Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, March 17, 1990 TAG: 9003172130
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOE KENNEDY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
And so a few weeks ago he spent part of an afternoon singing, in his 87-year-old voice, some of the favorites his mother taught him.
"Most Irish songs are sad," he said. "They had a rough time, people did, in those days."
The titles - "The Lament of the Irish Immigrant," "Come Back to Erin" and "I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen" - told the story, and so did the lyrics.
I'll take you home again, Kathleen,
across the ocean wild and wide,
to where your heart has ever been
since first you were my bonny bride.
the roses all have left your cheek,
I've watched them fade away and die,
your voice is sad whene'er you speak
and tears bedim your loving eyes . . .
Heffernan was born in Ireland, where he lived for three years before emigrating with his family to Canada in 1905. Later he and his family moved to the United States, where his father worked as a foreman in brush factories.
Heffernan spent his teen-age years in Baltimore, studied cello at the Peabody Conservatory there and later moved to Danville to work for the American Red Cross. He spent 13 years as cellist with the Roanoke Symphony when Gibson Morrissey was its conductor.
Retired to Roanoke with his wife, Frances, he thinks often of the old songs and of the St. Patrick's Days he knew as a young man in America.
"I want to see somebody appreciate these songs," he said, and they do, especially at this time of year.
"The Best of Irish Music," a songbook published by Creative Concepts of Ojai, Calif., has sold well in the two years it's been available, with 90 percent of sales coming between January and March.
And it won't be any short-term thing, said John Haag of Creative Concepts. "These books sell year after year after year."
Once there was a time when Irish music was known largely through the efforts of songwriters like Thomas Moore and tenors like John McCormack. More recently, popular singers of decidedly different ethnic backgrounds have given their versions of Irish songs. Soul singer Jackie Wilson recorded "Danny Boy" in 1965, folksinger Joan Baez 10 years later.
But the days when that song and others were viewed as the whole of Irish music are long gone. Nowadays, Irish music of all kinds can be heard on the airwaves and found in stores. Big names include bands like U2 and Hothouse Flowers, Irish-English bands like the Pogues, Irish singers like Maura O'Connell and Mary Black, balladeers like Paul Brady and Chris De Burgh.
Last year Irish rocker Van Morrison released "Irish Heartbeat" in collaboration with the Chieftains, perhaps the best-known purveyors of the Ireland's traditional instrumental music.
The Clancy Brothers are synonymous with Irish folk tunes. In larger cities, traditional bands perform in Irish pubs, rarely, and seldom willingly, playing the likes of "Danny Boy."
Mary O'Driscoll is a traditional Irish musician in St. Paul, Minn., and an employee of the Irish American Cultural Institute of the College of St. Thomas. She plays fiddle in a four-member band called Blarney Pilgrim. Her husband, Sean O'Driscoll, also in the band, is from Cork.
O'Driscoll dubbed "Danny Boy," "Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ra" and other such ballads "songs written by homesick Irish people in this country. They are not inherently, most of them, Irish songs, though a lot of them may have used a traditional Irish melody.
"A lot of them were from the vaudeville kind of scene in the '20s and '30s and they became very popular and were exported back to Ireland. Now maybe you would hear them in Ireland, too. But it's an inherently commercial music as opposed to an oral form that's been passed down from generation to generation."
Traditional Irish music dates back centuries, says Fiona Ritchie, producer and host of National Public Radio's "Thistle and Shamrock," a program devoted to Irish and Scottish music.
The sentimental songs about Ireland "are more of the music hall era, and for that reason they are very popular with exiled Irish and Irish-Americans."
"More Irish-Americans are sentimental about that music than the actual Irish, who are very progressive in their music," said Michael George, a director of The Irish Arts Center in New York.
Dispelling the sentimentality surrounding contemporary Ireland is one of the center's missions. The center has sponsored performances of Janet Nobel's play, "Away Alone," about illegal Irish immigrants in America. And George is producing a film called "Illegal," by the center's executive director Nye Heron. "It's about illegal Irish and Dominican immigrants in the Bronx," he said.
George speaks strongly against precious or comical images of shamrocks and leprechauns.
"If anyone goes over there, it's not like `The Quiet Man,' the John Wayne movie with little leprechauns jumping out and everything is green. In Dublin, people are dying because of the air. . . . People come here because it's a better chance for them."
As in the 1800s and early 1900s, high unemployment is sending droves of young Irish citizens to the United States in search of legal and illegal employment, or to Australia, where greater opportunities beckon. The phenomenon, and its heart-rending effects on the Emerald Isle, are described in the Pogues' song, "Thousands Are Sailing."
Descendants of those who sailed decades ago often return to the motherland, only to find its present inhabitants anything but sweetly nostalgic.
"It's not the way it was before," said George. "People say, `You're rich,' " with more envy than admiration."
Nostalgic songs have their place, "and some of it is grand stuff," Ritchie said. "I've played a version of the old John McCormack favorite, `When You and I were Young, My Dear,' by Maura O'Connell. She calls it `Maggie.'
"But for the most part I don't dwell in the repertoire of nostalgic Victoriana. I try to represent the traditional more than the contemporary." Her favorite Irish music consists of tunes written for harp, fiddle and uillean pipes and performed nowadays on wooden flute, button accordion, tin whistle, Greek bazouki, guitar, mandolin and banjo.
Unfortunately for the purists among traditional Irish musicians, the public doesn't always recognize the differences in the musical forms. One difference: Irish tunes consist largely of instrumental dance music.
"The really traditional Irish singing is unaccompanied," O'Driscoll said, "not with catchy little choruses but beautiful complex melodies. The timing and phrasing varies from verse to verse. It's a whole different kind of thing."
Unaccompanied Irish singing is called sean nos, and is as distinctive as lilting, another Irish vocal form.
Musicians who play in pubs and bars often have to accommodate their listeners by playing commercial tunes like "The Wild Rover" and "The Unicorn Song," O'Driscoll said.
"I think a lot of Irish musicians brace themselves for those kinds of requests. This is true of Scottish musicians, too - they sort of avoid taking requests," Ritchie said.
"Robbie O'Connell has a wonderful song that really touches on that very issue - `You're Not Irish.' It's about his experiences: `You can't be Irish, you don't do "Danny Boy." ' On his album notes he says, `Just for the record, I still don't know any of those songs.' "
But, O'Driscoll notes, "Nothing becomes accepted and adopted by people unless it appeals to them."
For all their schmaltz, the gooey songs of Ireland had a vast audience in earlier times, when "recordings were just becoming available and there was this huge listenership of nostalgic, sentimental, homesick Irish," she added.
Though she and her band prefer to play traditional songs and their own compositions, they will play requests for "The Irish Rover" and the like, if that's what's necessary to make the evening a success.
"The reality is that some of those pub songs, even if you are sick to death of them, are fun, catchy songs and give people a good time," she said. "And `Danny Boy,' when it's sung well, is incredible."
by CNB