So there’s Irish music and there’s Irish music.
On the one hand, the genius of reinterpretation of centuries-old “traditional” (trad) music that emerged in the '60s and '70s folk revival through bands like the Chieftains, the Bothy Band and, perhaps above all, Planxty, should be a serious port of call (especially if you can score live recordings) for anyone interested in the sheer pleasure of a listening to highly-skilled musicians playing their hearts out.
And it should not be forgotten that this trad music revival paralleled an upsurge in sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland. It’s notable how the culture was responding to the times.
Later in the '70s, musicians such as Paul Brady, Andy Irvine and many, many others, further raised the bar for performance and the vision for what Irish trad could become.
Sidebar: I was privileged to see Planxty (Donal Lunny, Andy Irvine, Liam O’Flynn and Christy Moore) perform at the Barbican concert hall in London in January 2005. The show itself was the destination and motivation of that trip (yes, they’re really that good that I flew from San Francisco to London for a long weekend).
You can check them out in a recently-released feature documentary about the band, called “Whiskey on a Sunday,” which also includes an audio CD with new tracks and live performances of some classics.
As Bridget Regan, the band’s fiddle and Irish whistle player, says in the film about their music: “It's like taking real traditional tunes,
and turning it into a train wreck.”
There's no question this is a remarkable band made up of talented people with extraordinary commitment, musical skill and the ability to wrestle some happiness from tough lives. But Dave, really, is the focal point in all of this. Sure, he can come across as occasionally over-indulgent (one of his songs is called "Selfish Man") and there's also times that he can bullshit with the best of them: he's at his weakest when over-intellectualizing what their music is about.
But when he recalls the death of his father and visiting his aging mother after eight years after being, essentially, exiled in the United States because of immigration barriers, the pain that you feel drives the whole band is laid bare.
His mother, initially, barely remembers him when he shows up at her door.
A film crew captures him singing a couple of FM songs in her home in Beggars Bush, Dublin. She'd never heard his music before. He sang about the death of his father:
Here's to you/I sing for my daddy-o
As I lay him down/to sleep
Well it's been so long/since I lost my daddy-o
I hope he's watching/over me
He also sings about the lack of communication between son and mother, a song called "The Sun Never Shines on Closed Doors."
His mother just cried as Dave sang. "You can't go wrong with writing about stuff like that. You can't: it's real... Home will always be home and no matter where life takes us, we all go the same way home."
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