IrishMusicInfo
The Sunday Tribune Weekly Traditional Music Column by Fintan Vallely
990131
The Wexford Singers' Festival next weekend opens the year's music calendar. Singing has been the sauce of GAA games for a century, much of it local, the odd nationally-inspiring piece breaking out to all-island coverage. Former GAA executive Jimmy Smith has launched a formidable collection of 172 such lyrics - *Ballads of the Banner* - mostly relating to his native Co. Clare. This kind of song is graphic journalism, one time doggerel, again fine poetry. Gaelic football dates from 1884, and so Smith's oldest tale is from Ennis, 1856: 'The hurlbats crash in shorten'd blow, They strike, they fall, move on contending'. And in 1932: 'The ball is thrown in, King ash holds full sway, And the multitudes rise to the thrills of the fray'. Criostir î Floinn's 1985 *Centenary* invests the game with its political birthright which perhaps augurs Eoin O'Duffy manly Blue-shirtedness: 'The men who founded the GAA, Would scorn the modern parasitic way'. But this is a book of essentially local verse with remarkable feats of name-rhyming, intense detail carefully pruned to fit song-air metres, much made in recent years, but all filled with passion - song as vehicle for praise of the sons of the place. Women figure in camogie: 'Model of Irish womanhood', or as wife to the hero: 'Sue Ellen like a Turk on the farm is working, Without getting a great deal of help from the men'. 'Herself' is also a fashion-magazine treat for manhood: 'Her step is light, her waist is slim - The lass that loves a hurler'. But they are heroes too, for in 1966: 'Majella the ball in the net she did sink'. In this chronology of match reports, triumphalism, tributes and laments, history and politics condition all the frays. They 'threw Souperism to the sea', and: 'The Conquerors fell at their feet on the way - And they walked on their bodies in Tom Daniel's' Ray' [flat ground]. The games stand as allusions to a glorious, battling past that these days is only permitted to strike down balls: 'On Tailteann plain, the Fenian men in friendly conflict met'. Michael Cusack is hewed from the Burren, Tom Malone of Miltown Malbay is a giant. And challenging the modern clubs' bars, the sportsmen were once 'strict temperance men ... sober, steady Dalgais'. 'Ballads of the Banner' might have benefited from a writers' index, and an alphabetic contents page, but like its passionate energy or loathe its sentimentality, this songbook is a route into music. Anecdotes illuminate profusely, and with several pieces by luminaries like Joseph Considine, 'Sliabh Rua', Peadar Kearney, Robert Dwyer-Joyce, the collector himself and CC's Samus MacMathna, the bulk of its material is designed as unaccompanied singing - there is only one way to do it.
©Fintan Vallely, IrishMusicInfo.com
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