LAST NIGHT'S FUN
So, I'm revisiting – for the umpteenth time – a great little book on traditional Irish music by Ciaran Carson, titled “Last Night’s Fun”. I can do no greater justice by it than to repeat the blurb on the back cover, which, in this umpteenth plus one reading, still rings so true.
“Last Night’s Fun,” it says, “is a
sparkling celebration of music and life that is itself a literary performance
of the highest order. Carson’s inspired
jumble of recording history, poetry, tall tales, and polemic captures the sound
and vigor of a ruthlessly unsentimental music.
Last Night’s Fun is remarkable
for its liveliness, honesty, scholarship, and spontaneous joy; certainly there
has never been a book about Irish music like this one, and few books ever
written anywhere about the experience of music can compare with it.”
Quite
so, a wit would agree. But “ruthlessly
unsentimental”? If sentiment connotes
some of the hackneyed, stage renditions of Irish music, then I suppose I am in
near-complete agreement, though even those tunes may have their rightful place
in the timeline our music has followed.
More on that at some future point.
For now, let’s argue that exceptions exist to any bucketing description,
and if sentiment applies to anything that moves the human spirit, then clearly
there sit tunes and airs that rear up like jagged rocks in the middle of a
stream, ready to snag our emotions and shatter calm pretensions, and make even
the hardest, most jaded or opinionated of us shed a cathartic tear.
To wit, the Derry Air. What heart of oak
can listen to that as either tune or simple air, and not recall a calmer,
sweeter past? There are other tunes, of
course, that cannot weather the scrutiny as well as others. But as is said, there’s a role for everyone,
and every tune, and every air.
Ciaran relates an etymology of
sorts about the tune that forms the book’s title: Last Night’s Fun, and the first time he heard it, on the record Cooley, capturing the genius of
accordion player Joe Cooley from his last performance, November 29, 1973, at
Lahiff’s bar in the village of Peterswell, County Galway. In 22 days Joe will be dead from lung cancer,
but on this night the venue is packed.
Faces of the overflow crowd are pressed up against the rain-swept window
panes outside for a last look and hear of a master of traditional Irish
music. The resultant album, Carson
writes, “is one of the best recordings of traditional Irish music ever made.”
Now, Carson writes this in 1996 or
so, and the wealth of Irish music put out over the intervening 22 years has
been prodigious. And note, he doesn’t
say “the best”, but rather “one of the best.”
The album covers that last performance, but others also, earlier in
Cooney’s life, played in someone’s front room in Dublin, or in Chicago, or in
Galway. The tunes Carson mentions rise
from the page, and we can almost hear the melodies throbbing through the night:
The Skylark; Roaring Mary; My Love is in
America; The Ships Are Sailing; The Sailor on the Rock.
Thumbing through the book, I see a
note I wrote ages ago, ten years at least since I purchased the book
second-hand somewhere. The first note is
from June 1998, penned by the prior owner: “To Colleen – who opens my eyes
& ears! Ellen.” I wonder who Colleen and Ellen are, and what
they’re doing now. But I have no wonder
at the debt that Ellen owes to Colleen, who clearly has been her pathway to a
deeper understanding of the music that stirs her soul. Kudos!
There are more notes I wrote during
that first reading the summer of 2008, the book fresh in my hands, and in
subsequent re-readings over the intervening years, neatly laid on in pencil on
page 5.
“Get the album Cooley.” This from a decade
earlier. I never did, but I will now.
“See if have any Cooley on
SS.” This from last night. The reference is to Seoltaí Séidte, which I spoke of in an earlier post. There’s no Cooley, but plenty of Willie
Clancy, another favorite, and a few tracks of Joe Burke, like Cooley a master
of the accordion keyboard, playing four reels on two tracks: The Golden Keyboard; Farrell O’Gara’s Reel;
The Dawn; The Moving Cloud. We’ll
give them all a listen, all in good time, and see where they take us.
“Download a YouTube of Last Night’s Fun, and start listening to
it.” This from this morning. And this last I did, and came across a host
of recordings, which I’ll share with you now, in no order other than that of
their download. But if you do play them –
and I hope that you will – you’ll see, and hear, the force behind the music,
and know for the rest of time why Joe Cooley played it, and why Ciaran Carson
chose it as the title of his book – in my opinion, at least.
So, have a listen, and let me know
did you enjoy it? I won’t tell you who
is playing, you’ll find that out for yourself.
Just listen to the tune. For it’s
in the music that we find ourselves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T96DdnK7cuU
Slainte!
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