#2 - One Grand Battle of Noble Underdogs Against Tyrant Oppressors

Folk Music and the Irish Pub 1955 - 1973

(The following is the text, with minor additions, of a talk I gave as part of a panel on “The History of the Irish Pub” at the Trinity Long Room Hub [not in person obviously] on March 12 2021. You can listen back here)

Firstly I wanted to thank the Trinity Long Room Hub for inviting me, it’s a genuine pleasure to be on a panel with so many incredibly talented people.

I must admit, when I was asked to do this my first thought was, well, I don’t work on pubs. My research looks at political links in Irish folk music in the fifties and sixties. Then I realised that saying this was a bit like saying, “oh I don't work on forests, no no no, I work on trees you see”. 

Because pubs are all over my work. Beyond being where music is actually performed, enjoyed or recorded, pubs are the place that your brain pictures when you listen to something like Seven Drunken Nights or All for Me Grog or Whiskey in the Jar, or even the least imaginatively titled Clancy Brothers number: Beer Beer Beer.

Rather than trying to give an exhaustive history in nine minutes, instead I just want to look at a few moments in time, a few strange artefacts, to see if they tell us anything interesting. See, the nice thing about my research is I mention a lot of songs so if you get bored and drift off you can just put them on and enjoy that instead. 

So let's think about three pubs, a few songs, and a handful of moments in history.

First of all, the White Horse Tavern, at the corner of Hudson and 11th, in Greenwich Village, New York City. Now this is not strictly an Irish pub, but if you’d arrived in the door in the 1960s to see Michael Harrington and the Catholic Workers at one table, Democratic Party politician Daniel Patrick Moynihan holding court at another and the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem singing in the back room, you could be forgiven for thinking it was. This is where Makem and the Clancys cut their teeth, and built the sound that sold all those records in the US and then back home. Dan Wakefield recalled their sessions this way:

[T]he Irish rebellion and Spanish civil war seemed to blend together in one grand battle of noble underdogs against tyrant oppressors, waged from the dawn of history, and any rousing song of freedom stood just so well for the brave lads of Spain or Ireland, either one - or for any of us who had left home and come to the Village¹

("NYC - West Village: White Horse Tavern" by wallyg)

Now the way the Clancy’s started is a funny one. An heiress to one of the wealthiest families in world history, the Guggenheims², recruited Liam Clancy from Ireland to join his brothers in the states, and she also introduced him to Tommy Makem and bankrolled the enterprise. According to Liam Clancy himself:

She brought the Clancys and Makems together, then started the record company, Tradition Records, which would be the launching pad for Paddy, Tom, Tommy Makem, and myself as The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. She introduced us to Josh White, whose managers would guide us onto the world’s stages.³

If you wanted to be glib, you could say they were the first manufactured Irish boy band. 

But you'd want to be very glib indeed. Because the genesis of Makem and the Clancys is more complicated than that. There's a video, which I don't have time to show but hopefully you can watch in your own time. It's a special for Chicago public television recorded in 1962, the Clancys and Tommy Makem appear in a perfect little Irish pub, its location unknown. This is a few years into their career, and the Makem/Clancy style is already in place. Those Aran jumpers. Brennan On the Moor and Bold O’Donoghue and The Cobbler. Well known standards and fragments half remembered and reconstructed from songbooks, all given a new energy and an attractive sheen that made the pub the only logical setting. In a sense this mystery Irish pub they perform in could be any Irish pub. Their set even includes Liam Clancy performing a section of Robert Emmet's speech from the dock that rolls straight into the Rising of the Moon. 

Makem and the Clancys created their sound from Irish raw materials, manufactured it in the factories of American pubs, coffee houses and venues and then re-imported it back to Ireland to be heard and enjoyed in pubs up and down the country. Liam Clancy once said that he was hesitant to tour back home because as he put it, who would want to hear them sing Roddy McCorley in Ireland? The answer was of course, absolutely loads of people. The White Horse Tavern, for reference, has spent a long time dining out on its reputation and is, by all accounts, a shell of its former self. It was bought a few years back by a group that included a notorious slumlord and a gentleman that I’m sure none of you will have heard of called Anthony Scaramucci. 

Let’s go to another pub, not too long after, and one that many of you have probably been in. O’Donoghue’s on Baggot Street got a reputation for being a music pub in the early sixties, partially because the Dubliners would play there. And in May 1965, a student filmmaker called Kevin Sheldon produced an experimental, unfinished film called O’Donoghue’s Opera. It begins on an average busy night in the pub, with pints being poured and music playing. The Dubliners, the Grehan Sisters and Séamus Ennis⁴ all feature. The Grehan Sisters sing The Merry Ploughboy, a version of which by Dermot O’Brien would spend six weeks at the top of the Irish charts the very next year. What begins almost fly on the wall becomes folklore fantasia, as one of the songs, The Night Before Larry Was Stretched, takes life, with Ronnie Drew in the title role. The songs are old, the clientele mostly young and cool, with the Dubliners uniting the two. This is not unedited documentary footage that allows us to look directly into the past, in some ways it’s more interesting than that. It’s a piece of avant-garde art that shows us a fantastical version of what the artist imagined O’Donoghue’s to be: a space of historical imagining.⁵ 

Now if that seems a bit out there, let’s come back down to earth with our final pub: The Bogside Inn in Derry, just a few steps down the road from Free Derry Corner. This was the place where much of the planning was done for the 1969 “Liberation Fleadh”, an event held by the people of the Bogside, just days after the first deployment of soldiers to the streets of Derry. And guess who played at the festival? None other than Tommy Makem and a few lads called the Dubliners. Interestingly, RTÉ’s Wanderly Wagon was also in attendance. This was a way of bringing the music that was happening in the pubs and houses out onto the streets. According to some sources, Tommy Makem performed Four Green Fields for the first time at the event.⁶ 

(Posters at the Museum of Free Derry, Jack Sheehan, 2018)

And the Bogside Inn would be important again in 1973. An American documentary called ‘No Go!”, directed by Richard Chase, told the recent history of the Bogside and Creggan. For obvious reasons, much of the footage is recreated using actors, giving it a different, but still similarly semi-real feel, to O’Donoghue’s Opera. The music for the film was recorded in the Bogside Inn by local musicians, many of whom were also real life political participants in the drama being depicted. Songs like The Bogside Man, The Socialist Republic and the satirical Ballad of Jack Lynch were explicitly Republican and could be fairly described as ripped from the headlines. In the film itself, a childrens’ choir sing Four Green Fields as if it were a traditional tune, rather than something written only a few years before.⁷ 

So what am I trying to say with all this? Well ok, imagine yourself at a session. It’s the year 2025. You’re in a pub that looks old, but was really built in 2018. A group of musicians get up to play, and they’re good. Soon enough, everyone is up and singing along. They start with a few fairly uncontroversial ones, the Rocky Road to Dublin or the Black Velvet Band. Maybe the Rising of the Moon. No one complains too much when they play the Foggy Dew. But as soon as Take it Down From the Mast gets an airing you lose all the Fine Gaelers, and the Fianna Fáilers go back to the bar as soon as The Patriot Game appears. And it only gets stickier from there. By the time you get to The Men Behind the Wire, half the people are muttering and restless, and the other half are having the time of their lives. A real time historical argument about legitimacy is happening through the medium of pub music. And the whole time you can’t stop thinking that the convincingly old and shabby room where this is all taking place was a Lifestyle Sports until a few years ago.

My point here is that these struggles and debates we’re having today, over authenticity and legitimacy, what makes a real Irish pub, and the debates that have been had over this decade of centenaries, they don’t just happen in the letters pages of History Ireland or the Irish Times, they happen everywhere. And one of the best ways to see that in action is by going to your local pub and waiting for a sing song to break out. 

And of course, if you think what I’m saying is all nonsense, well, fair enough, you’re of course more than welcome to sing something different. Thank you.

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1. From Dan Wakefield, New York in the 70s, quoted in Maurice Isserman, The Other American, The Life of Michael Harrington.

2. Diane Guggenheim, known as Diane Hamilton, apparently developed her fascination with Ireland from having an Irish nanny. She’s an incredible figure who deserves a proper biography.

3. From Liam Clancy, The Mountain of the Women, Memoirs of an Irish Troubadour.

4. Séamus Ennis, I’ve discovered in the course of my research, was apparently a first or second cousin of my grandmother Agnes, both good North Dubliners. This supports my theory that there are only approx 500 people in Ireland, really.

5. One of the great unsung heroes of 20th century Irish historical studies is a guy on YouTube called CR’s Video Vaults. A one man Library of Alexandria.

6. Eamon Melaugh, a Derryman who had a major role in the event, also took many spectacular photos of it, some of which can be seen here

7. This happens about 50 minutes in.