~\ Irish Musician Andy Irvine /~

Originally for Celtic Life Magazine (2008), with additions: ? Winnie Czulinski

My Heart’s Tonight in Ireland...

?? One of Andy Irvine’s best-loved songs, evoking the “sweet County Clare,” took centre stage during his recent 2008 North American mini-tour:

The Dublin, Ohio Irish Festival with his band Patrick Street. Restaurant-pub Baile Corcaigh "Town of Cork" in Detroit's old, Irish-immigrant-settled neighborhood Corktown. The Labrador and Newfoundland Folk Festival in St. John’s, Nfld., Canada.

?? As for Toronto, the midpoint in it all, there’s palpable Eire in the air at renowned folk club Hugh’s Room, a venue as packed and expectant as it can get. I see what looks like a father and son, perhaps both musicians, intense, almost bursting, the dad saying something like "Now you'll see what a real strings player is. Voice, too." I find myself thinking Ken should be here – my dear music-industry friend who died just a few months before, and was a Hugh's fixture.

The dozens and dozens of people here tonight seem to suggest major presentation (and Ken often did elaborate sound) – not this simple un-stage set with a few instruments resting against a spot-lit seat. Andy Irvine, one of the most remarkable, respected and renowned figures of Irish and world music, tonight is a solo show.

?? He opens his concert with old folksong "Reynardine," a quirky tale about a werefox and beautiful maidens with "lips of ruby wine," and a piece found as far afield as Northern Ireland and Nova Scotia. The words beguile, and the tune dazzles with Irvine's lightning fingers on fretboard. But after this folk favourite, he has an unexpected story on how music as a profession began for him:

“A strange thing, but my first musical hero, when I was a young teenager, was Woody Guthrie. I discovered Woody – and I think what it was that impressed me about him, before I heard any music he played – I thought it was a great name!”

To laughter from the audience, Irvine goes on to describe how he went to coffee bars in neighbouring Irish towns, with songwriter/folksinger Guthrie’s guitar style and Oklahoma accent. One night he saw his father in the crowd. “He never mentioned it; he’s taken it to his grave with him. But maybe this was some kind of sign sent down to me from Woody, just to say 'Be yourself!'

?? Irvine, born in London UK to Irish-Scottish parents, began as a child actor, eschewed classical guitar for the skiffle music of Lonnie Donegan and the like, discovered Guthrie – and went on to fill four decades with renowned and diverse music. Sweeney’s Men. Planxty. Patrick Street. Mozaik. These bands all have achieved huge followings – but for what, exactly?

“I never was one to be pigeonholed,” says Irvine, who, yes, reveals his love for traditional Irish and Scottish music, but, just like the ancient Celts themselves, has traveled multicultural musical roads. A master of many stringed instruments, his fingers dance, fast and intricate, as though from some beyond-human sphere, and other worlds far beyond this.

?? Yet he is also rooted, and his “Never Tire of the Road” tribute to Guthrie has become a kind of mantra for Irvine. And, though his harmonica playing “owes nearly everything to Woody Guthrie and (American folksinger) Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, who showed me how to play it so many years ago,” he’s learned to play slides and polkas on it, under the eye of renowned Irish-musical-colleague Jackie Daly. The mouth organ never has been known as integral to Irish traditional music, probably another reason Irvine embraces it.

Over the years, Irvine also has embraced solo projects like "Rain on the Roof" and "Rude Awakening," has contributed to many musicians’ albums, and has compiled a songbook, Aiming for the Heart. 2008 has marked the re-release of the 1976 Andy Irvine and Paul Brady album. Irvine also performed with Brady, a longtime musical colleague, at the Celtic Connections festival in Scotland this year (2008).

As for that big ‘C’ word, ‘Celtic,’ “It seems to cover a multitude of sins today,” Irvine jokes. “We never called it (Celtic) in Ireland – it was always ‘folk music’ – or might be found under ‘British Isles’ Music.’

“I think of (Breton musician) Alan Stivell as the prime mover” – of the force of the legacy of the music of the Celts. Irvine himself has done some of the music of Brittany, Stivell’s homeland and a recognized Celtic nation. And overall he has traveled, in his lifetime, as much as any plundering or new-homeland-seeking Celt.

?? In the hushed and darkened Hugh’s Room of Toronto, Irvine embraces both mandola and harmonica to give his audience emigration song "The Braes of Moneymore,” and his rendition of “Erin Go Bragh” (‘Ireland Forever’). A more personal Irish offering – announced to audience whoops and cheers – is his song “O'Donoghue’s,” a much-loved Dublin, Ireland pub. Irvine rattles off the address and phone #, to more appreciative laughter, as he introduces the song.

"It was my office,” he jokes. “I went in there in 1962, and didn't really come out again until 1968. It was the first time I'd really met an entire flock of people who I could relate to so well."

?? In recalling those heady 1960s days, the song nods to characters like Banjo Barney, who made the fiddle-tuned tenor banjo a ‘standard’ of Irish music; popular traditional musician/accordion player Sonny Brogan, (1907-1965) – and renowned Irish musician Johnny Moynihan, who formed Sweeney’s Men, in the 1960s, with Irvine and Joe Dolan.

Moynihan is credited with bringing the bouzouki from Greece into Irish music, to become one of Irvine’s favoured stringed instruments, with some adjustments – flattening the awkward bowl-shaped back, adding more strings, creating a more guitar-shaped body, with a fuller, richer sound.

Irvine then moved beyond the world of O’Donoghue’s to travel beyond Ireland. “Half of Europe was on the road going somewhere. Not being much into vogues, I went to Bulgaria and Romania.”

?? It was the beginning of a passion for eastern-European rhythms and influences that would fuse with the Irish in his band Planxty, with Christy Moore, Donal Lunny and uillean piper Liam O’Flynn – and became even more apparent in the album East Wind (1992) which featured musicians like piper Davy Spillane and Nikola Parov, who become Riverdance orchestral mainstays.

Bill Whelan, Riverdance composer, drew on many of these eastern-European rhythms for this supposedly Irish 1990s dance show that is an ongoing global phenomenon. Irvine himself says he had “a plan to bring different elements of European music together, long before the so-called World Music took off.

?? “When (the album) East Wind was ready, Tara Records tried to find a larger label to sell on to. Nearly all the big companies wrote back to say how much they had enjoyed it, but, as one letter had it, ‘Unfortunately, we'll have to pass on it. Great music, but no known pigeon-hole to put it in!'”

That Balkan influence is evident in his beautiful song, “Wind Blows Over The Danube,” based on a Hungarian folksong called "Dunara.” The “sadness of time passing” seems to ripple through the darkened Hugh’s Room. The strings that Irvine plays are high, sweet, and with an approach somewhat exotic to Western ears.

?? “I?very much doubt whether many people who listened to "Smeceno Horo" (a Bulgarian tune) in those heady days of Planxty-long-ago, would have understood the first thing about where the beat was,” he says. “We had difficulty ourselves. However, the very fact that the rhythms were incomprehensible seems to have excited the audience more than if the piece had been in 4/4.”

In other songs, Irvine brings in the influences and flavours of Greece and Norway, and plays a piece from a New Zealand friend, who himself had taken Irvine’s song “Patrick Street” to present his version of the timeless newcomer in town who gets taken by an opportunist. Irvine also shakes up the audience by throwing himself into an unannounced whisky-flavoured stew of an a cappella song.

Towards the end of his first set, he takes on “The Highwayman.” “I like to leave my audience in floods of tears,” Irvine says, before beginning to sing this long and tragic poem. In the dimly-lit venue, his physical presence, unpretentious, takes on the shadow of another era. The audience is rapt. Irvine admits he brings some of his acting background to his musical stage presence.

And yet it might be difficult to find a more down-to-earth performer – at break-time, he thanks the venue, thanks soundman Colin Puffer, says we are “an audience made in Heaven,” and then fumbles for his glasses. “It’s vanity….I only wear them to look at my song list,” he says.

?? I find myself reflecting on our previous convo, when I phoned him, in Ohio for the Irish festival. Then, as now, he talks of music with the zeal of one making a new discovery every day, as with his rendition of 'The Girl I Left Behind,” a “love lost” tune loved in both Ireland and America. “It was one of those situations: you go into a kind of hyperspace while you're working on it – you’ve got this really nice accompaniment, you go over it again and again, and again, put the instrument down, and two seconds later, you have to play it again. The verse towards the end is so poetic I’d break down every time I got there.”

In the second set, in the pulsating darkness and simple un-stage light of Hugh's Room, Irvine also pays tribute to "Forgotten Hero," 19th-century Irish revolutionary and land-reformer Michael Davitt, who had lost his arm in a Lancashire cotton-mill machine; to Irish-American labour and community organizer “Mother Jones” – and to his own mother.

?? An actress from Co. Antrim, who toured Britain and Ireland, “She would sing songs from (Jerome Kern’s) Sunny at the drop of a hat.” Irvine chooses to honour her with a song he learned from Co. Antrim traditional musicians, the kind of music his mother never really liked. “She might have changed her mind, but she died before her son got going.”

It’s easy to imagine she knows very well, that she’s here with us in this Toronto venue. Tonight we’ve felt, with Irvine, the struggles for justice, have loved and lost and empathized with the morning-after pains of too much whisky, have soared with the larks as they sing high on a summer day, have travelled from an old home to a new land – and have experienced worlds beyond our own.

“You have been a fantastic audience,” says Irvine, seemingly overwhelmed by the Toronto crowd rising as one, cheering, roaring, whooping and whistling and stamping, loathe to let the evening end.

?? Now there is urgency in audience voices calling out “Blacksmith!” and “Plains of Kildare!” (three times). He obliges with the first, a traditional English folk song he’s performed for decades, and with some intricate instrumentation. The line "I would live for ever…” seems especially to resonate with the audience. And then, to more rapturous applause, Irvine launches into the song-tale of the Monaghan grey mare on the Plains of Kildare, a-gallop and streaming to the finish…

Offstage, he casually wanders back to the merchandise table, to sign CDs, to chat to people milling close, to have his photo taken. And though this legendary man of lyrics and intricate fretboard-ing, seems drained, ready to sleep then key up to perform in his three-day Newfoundland gig, those Irish eyes smile with warmth, and the passion of his 70-year love affair with music.

?? Much of this can be read in his impressive “Andy's History” journal on his website www.andyirvine.com . As he's said there: “You will find a longish autobiography in nine chapters…I could have gone down the well-worn path of having somebody write a eulogy, but I’m not really into the highways of Music Business hype. So, you may think this ‘homely.’”

That is exactly the feeling. Irvine, a legend of his time, and a man who’s traveled many diverse roots and routes, seems to have the heart that is “home,” wherever you are.

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?? From 1976: one of Andy Irvine's songs, "B?neas?'s Green Glade," which shows a beautiful blend of 'Celtic' balladry – and strong eastern-European rhythms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2L05TsbciE

?? Andy Irvine doing old folksong "The Blacksmith" with band Planxty, one of many he formed and recorded with: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Z3A5Tgy47M

?? And more recently, doing old folksong "Reynardine" : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgnUkmY4nkc –the piece with which he opened the concert I write about in my article.

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