Hello all,
June is almost out, and I haven't written -- too much
music and fishing. You remember Brendan Salmon -- he came here from Mayo
ten or so years ago, was working at Clifden Supply, and playing guitar
and singing at Terry Sweeney's and at Guy's. He was at university with
the King lad, and one summer a few years ago they performed together at
Terry's, mostly American rock and roll, a sort of Connemara Simon and Garfunkel
act. Then the King lad got a position teaching English in Japan, and Brendan
went to work for a firm in Dublin. He still plays music, though -- a couple
nights a week at a pub in Dublin, and during the summer he comes back to
Clifden on some weekends, to perform at Guy's. He's making enough money
to be able to add a good sound system, amplifier and keyboards to his act.
I like to see him whenever he's in Clifden, hear how he interprets music
now that he's burdened with a serious job in Dublin, watch the leaving-cert-aged
crowd that frequents Guy's respond to the music, knowing he wasn't far
past his own leaving-cert when he started playing here.
The most varied and colorful entertainment in Clifden
now is the Basket House collective, which is meeting every second week
at Mullarkey's Pub in the Clifden Bay Hotel, giving us the chance to enjoy
our local talent. It was organized by some of our own musicians and writers:
Tom Lydon, Martin Finke, Noel Mannion and Ralph Lavelle. Ralph is the master-of
ceremonies and sometimes also plays guitar, sings or reads a piece of his
own writing. What I've most liked is that many of the songs and poems are
grounded in the events and landscape of our everyday life here -- the disco
at Smugglers' Lodge, coffee at Terry Sweeney's, the death of a neighbor
from the Sky Road.
When the Basket House was on a few weeks ago there was
another performance the same evening -- a classical guitarist from Spain,
Agustin Maruri, who had been here before as part of a government-sponsored
music series, returned for a holiday because he enjoys Connemara, and gave
a recital at the Abbey Glen. It was held in the early evening, and so I
was able to hear him and then go over to Mullarkey's for the Basket House.
One of the pieces he played was from the court of Philip II, and because
I happen to like early music I was able to identify a theme in the piece
that was taken from a popular religious song of the pilgrims to Compestella
from a few centuries earlier. Well, I walked into Mullarkey's just as Michael
Carey, Peter Carey's son, was singing, to his own guitar accompaniment,
a song he's written called "Tea on the bog." Now you know there's
nothing so good as having your tea on the bog when you're taking a break
from your work out there --- or from the fishing of the lakes on the bog.
It's a part of our life that needs to be celebrated and this was a delightful
song, the sort of thing that would be on everyone's lips if it were promoted
the way commercial songs are, or heard among ourselves over a time. And
I wondered if, a few hundred years from now, someone were to compose a
"Connemara Suite," would a listener be able to catch the theme
of a song popular with the old people -- that's us -- something about the
pleasure of tea on the bog.
From Tullyvoheen, good night and God bless you.
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