Writing

Poems

I’ve been inspired by musicians that I’ve known over the years, and have ended up writing a series of poems—character portraits, really—about the people whose music influenced me, including:   Tommy Potts ~ Willie Clancy ~ Sonny Brogan ~ Seamus Ennis ~ Páidí Bán O Bríain ~ Micho Russell ~ Michael Dwyer ~ Sean Maguire ~  Tony MacMahon ~ Julia Clifford ~ John Kelly ~ Jack Dolan ~ Bill Harte

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Potts

Thrown in amongst puzzled onlookers
He stroked and pulled and glided his bow
Head bent in total reverence to his vision of the spirit.
While listeners wondered about the strength of their praise
His swollen eyes let loose the tears of the forgotten dead
And then the rhythm and the lift
And the notes that broke the rules
Of conventional acceptance
And the humble loneliness of the crucified stranger
Leapt forth in freedom’s ecstasy as Potts bent lower and lower
Caressing the sound of his unspeakable compassion.
And the tune was a happy tune
All naked and ready on the headland
But the gallant surprise of it all
Was the sadness and the pleading
That came again and again
For those of us who listened closer
When the sound-post trembled
To the music of Tommy Potts.

© Paddy O’Brien, April 1989

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The Road From Castlebarnagh

A Memoir by Paddy O’Brien – Brief Synopsis

One of my earliest memories is of sitting in the corner by the fire at an open hearth—the same fire that warmed us, where my mother boiled bacon and cabbage and baked wheaten bread on a griddle. I entered the world in 1945, the middle of the 20th century, but my family’s way of life had not changed substantially for more than a hundred years. The house where I was born was an old thatched cottage with no running water or electricity. The area around our house is still known as Castlebarnagh, which is a small townsland near Daingean in northeast County Offaly, in the midlands of Ireland.

I remember the countryside of my childhood as poor. When money was scarce, as it always seemed to be when I was young, people had to entertain themselves with local stories, conversation with visiting friends and ramblers. Our house had its share of people who stopped in for a chat or a cup of tea, and I was raised on stories—of hard work and ruined harvests, of Gaelic sports, little people, ghost stories and hauntings. I began storing up my own stories as well: about the time my father got in our first wireless, and when my mother bought my first musical instrument—a mouth organ—from a travelling peddler. When I was five years old, I heard Leo Rowsome—known in his day as the king of the Irish pipers—at Croghan Feis (a traditional festival of music and dancing and Gaelic games) on Saint Patrick’s Day, 1951. My school-day recollections center on a cruel National School teacher, who regarded children and treated them as would a disturbed Victorian character from a Dickens novel. But it was also a wonderful time of western films, cowboy heroes, and ever-enjoyable games of cowboys and Indians that we played around the dangerous Rourke’s Moors, where a desperate bull was said to be lurking.

My childhood days were spent working around our farm and going to school, cutting turf and thatching the house with my father. I grew up immersed in Irish rural culture—storytelling, music, and house dances that traced a long line back into the past; with characters, customs, and ways of life now long gone. The characters who people these stories are my parents and sisters, friends and neighbors, schoolmates, fellow musicians, workmates—all ordinary folk from the Irish countryside, who worked and played and squabbled and endeavored to keep themselves and their families afloat in hard times.

Through and against all these stories runs the counter-melody of an awakening creative consciousness, a slow recognition of the one vital imperative in my life: playing Irish traditional music. That realization overtook me as a young child, so these are also the recollections of a young musician who had to learn music by ear from listening to the wireless—in those days my only source of inspiration. Without the aid of a tape recorder, my struggle to get to the heart of the music was an arduous journey, one of constant challenge and soul-grinding frustration.

And yet all of these things shaped me, the stories and hardships and the laughter. You might hear the rasp of the corncrake or the howling curses of our neighbor Mick Hayes in the way I play a reel, or feel the cold wind blowing across the bog in the mournful melody of a slow air.