oil slick out of modern-day Nashville, but the hard-living, working man variety made famous by old-school singers like Merle Haggard, George Jones, Patsy Cline and The Man in Black himself. The same group of people who had been crying openly and without shame only seconds before were now pumping their fists in the air and shouting the lines: "I shot a man in Reno, just to WATCH HIM DIE!"

Fascinating. And so very Irish in the confusion it creates when a people possess emotional bandwidth that seems to far exceed most other cultures in the world around their tiny island home. It is a nature that comes out in the music.

One evening at a music session in the town of Adare, another All-Ireland Singing Champion, Nora Butler, stood to sing the praises of the Emerald Isle. She sang alone, with her eyes closed, filled with pride and defiance as her voice rose for the final verse.

Nora was a terrible, powerful beauty as she rounded the corner for the final lines of the tune. It had the ring of all the tribulations the Irish have suffered over the years - Viking raids, Norman conquests, English land grabs and cruel domination, famines that chased the young ones off to America, the "troubles" that plagued the north - and celebrated their ability to bounce back, repeatedly, in spite of them all.

"For the Irish are like wild flowers,

The faster you cut them, the stronger they grow."

Ireland's traditional music, along with the Gaelic language, was at risk of falling by the wayside after Word War II. But in the 1970s, a cultural renaissance brought the songs and the ancient words back into favor as musicians rediscovered their roots. New bands tried out contemporary takes on traditional music, which led to further exploration by the next generation of players who happened along.

Today, one of the most popular forms of music is "trad" - played now by a prodigiously talented crop of youngsters who have come full-circle to embrace tunes that have been passed along by ear from one generation to the next.

A young lad sat outside a storefront in the village of Cahersiveen, joining a throng of street musicians gathered there for the annual Celtic Festival of Arts & Culture. He played quietly on a small harp, his music eclipsed by the fiddles and whistles and singers playing all along the street on both sides of him.

"That's cute," I thought as I leaned down to drop a Euro in the wool cap he had set out for tips. "A little guy pretending he can play." 

But I caught his eye as the coin clinked on top of the other money in the cap. And, kneeling closer, I heard the music he was playing. He was young enough to have stuffed a small teddy bear into his trouser pocket for extra security, but the song he played was older than the walls and streets and buildings all around him.

I listened until the tune came to an end. The boy thanked me for the tip and searched my face for some sign of what I thought of his music making.

"Lovely," I told him, nodding my head to one side. "Just lovely."