Irish Fiddler James Kelly:
A Matter of Tradition
By Hollis Payer
A Matter of Tradition
By Hollis Payer
James Kelly is one of the most respected fiddlers playing traditional Irish music today. Through
his many recordings, his involvement in such well known performing groups as Planxty and
Patrick Street, and his teaching work in Irish music schools and festivals around the world, he
has touched and inspired legions of musicians and music lovers. James' roots in the music run
deep. He grew up in a musical household during a time of heightened interest in traditional
music in Ireland. Like his father, John, before him, James is a font of information about tunes
and anecdotes of characters who formed the tradition, and a fierce advocate of the music.
Tell me about the musical legacy you inherited from your father [John Kelly].
Well, I suppose to start at the very beginning –– who said that, Julie Andrews? –– my father was a musician, a fiddle player and a concertina player from a very rural part of County Clare, in the west of Ireland. He grew up where people didn't travel away very much, in fact they hardly ever traveled away. You had all your influences from the area you lived in, and the style of music that he played, of course, was a very traditional style. His concertina music, although he played the same dance tunes as he played on the fiddle, were settings for the concertina and he kept it separate, lovely ideas. He left County Clare in his late twenties and worked in the Bob of Allen, just outside Dublin. He met my mother and they got married in 1945 and set up a shop in Dublin, a little shop in Capel Street called The Horse Shoe. And they started a family. I was the youngest of five children and everybody was a musician in the house including my mother who tipped a little bit on the accordion. Everybody else was a fiddle player in the family –– six fiddlers. We had one piper, my brother Anthony who was also a fiddle player, but he was more a piper than a fiddler. We grew up together learning tunes, listening to tunes, old recordings, 78s, and tapes, and being visited by just an endless string of musicians, it seems.
How did it happen that there was this scene at your house? Was that from your father's old connections?
My father was one of the elder statesmen in the music, so to speak, a musician that people looked up to and revered. They respected his opinion very highly. He was an old-fashioned man –– if you met him you'd think he was from the last century, he had this ancient feeling about him. He had a lot of knowledge about the music in him and if he responded to you favorably, you knew that you were doing something right within the tradition itself. Musicians loved to come to the house, they knew there'd always be a good welcome and they'd hear some music and talk. Through the years they made friends with a lot of people –– he would travel a lot within Ireland itself, and he got to know a lot of people. People who didn't know him would come anyway.
So your house and the shop became this gathering point.
It wasn't as if at any time there were twenty people standing outside the front door, it was just a place that people would come to if they came to Dublin. You'd usually nip in to The Horse Shoe to see John Kelly and my mother Frances. You'd have a great time. My father was a storyteller, a historian, and it was all natural for him because he came from the soil, he came from the West. He was kind of serious in his own way but very funny in another way. He'd always have a few nice tunes and a good welcome in the house and that. I grew up looking at all these people, not knowing exactly who a lot of them were. I might have known their names as a child, but not realizing how important these people were until I got older.
Who were some of these people, and why were they important?
People like Seamus Ennis for example. Seamus was a great uillean piper, storyteller, writer, and fluent Irish speaker. He had a great knowledge of the music, worked for the BBC, and collected songs around England, Scotland and Ireland as well. Willie Clancy was another great friend of my father and mother. Willie would stay at our place and when we'd go to County Clare we'd stay with him. We wouldn't have much, our accommodations were two rooms, two beds in the room, four kids in the bed, so if people came up for a few days and they didn't have a place to stay, you'd just do the best you could. Sometimes there'd be Darach O'Cathain the singer, and Joe Heaney, before he went over to live in America, Bobby Casey, Joe Ryan, Neillidh O'Boyle. When Johnny Doran would come to Dublin he'd always come into the house. Johnny Doran liked my mother's brown bread. He'd sit with her upstairs, because at that time, after World War II, they had to keep the shop open late to try and make a bit of money because the money was scarce. Just anybody might come down. Dennis Murphy, Julia Clifford, Johnny Leary, whoever.
How did you learn tunes? Did you ever play for these people?
As a young kid I was very shy. But I'd play a little bit and they'd play in the house. We'd learn tunes that way, listening; my father would teach us a few tunes. If you have relations or family or people close by who are doing the same thing, a little bit of competition or rivalry can be good because you're trying to do what the other people are doing, and there's great excitement when everybody's doing the same thing. I was always struggling to do what my eldest brother Michael would do. "I can't do those triplets, I wonder what he's doing there..." It took me a long time, but I was after them, so it was great.
Through your father and from your own experiences, you have particular insight into changes that have occurred in the culture and the traditional music of Ireland. What do you see from your perspective?
To go back a bit, before the 1930s, in Ireland people would get together in the rural parts of the country at the crossroads and the house dances and have their own social activities, dances, stories and songs. A family in the locality might have an old gramophone player, and when some of the 78 records would come from the States, it was like going to Disneyland! People would get together at whoever's house it would be and they'd listen to this record over and over and over again. It was a great time for excitement, you know. So that was going on when the early recordings were coming into Ireland from the States and the musicians who were making those recordings were becoming influential because they were making recordings° no one had made them before. Then in the '30s, there was a bit of a switch and the clergy in Ireland at the time played a role in that. They started to discourage the crossroad dances and the country dances and encourage people to go to the bigger towns and villages into these halls. In a sense it kind of put a stop to all that stuff, you know. The music itself went through a period in the '40s and '50s where there wasn't much going on at all. In a lot of cases people just played in their own homes – – you might invite people in, get together and play. It wasn't as if you'd go for a festival like you would these days. I was born in 1957. In Dublin in the late '50s, there were two plays going on. One of them was called The Song of the Anvil, and there were two groups of musicians together for those plays. One was a man called Sean O'Riada, and some of the other musicians were my father, Paddy Moloney, Michael Tubridy, Martin Fahey, Ronnie McShane, Sonny Brogan and Eamon DeBuitleir. Out of all that came the idea to form a group, which wasn't done before. Technically speaking, the idea of actually arranging folk music, or dance music, had been done on at least one or two 78 recordings that I have, but they were folk tunes done in a classical way, highly orchestrated. And I presume they were classical musicians. But in this case, they were all traditional musicians who called themselves Ceoltoiri Culainn. Ceoltoiri is the Gaelic word for musicians, and Culainn is a place name, just outside Dublin. The idea of the band was to present traditional songs with accompaniment and traditional dance tunes and slow airs, arranged with instruments: harpsichord, bodhran, piano, fiddle, flute, pipes, whistles. Sean O'Riada himself started to dig up the music of Turlough O'Carolan, and Ceoltoiri Culainn introduced the music of O'Carolan for the first time.
How did people respond to this new style of music?
When it started off, a lot of the traditional musicians in Dublin were absolutely confused, they couldn't figure it out at all. Particularly when they got the first bit of air play on the radio, because at that time the idea of doing a radio broadcast was something unusual, something very special. Some people liked it from the first, and others thought it was modern, they didn't like the ideas. Sean O'Riada himself probably was criticized because he was a musician with a jazz and classical background. In 1963, out of Ceoltoiri Culainn came the Chieftains, under the leadership of Paddy Moloney.
[For the rest of this interview, plus the tunes "Humors of Lissadell" and "Gaffney's Favourite Son" as arranged by James Kelly, subscribe to Fiddler Magazine!
The article is reprinted with the permsission of FIDDLER MAGAZINE