Bobby Casey had emigrated to London with Willie Clancy in 1952 after a stint in Dublin and there remained, letting Willie return to Miltown Malbay on his own. He would become a major part of the Irish music scene in London, which in the post-war years would boast a broad array of superb musicians from all over the western counties of Ireland and in the '70s a new generation of London and English born stars.

By the early '60s the Irish population in London had been steadily growing since the '30s. It had become quite acceptable to play music in public houses and indeed many Irish people would patronize public houses based on the same parochial and townland associations of their youth. It was the custom that any neighbor from home would come out and buy a drink for their local musicians, a testament to their support, appreciation and patronage. At the end of many nights, and particularly when Bobby played, there would not be space left atop the piano to hold the drink that was offered in tribute.

This image of a piano top laden with drink, that couldn't possibly be consumed, is a very potent one for me. The place that Bobby Casey, my father and most of their audience had left behind was one where such ostentation was never known. In the wind-lashed isolation and acid-soil austerity of Annagh in West Clare, Bobby Casey was, like his father before him, a pool of shinning, shimmering light in the reedy, bog-soaked fields of humdrum and impoverished existence. Whereas in West Clare his neighbor's could furnish rewards of respect and dignified, solemn thankfulness, London offered a lake of porter, flooded by eager, isolated souls seeking to surround and preserve the island of their consciousness and culture.

Bobby's father, John "Scully" Casey, was a small farmer from near the Crosses of Annagh, and lived about a half a mile from the Atlantic Ocean. Scully was the foremost fiddle player of his day in West Clare and in my grandfather, Junior Crehan's opinion, the greatest exponent of the ornamental fiddle style he ever heard. Junior lived from 1908 to 1998 and never departed from this viewpoint even composing a song in honor of Scully which asserts that those calling themselves fiddle players today "are not fit for to roisin your bow". Scully died too young when Bobby was only 13 years of age. Junior told me that even at such a young age Bobby had all of his father's music, an impressive feat given that, there was only ever one fiddle in the house.

Rural life had been particularly hard in Ireland up to this time due principally to the economic war with Britain. The music, dancing and singing were one of the few escapes the people had. In light of his circumstances I believe that musical expression became for Bobby Casey an escape from the harshness of life on a small, fatherless farm in West Clare and a touchstone from which he could draw solace in the legacy of that which he shared with his father.

He was a talented player from the time he was small, being asked to play for his classmates at a young age. He was also exposed, in his formative years, to the array of recordings making there way back from America. Many of these tunes were introduced to the Casey house via Junior who borrowed the 78s from the Lenehans of Knockbrach as he had access at that time to a gramophone on which to play them. He would trade the Sligo tunes with Scully for the old West Clare ones.

I first remember meeting Bobby at the Willie Clancy summer school when I was a child. There I fell under the spell of four of the great West Clare fiddlers, Junior Crehan, Bobby Casey, John Kelly and Joe Ryan. In having access to these people I grew to recognize the truly unique aspects of their music and also began to appreciate the connection of their personalities and character to the nature of that music. Bobby was always joking and making light of the situation. He had lots of stories and funny comments for children as well as adults. Bobby always seemed to be at the center of any session he played in, with heads and ears straining to catch the craic in between tunes. He had a keenly observant eye and a devilishly quick wit. The most recent, Casey related story I heard, was recounted by the flute player John Skelton, at the Cincinnati Celtic Festival last year. Bobby had been asked to appear at the Green Linnet festival in Connecticut. Upon arriving at the airport in England and discovering the name of the airline that would be conveying him to the U.S. he made his concern known about riding on an airline that had never been ridden before!

In listening to, and playing with Bobby, this joking, shocking, irreverent side of his personality was always to the fore. His music is full of inventiveness and devilment. The flourishes are bountiful and spread effortlessly over the phrasing. Indeed as Cait Reed once commented, "Bobby Casey ornaments his ornaments!" This expression is presented as a wave of inventive and complex embellishment. In comparison to Junior Crehan, who is of an earlier generation than Bobby, age wise, and an even older generation musically speaking, Bobby's style is much more heavily ornamented; and this in terms of the quantity, variety and degree of execution present. Bobby's style can best be described as a flamboyantly exuberant one, punching and pushing at the seams of the West Clare mantle.

The West Clare style doesn't normally have adjectives like flamboyant and exuberant associated with it, the style having quite a minor, slow, flat feel to it. Indeed on first listen most people would probably express doubts about the claims I am making here for Bobby. Listen carefully and closely however and the evidence and rewards are there. There is great life and lift to West Clare music. Given the fact that the set dancing revival has sprung from West Clare and a few other places like it, one must conclude that this style of music continues to be well capable of supporting it's regional social dance form, without compromising its essential uniqueness. I feel that making music lively without resorting to such techniques as sharpening tone or playing faster is a fundamental measure of success in this style and Bobby certainly had its mastery.

In listening to his published recordings, (of which there are not many) and the private ones, speed is not a high priority. Reels are played in the 106-112 bpm range, jigs in the 118-124 bpm range and hornpipes around 86 bpm. I base these figures on the Topic recording "Paddy in the Smoke" TSCD603, the Bellbridge recording "Casey in the Cowhouse" Bellbridge 001 and my own private recordings. These recordings were made from 1959 to the 1990's. This slower style lends itself greatly to embellishment opportunities and this is where Bobby stood out. The breadth of his ornamentation and the intricate layering, which he achieves, is regularly astounding.

In comparing Bobby to Junior Crehan again, (Junior being the closest geographically and socially), an interesting observation can be made. Both use essentially the same techniques for ornamentation, which we should expect given the close association within their broader community, but the degree to which the ornamentation is applied is very different.

It should be said at this point that Junior always acknowledged Scully's mastery of ornamentation and superiority in its execution. He described Scully's music as being full of draoíocht and melody, draoíocht being a particularly powerful term to which Junior attached much weight. In English, and in Junior's sense, it can be translated as richly wrought enchantment. Bobby's inheritance of this technical ability obviously has a huge bearing on his own style and on the avenue's of exploration it opened up for him.

Also the puzzle is even more interesting in that, as I mentioned earlier, Junior carried a lot of the Sligo music to the Casey's while Bobby was still young and under his father's influence. Junior's version of a Sligo standard, quite possibly introduced to Scully by him, and Bobby's version of the same tune, learned through his father, leads to a fascinating glimpse of the machinery of the folk music tradition in operation. The differences in the outcome being so great I would further surmise that this new music was what was largely being played in the Casey home in those formative years prior to his father's death. This possibly explains Bobby's affinity for the great Sligo repertoire and his association with such tunes as Bonnie Kate, Jennie's Chickens, Paddy Ryan's Dream, Rakish Paddy, Murphy's hornpipe etc.

While the techniques are the same and include double-stopping, bowed rolls and triplets, fingered rolls and triplets and fingered runs their usage is vastly different. Junior very rarely uses the bow to divide a run; roll or triplet while Bobby is constantly mixing and matching these techniques. While Junior will perhaps bow-divide one roll in an entire 3-cycle pass of a tune Bobby regularly will be dropping this nuance all over the place and most impressively in very unusual places and when we least expect it.

It is also quite interesting to compare the similarities in style of Bobby's contemporaries including Paddy Canny and Sean Ryan. In listening to all three I was quite surprised by the degree of similarity, expecting to be noticing the differences. All three, while exhibiting the characteristics of the regional styles for which they are known, have a very similar approach in terms of the feel, by this I mean where the tune is coming from and what they are trying to communicate with it. While Bobby and Paddy Canny are more precocious than Sean Ryan, all three would seem to have been bitten by the same bug in their formative years. I would conclude that the Sligo/American records of Morrison, Coleman, Kiloran and Co. are what conveyed that bug to all of them and the inherent talent and local style provided an ideal environment that made inoculation ineffective.

Bobby Casey will always remain for me a great source of inspiration and wonderment. I feel very privileged to have had the opportunity to get to know him, to play with him and to have been influenced by his superb music making. I compare so many standard tunes to his versions of the same and I am always finding new details, even in tunes I have been listening to for many years. He influenced many, many people and didn't receive the reward or recognition his talents truly deserved. He banished sorrow and made light of misfortune every time he moved bow against string. When those pools of shimmering light catch my eye in West Clare, I will rejoice with a smile in the draoícht-filled breeze, as it brushes past me, through the reedy fields of Annagh and out over the Atlantic broad. The magician may be gone, but his magic lives on.

©Copyright 2000 Kevin Crehan. All rights reserved.

Reprinted here with the permission of Kevin Crehan.
Visit his site at www.kevincrehan.com

BACK TO WELCOME PAGE