By Alan Woods

In the first programme of ITMA’s Taoscadh ón Tobar series, broadcast on TG4, Andrea Palandri explored the life and music of Pádraig O’Keeffe, the ‘Sliabh Luachra Fiddle Master’.

Pádraig O’Keeffe (unidentified photographer)

Andrea’s edition of Taoscadh ón Tobar features an exciting discovery – a little known audio recording of Pádraig O’Keeffe – which was recently discovered as part of materials donated to ITMA by Eleanor Davis, from the collection of her late husband, Tom Davis, who during his lifetime was a well-known collector of Irish traditional music.

The recording itself appears to have been made by Paddy McElvaney, originally from Co. Monaghan, who was a member of The Piper’s Club in Dublin and a founding member of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann.  Paddy’s voice can be heard on the recording as he introduces Pádraig, who not only plays but also speaks throughout the recording, which is just over 27 minutes long, featuring ten pieces of music.

Also in the company on the night was Dan Lane (Danny Willy Thomas), a bonesetter from Kiskeam, Co. Cork. Paddy McElvaney’s wife, Margaret Murphy, was originally from Newmarket, Co. Cork, and through marriage Dan Lane was related to the Murphy family. Dan can be heard on the recording introducing a set of reels played by Pádraig.

The date of the recording is not known for certain but information on the case for the reel-to-reel tape indicates it may have been made in 1957. At an unspecified later date, the tape was trusted to Tom Davis and is now part of the Tom Davis Collection in ITMA.

It’s with great gratitude that ITMA commends the work of Paddy McElvaney in making this historic recording of Pádraig O’Keeffe and also Tom Davis for his role in preserving the recording for so many years, to be found again now and enjoyed by the entire Irish traditional music community.

Watch Andrea’s edition of Taoscadh ón Tobar to see the moment he first hears the recording and discusses it with uilleann piper, Peter Browne, a long-time aficionado of O’Keeffe’s music.

Recording track list

00:00 – Introduction by Paddy McElvaney and Pádraig O’Keeffe
01:28 – McCarthy’s, hornpipe (Roxburgh Castle); The Rose of Drishane, hornpipe
03:50 – The Bucks of Oranmore, reel; The New Mown Meadows, reel
06:20 – The Erin Lass, jig (The Cobbler); Tarrant’s Favourite, jig
08:48 – Merrily Kiss the Quaker, slide; “Dinny Murphy’s Favourite”, slide
12:04 – An Buachaillín Bán, air (The Dear Irish Boy)
14:22 – Morrison’s, jig (version learned from Tom Billy Murphy)
16:42 – Cooley’s, reel; The Flowing Bowl, reel (The Piper’s Despair)
19:31 – The Morning Star, reel; The Road to Newbridge, reel
22:21 – Caoineadh Uí Dhomhnaill, story
23:50 – Caoineadh Uí Dhomhnaill, air
25:47 – The Fisherman’s Hornpipe

Comments on the recording

Andrea Palandri
This recently-unearthed archival recording of Pádraig O’Keeffe talking and playing in Lyon’s bar, Scartaglin, is an important discovery in the history of the music of Sliabh Luachra. It came as a great surprise to myself personally to hear O’Keeffe’s voice in conversation with Paddy McElvaney and introducing the music he plays, as there was only one previously known recording of O’Keeffe speaking, a recording made by Ciarán Mac Mathúna in the 1950s for Raidió Éireann:  https://itmacatalogues.ie/Portal/Default/en-GB/RecordView/Index/49977

O’Keeffe has become an important figure in Irish Music folklore, known for his quick wit, yarns and eloquence and to be able to give these stories a voice, though many second-hand descriptions of it have been collected, is an extraordinary gift to the Irish Music community.
Along with his teaching manuscripts, in which O’Keeffe managed to codify many of the bowing and ornamentation techniques that distinguished his style, audio recordings of the fiddle master are of course the most important witnesses to the sound of this style as it was played by O’Keeffe himself. Although O’Keeffe may have lost some of his musical agility when this recording was made, compared to the 1948–49 Raidió Éireann recordings released on the album The Sliabh Luachra Fiddle Master, it still represents an extraordinary discovery to those who are passionate about his music.

O’Keeffe taught and imparted his distinctive style to a generation of extraordinary musicians from his surrounding area during the first half of the nineteenth century. Unsurprisingly perhaps, we can hear how the recording of O’Keeffe playing The Piper’s Despair (named as The Flowing Bowl in the recording) is very close to the various versions that were recorded by his pupil, Denis Murphy. And although a 1961 recording of both men playing the reel together exists, a solo recording of O’Keeffe playing the tune really helps us understand how Murphy emulated him.

Similarly, listening to O’Keeffe play the Morning Star, and following his tablature found in Pádraig O’Keeffe ITMA-Collins Manuscript. Book 2. Fiddle p. 29, (https://www.itma.ie/notated-collections/padraig-okeeffe-itma-collins-manuscripts-book-2-fiddle) offers us an opportunity to conduct an interesting exercise where we can hear and see many similarities but also detect a number of differences.

In fact, as Cranitch has previously observed (‘Pádraig O’Keeffe and the Sliabh Luachra Fiddle Tradition’ 2006: 200), following O’Keeffe’s notation of a tune note by note and bow-stroke by bow-stroke does not mirror how O’Keeffe played that piece of music every time, rather it allows us to follow a number of ‘prescriptive’ or ‘directional’ instructions the fiddle master laid out on a particular occasion which in turn reflect how he thought that tune should be played and taught on that particular day.

Though just under a half an hour in length, this recording contains a huge amount of new information for Irish Traditional Music. The recording is an important new document in helping us to tell the story of Pádraig O’Keeffe and his music.

Peter Browne
Much knowledge has been acquired over the years about Pádraig O’Keeffe (1887–1963), “The Last of the Fiddle-Masters”; as he has been called. There are many stories about his lifetime in the Sliabh Luachra area on the Kerry-Cork border – where the River Blackwater (An Abhainn Mhór) runs along the boundary between the two counties.

When it comes to traditional music in Sliabh Luachra, intercounty boundaries or rivalries never counted for much and the style of playing in the region is one of the most distinctive in Ireland. People talk about Pádraig’s exceptional musicianship, his fiddle-teaching to hundreds of pupils, the long distances he walked in all weathers between the houses to give the lessons, the loss of his school-teaching job, his life by night in pubs, houses and dancehalls, his enduring legacy and there are many vivid descriptions of his appearance, demeanour and sense of humour.

We know from audio recordings of his music made over a fifteen-year period – both by Raidió Éireann and private individuals – that he was a superb player with style and class who combined technique and taste in a very sensitive way. He had a wide repertoire, drawn from different sources – the strong tradition in the local area, tune book collections and in later times, radio broadcasts and recordings from further afield.

He was known as an intuitive, caring and effective music teacher and many of his former pupils have spoken warmly about him. There are about half-a-dozen black and white and just two colour photographs of Pádraig in common circulation today, and a very short, tantalising piece of silent film of him playing on the Main Street in Castleisland taken by a visitor home to Kerry in the 1950s.

For a person who was known to be highly intelligent and a witty conversationalist with a love of words and wordplay, a missing piece of the jigsaw has always been an opportunity to hear directly what Pádraig might have said on any given topic, not just music, and how he might have voiced it. Those who knew him over the years recalled that he would usually only share his views and thoughts with people whom he knew well, and in close company such as in a public house snug or a private dwelling or to visitors to his own home in Gleanntán.

But as regards his speech and the sound of his voice, there was only ever one oft-quoted and celebrated minutes-long radio interview with Pádraig from the 1950s in which Ciarán Mac Mathúna asks him during a recording session “Where is Gleanntán…?” Pádraig’s reluctant enough reply in his deep voice is that Gleanntán is “…where the bog is!”.

So now, what a valuable and lucky find is this half-hour tape of Pádraig, playing and introducing selections of dance music and slow airs. It has been unknown and untouched for nearly seventy years and is essentially a high-quality recital that we could never have expected to hear from a legendary musician of the past.

It was recorded in Scartaglin (about 7km from Gleanntán) – in Lyons’s pub where Pádraig visited and played most frequently in his later years. The date is not certain – possibly 1957 – and the recording is introduced by Paddy McElvaney who was a long-standing member of the Pipers Club in Thomas Street in Dublin and a founding member of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann. It’s not clear (and may never be) whether it was Paddy alone who was operating the tape recorder or if there was someone else with him to help in doing that work.

In any event, the tape has turned up amongst material gathered over years by Tom Davis and donated to ITMA as part of his collection after Tom passed away in 2013. Tom  was a tireless collector of traditional music and a constant presence over many years at fleadhanna, festivals and other gatherings and we can be very grateful that he preserved the tape from all those years ago.

The speech from Pádraig on the tape is heard between the tunes and we do learn some things from it – that he started playing when he was five years old and was now “…getting into years”. He was (most likely) around seventy years old at the time the recording took place. He expresses the hope that people would learn traditional music in preference to rock ‘n roll and that “…music is next to the (Irish) language and music is language and language is music”. But it’s the sound of his speaking voice that is so interesting and so welcome to hear.

And the music is magic – there are ten pieces, and they are worth hearing over and over again for the technique, variations and his subtle musicality: reels, hornpipes, jigs, slides and two slow airs. It’s worth noting that there are no polkas – this could well be by chance, but then again Paddy Cronin did say to me once that Pádraig didn’t particularly like playing for dancers, was even known to break a string on the fiddle to avoid having to continue having to do it, and never played a polka if he was just sitting down at a normal session.

He plays a fine version of Morrison’s Jig on the tape – an unusual three-part version and very different to the one normally heard. He says he learned it from another famous player and fiddle teacher in Sliabh Luachra, Tom Billy Murphy (1879 – 1944), whom he describes as “…an old friend of mine from Ballydesmond, may the Lord have mercy on his soul, he was very good”. There used to be an occasional suggestion in local lore of rivalry between Pádraig and Tom Billy, but on the evidence of the tape, if there was such a thing it doesn’t seem to have run too deep!

The two slow airs are particularly worth mentioning – Caoineadh Uí Dhomhnaill is one which only Pádraig played and had it not been for him, it would have been lost altogether. He prefaces his playing of it by telling the story of a young man being presented with a pair of dancing shoes which had poisoned tacks embedded in the soles. As he dances, the poison takes effect and as his death nears, the banshee is heard, and her sound is reflected in the melody of the air… Pádraig’s version of The Dear Irish Boy is also exceptional for its lyrical feeling and the variations he uses.

The reels, hornpipes and jigs selections have a lot to offer and it’s interesting that he plays Cooley’s Reel which must be one he heard later in his life – possibly on radio – since it wouldn’t be known strongly as a Sliabh Luachra tune.

He says before playing the slide selection that Merrily Kiss the Quaker is “Dinny Murphy’s favourite slide”. He was very close to Denis Murphy and their duets in Lyons’s pub recorded by Séamus Ennis for Raidió Éireann in the late 1940s are excellent.

The first recordings we have of Pádraig’s fiddle-playing date from 1947 when he was already 60 years old. And there is a sense that in the recordings he made later during the 1950s, his playing had become more mellow.

Aindreas Ó Gallchóir, who was working in Raidió Éireann in Cork at that time, made several fine recordings of Pádraig in Scartaglen and Castleisland, and said it was always a good idea to catch Pádraig early in the day to have the best chance to get good music from him. In whichever way Paddy McElvaney and whoever might have been with him managed it, they did catch – or as Paddy says himself on the tape “locate” – Pádraig in Lyons’s and the results are most welcome and to the benefit of all of us.

It’s worth also saying that the technical quality and clarity of the sound recording is also very high – not the easiest thing to achieve back in those times – and being able to hear the music so clearly adds to the value of what has been discovered.

In 1993, I spent quite an amount of time in Sliabh Luachra recording for a four part radio documentary about Pádraig – his life and music – and preparing an archive CD of his Raidió Éireann recordings to be issued on the RTÉ label. This work was undertaken to mark the 30th anniversary of Pádraig’s death and was one of the main motivations for the founding that same year in Castleisland of the annual Patrick O’Keeffe Festival which has grown in importance and stature over the intervening years.

I interviewed over forty people during the making of those programmes and heard many memories of Pádraig. There was great affection and respect for him – as a person, a fiddle-player who devised his own system of music notation, an excellent music teacher and a local hero whose influence has spread far wider than in his home area and who is still remembered today with great fondness.

This newly discovered recording of Pádraig adds something unique and significant to our awareness and appreciation of him, and it is a tribute to those who made and preserved it and to the work of ITMA in making it fully available.

Andrea Palandri and Peter Browne, Scartaglin, Co. Kerry (photo: Alan Woods)