A Good Note For The Season Of St Patrick

By Andrew Carey

One doesn’t have to be Irish, or of Irish descent, to play Irish traditional music. Nor does one have to be the son of a player, who was the son of a player, and on down the line into the depths of time and legend. But it is true that the music is often a family affair.

Mike Rafferty (playing wooden flute and uillean pipes), his daughter Mary (accordion and tin whistle), and Mary’s husband Dónal Clancy (guitar and bouzouki) – the trio who performed at Newtown Meeting House on Saturday, March 5 – are a prime example. 

Mike Rafferty, born in 1926 in the town of Larraga in the parish of Ballinakil, County Galway, learned to play the flute from his father, Tom “Barrel” Rafferty, a small farmer by trade. The elder Mr Rafferty got his nickname – a near-necessity in a town of seven houses where at one time there were seven families named Rafferty – from neighbors who said he had a “barrel of wind” to drive his instrument.

Mary Rafferty, Mike Rafferty’s daughter, born in New Jersey, to which her father emigrated in 1949, learned the flute and the tin whistle from her father and the accordion from the late Martin Mulvihill. For seven years she toured and recorded with the all-female supergroup Cherish the Ladies, which has also included the singer Aoife Clancy, the daughter of Bobby Clancy of the famous Clancy Brothers, who herself performed at the meeting house in 2001.

Dónal Clancy, the husband of Mary Rafferty and the son of Bobby Clancy’s brother Líam, grew up in the Ring Gaeltacht (a region speaking the Irish Gaelic language) in County Waterford. A professional musician from the age of 14, he is a strong player of the guitar and Irish bouzouki, and has performed and recorded with many well-known groups including Solas, the Eileen Ivers Band, and Danú.

The evening started off with a strong set of jigs, “Kevin Moloney’s,” named for a fiddler from Mr Rafferty’s home region, and “The Scotsman Over the Border.” Playing on flute, button accordion and guitar, the Raffertys and Mr Clancy showed from the first the stylistic tightness and smooth accord that comes from family playing together.

Ms Rafferty has absorbed her father’s style to the point that her accordion and his flute blended together almost as if they were one instrument. Mr Clancy’s guitar work was solid and unobtrusive, with a restrained complexity that supported the melody without ever distracting from the single-line thrust and forward drive of the tunes.

“The Congress” and “Captain Rock” is a classic pair of reels, heard at sessions wherever Irish people and Irish music have made their homes.  Of “Captain Rock,” Mr Rafferty said, “The reason he got his name was because he was the captain of a ship and it hit some rocks and went down. Somebody wrote a tune in honor of him, but I suppose he wasn’t a very good captain.”

Although Mr. Rafferty’s concerts are full of jokes and stories, the emphasis never drifts away from the music. Playing a set of reels from the County Clare, a region so well known for its musicians that its reputation sometimes overshadows that of Mr Rafferty’s East Galway, he said, “We’re three miles from the Clare border, and it’s downhill all the way ‘til you reach Ballinakil.  And we used to say that sound travels uphill, and that’s how the Clare people got their music.”

To back “The Church in the Meadow” and “Joe Burke’s Jig,” Mr Clancy switched to bouzouki. With its four pairs of strings the bouzouki handles quite differently than a guitar, having a more nasal tone and faster decay and lending itself to open harmonies and smaller chords. Mr Clancy is as adept on his second instrument as on his first.

It isn’t very easy to play good guitar backing for traditional music, which was born on purely melodic instruments like the flute and does not follow the chord progressions and strumming patterns of bluegrass or “folk” music.  But it is a more difficult task still for a guitarist to play tunes smoothly and at full speed (even the moderate tempo of the East Galway style) with good ornamentation and rhythmic emphasis..

So, when Mr Clancy opened up a set of reels with a burst of pure solo flatpicking, as supple and stylish as his wife’s accordion or father-in-law’s flute, he showed himself to have truly mastered the guitar and fully assimilated it into the Irish tradition. After Ms Rafferty came in on the second tune of the set, “The Limestone Rock,” he flowed as smoothly from leading to accompaniment as a skilled horseman eases his mount from canter to trot.

Ms Rafferty mostly stuck to the accordion, as her bag of whistles had been forgotten at home. She did play one set on a whistle of Mr Rafferty’s, however. She apologized beforehand, saying the whistle was “a little sick,” but whatever hoarseness might have been in the instrument was more than made up for by her own skill, developed under her father’s tutelage from the age of eight.  Clearly Mr Rafferty is a great teacher as well as a player of the first order.

After the break, Mr Rafferty switched to the uillean pipes, which are among the oldest of traditional Irish instruments, and launched into a set of jigs: “The Queen of the Rushes” and “John Brady’s,” with the accordion and the bouzouki providing ample support.

“The Town of Sweet Loughrea,” a slow air, showed the pipes at their profoundly expressive best, and the tune usually called “The Peeler’s Jacket,” had its name changed to “The Lonesome Reel.”

“It feels lonesome to me,” Mr Rafferty explained, and his version had that quality in ample measure. The name of a tune isn’t usually anything but a convenient handle used when musicians discuss what they’re going to play, but in this case the change mades perfect sense. It’s hard to deny that it doesn’t sound like a policeman’s jacket.

The Raffertys’ current tour is inspired by Mr Rafferty’s recent CD, Speed 78, his first solo album after seventy years of playing and three CDs on which he shared billing with his daughter. The title comes from the old 78 rpm records, as well as Mr Rafferty’s 78th year, in which it was recorded.

The latest in the Shamrock Traditional Irish Music Society’s regular concert series, the show at Newtown Meeting House made a perfect opening to the St Patrick’s season.