IrishMusicInfo
The Sunday Tribune Weekly Traditional Music Column by Fintan Vallely
990530
Two thousand people, many of them musicians from all over Ireland, gathered in Dundalk on Saturday last to mark the passing of singer, songwriter and flute player Eithne N’ Uallach‡in. Children from Gaelscoil Dhœn Dealgan where she had taught music played airs in tribute, Louth singers Fran McPhail and Gerry Cullen with Phil Callery performed a moving Thou little Tiny Child. Music was not a feature of the involved ceremony in which ten priests concelebrated under Fr. Tom Hamill, spirituality was central. This underlined Eithne N’ Uallach‡in's involvement with the deeper emotional resources of the lyric genre she espoused, and which informed her own more contemporary song-air interpretation and writing style. Over the years this resulted in unique presentations with husband, fiddler Gerry O'Connor, in their work together as L‡ Lugh. Their 1996 Brighid's Kiss album linked her chilling, mantric vocals with his passionate intensity, technology bridging centuries between plainchant simplicity and the release of the stored art classicism that comes through in his dance music and airs. Eithne N’ Uallach‡in's was born in 1957 to a family involved with the cultural traditions of Louth and South Armagh. Her mother is from a Cullyhanna family wherein the Irish language had survived; her Louth father was in the first group of children brought in 1926 to study Irish in the Rannafast, Donegal, Gaeltacht. His work as a school inspector gave the language a strong unifying symbolism, this perhaps most productively expressed in Eithne and sister Padraig’n's exploration of the recorded and collected resources of South East Ulster song. On Brighid's Kiss Eithne has several such pieces, under-acknowledged in the present flood of Traditional music popularity. Ring Ting Ring Num came from her mother, Hie Do Indiu is a fragment of a song celebrating the Omeath pattern, Scad‡n Amh‡in was heard there by collector Larry Murray around the turn of the century. A strong singer too in the Ulster English-language tradition, her Lough Erne Shore learned from Paddy Tunny has all the throwaway understatement and haunting beauty of the genre, and in other pieces she bent its directness with a sean-n—s sensibility. Eithne N’ Uallach‡in has a solo recording completed, but it is L‡ Lugh's recent Senex Puer which for the moment is her epitaph: the origins of the title track from this in Irish monastic tradition reinforce her spiritual quest. And most poignant there in this regard is her presentation of imagery in Emigrant's Farewell: Our ship she is ready, to sail away, And its come my sweet comrades o'er the stormy sea Her snow white wings are all unfurled, and soon shall swim in a watery world. Don't forget love, do not grieve, for my heart is true cannot deceive, My hand and heart I will give to thee, so farewell my love and remember me.
©Fintan Vallely, IrishMusicInfo.com
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