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Tommy moved to Dublin aged sixteen, leaving his family and homeplace behind. This migration to the capital was common place among young people from rural Ireland at the time. The Irish economy was expanding in the 1960s and the signing of the Anglo-Irish Trade Agreement was a major stepping stone towards Ireland’s eventual joining of the European Economic Community.
Tommy found lodgings in Terenure College where in an unlikely twist of fate, he almost immediately bumped into the Dean of St Eunan’s who had forced his withdrawal from the school. He found work in the buildings of the religious orders where he also lodged.
Music was something that Tommy associated with his homeplace, something that was deeply ingrained in the people, geography and atmosphere of east Donegal. Like many musicians of his generation, he did not see how his music would be relevant in a new urban environment. However, a chance meeting with John Kelly changed the course of his life and introduced him to the Dublin music community.
Many of the musicians that he met through the Kellys, the old Pipers Club and other traditional music venues helped him to settle in Dublin, and to circumvent the strict curfew at his friary lodgings. However, the habits that he learned at late-night music parties — a taste for whiskey in particular — soon led to his removal from the friary and he was taken in by the musical community before finding longer-term residence above the Brazen Head Pub on Lower Bridge Street.
He was observed frequenting libraries and resources for music, copying tunes from collections and building his repertoire in challenging directions.
In March 1968 the folklorist Breandán Breathnach recorded a nineteen-year-old Tommy Peoples in Dublin. Breathnach, a civil servant, was employed by the government to collect traditional music around the country. His collections were later published as Ceol Rince na hÉireann and would play a key role in the establishment of the Irish Traditional Music Archive. Breathnach’s recordings of Tommy capture a fiddler growing in confidence in new surroundings, composing freely and sending his tunes out into the world. The full set of recordings is available in the next chapter.
Tommy developed friendships with members of The Castle Céilí Band and was a member of The Green Linnet Céilí Band. One of the first groups he joined was called 1691, alongside Liam Weldon, Matt Molloy, Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill and Peter Browne. This was a precursor to The Bothy Band which would go on to change the course of Irish traditional music.
By 1970, Tommy had met his wife Maria — daughter of Kitty Linnane, the legendary pianist and manager of the Kilfenora Céilí Band — and they had moved to Co. Clare. Tommy played with the Kilfenora on and off until 1993 and recorded two albums with them in the 1970s. When not touring, he was a regular musician in sessions in Lisdoonvarna, Kilfernora, Doolin and Ennis, and he mixed with many of the key figures of the Clare music scene, including Martin Rochford, Willie Clancy, the Russell brothers and Chris Droney. Tommy and Maria had six children together, Tommy, Siobhán, Crónan, Neasa, Gráinne and Lochlann.
Biographical information derived from:
Peoples, Tommy. Ó Am go hAm/From Time to Time: Tutor, Text and Tunes (Self-published, 2015).
Audio
Interview recordings from Scoil Trad Archive. Recording made in 2002 by Eoin Ó Riabhaigh, Conal Ó Gráda and Kevin Glackin.
Images
Photograph of Bernard Gallagher, Mary Gallagher (née Peoples), Tommy Peoples from Peoples, 2015.
Photograph of John Kelly & Francis Hilliard outside the Horse Shoe shop circa. 1982. From the Private Collection of John & Mary Kelly.
Photograph of the Peoples family, provided by the family.
