photo by Ena Doocey
Beneath The Surface
Interview with Seamus Connolly
By Brendan Taaffe
The Senior All-Ireland Fiddle competition at the Fleadh in 1961, in Swinford, Co. Mayo, was probably the most dramatic in the history of the competitions. You and Brendan McGlinchey were competing and were so evenly matched that the judges couldn't decide who was better. So they called you up to play a second time, and still couldn't decide, and still hadn't reached a decision when everyone had gone home.
That's right, we read it in the papers the next morning. Brendan was gone home and I was gone home, and they said "Fleadh Cheoil crux ends at midnight." I mean, you'd think there was nothing else going on in the world, here it was on the front page. You see, there's different types of jigs: a double jig, a slip jig, a single jig. They are all in 6/8 rhythm, except for the slip jig, which is 9/8. I think that the real story would be that the ruling was to play a double jig, but I don't think it said to play a double jig. I think it was very unfair; Brendan played a slip jig, and then when they recalled us he did the same thing. The decision could have gone the other way, but Brendan played a slip jig when he should have played a double jig. I happened to play a double jig. Brendan could have won it, too. It's all a lot of nonsense, you know.
How old were you at the time?
I was seventeen. It just happened that I was the youngest ever to win it, and I won the Junior and the Senior in the same year. They changed the ruling again after that, so that you couldn't play in the Senior competition if you were under eighteen. So it got serious now after that. Luckily I was over eighteen the following year when I played in the fiddle competition. Brendan won it that year. To me there's too much emphasis on the rules. There's a competition frame that you have to play in that has been passed down through the years; an expectancy that you have to play like this. It kind of inhibited me from being what I wanted to be, or doing what I wanted to do with the music. I was pigeonholed, boxed into a certain way of playing.
You did quite well in competitions -- you won ten All-Irelands.
I did. But competitions didn't mean a thing to me. I went in to hear people like Brendan McGlinchey and to learn from them, and to try and improve my playing. I didn't have an interest in winning. That might seem strange.
Why did you compete if you weren't interested in winning?
I competed so that I could go to the Fleadh Cheoils and hear the good fiddle players. There were a lot of great fiddle players at the time.
Right, but you could have been a punter in the crowd.
No -- I could have been, but I felt like there's no point in sitting down and being like the hurler on the ditch, criticizing. The only way I could improve myself was by practicing, and getting into the competition. So I kept practicing. There's a lot of misunderstanding about music. People think it just happens and become upset with themselves when it's too difficult. It takes practice. It just doesn't happen overnight. Brendan and I practiced all the time. We put an awful lot of pressure on ourselves. And the competition was pressure in the sense that there were people following Connolly and another camp following McGlinchey, and that was fierce pressure. Every time we played, if we'd be playing in the streets at the Fleadh, there'd be a tape recorder stuck over your shoulder, and you'd know it was there. That was fierce pressure, and you felt like if you played a wrong note they were going to take home the tapes and compare them and all. I hated that. I hated that pressure. So Brendan stopped playing for seventeen or eighteen years.
You think because of that pressure?
Well, it had a lot to do with it. And so I kind of fought that pressure, till one day I decided to say to myself, "I'm going to play my own music, I'm going to play the way I want to play instead of being told how to play." My father many times said to me, "Sit down there and play for me, play 'O'Rourke's Reel' till I see that you play it as good as Coleman." That was an abuse in a sense. He was well meaning, but that was hard to sit in front of your father, who knew music and was comparing you to Michael Coleman. So every time we played, every time I went on the stage, I was my own worst enemy. I might look relaxed on the stage, but I hated the pressure. I was being so hard on myself. That's gone from me now. I'm enjoying my music now.
How did that come to be?
I don't know how it came -- I would imagine suddenly waking up one day, at a certain age, and saying I should be enjoying music. I shouldn't be putting pressure on myself. People say to you that you have to make another record; you owe it to the public to make another record. You don't owe it to the public to make another record. It's great when people say that -- it makes you feel good, but we don't owe anything to anybody. I feel that we've kept the music alive but we don't owe anything to people. When I came to America I loved some of the great fiddle playing that I heard here: French Canadian fiddle playing and the great fiddlers from Cape Breton. I wanted to emulate some of the things that they were doing and incorporate it into my own playing. And I've done that in the sense that it might have changed the style that the older people were listening to, but underneath it all I have the foundation of the old styles that I used to sit and play with Paddy Canny at home. I feel now that I'm more free with my music and that I want to go back and be where I was when I was a young fella listening to Paddy Canny and listening to Sean Ryan. That's the kind of music that I get the most enjoyment out of. It's like a complete circle for me; I'd like to go back to what I heard when I was younger.
Let's go back and get the life story.
No, let's just finish this same thing. I feel that Irish music should stand alone and Scottish music should stand alone; these musics are great and there isn't any need to incorporate other licks and styles into them. Of course, the whole world is different now and people are making money with their music and the whole context is different from when I was a kid. We never got paid for playing and I find that when I get out there to perform, you're playing a different kind of music than you are when you're sitting down in the kitchen with people you like to play with.
How is it different?
People are paying to see you, and they expect some flashy fiddling -- this is what it's like in America, I find, anyways. They want to hear some of the things on the CDs, and you feel well, okay, I have CDs to sell, I don't want to bring them home with me. We all want to make a few bob. It's a different kind of music. There's a very small following of people that understand the older tradition and so if you're making a living as a professional musician you have to approach it differently.
So you'd be more likely to play the trickiest reel you know rather than a simple little jig?
Well, maybe something like that, but then people had said to me, "Ah, don't be showing off." It's unfair for people to say things like that; you want to be able to play what you want yourself. If there's a tricky hornpipe that you feel like playing then why not play it, but then you'll get criticized. It's a catch 22. I do what I want to do now, and I don't worry as much about the criticism of audiences. The most important thing is for everybody to be themselves. And I encourage young musicians to be themselves. They're brilliant, they're opening up the music to the world by incorporating other things; adding drums and synthesizers and guitars and it's altered the music. But they're still playing music and they're very, very talented, the young people today. And I encourage them to go out and do what they feel like doing and not to worry about the criticism. Because they can also sit down with the older people and play traditionally as well.
It sounds like Comhaltas has had a big role in your life.
Well, it did at the time. I think Comhaltas have done a tremendous job in preserving the old music, but sometimes they are criticized for having pigeonholed it, and I would share that criticism.
Would you say that the competitions have changed the music?
I think it has changed the music. I don't think there is a need for it anymore; the music is at a very high standard and there are thousands of young people playing. That's a tribute to Comhaltas, but personally I don't believe in competition at all. I think the overall effect has been to narrow the style; there's a standard competition style and if you play outside the lines you won't do well. The music is on a strong foothold and there's nothing to fear for it, so I think the job that Comhaltas should be doing is collecting of the old music -- videotaping these old players, getting the old music out of the archives. People need to hear it. I know that it's a little bit more difficult now with the complexity of copyrights and all that, but Irish music was never meant to be copyrighted. It's turned into a big business now, and if someone's making money out of it, I think it should be the musicians -- and they're the ones who get the least out of it.
You're from Killaloe.
I'm from Killaloe, County Clare, which is an area close enough to Feakle, Co. Clare, where Martin Hayes and Paddy Canny and P.J. Hayes came from. The Tulla Ceili Band would come to Killaloe when I was a young fella and P.J. Hayes would always have me up there in the front row playing, and I wouldn't know half the tunes, but it was a great honor to be sitting up there as a thirteen year old with the Tulla Ceili Band.
Was there music in your family?
There was. My father played the flute and the whistle, and he played the accordion. He was a great sean nos dancer. I have his flute and I have his father's flute. My mother's father also played flute and I have his flute; a lovely boxwood flute made in London. There was music in our house all the time.
With all those flutes, how did you get a fiddle?
Well, in 1954 my father's brother and his family emigrated to America, to New York, and he played the fiddle. So we had something of a party, but at that time we used to call them "American wakes" because we thought we were never going to see these people again; it was like a death in the family. During the night there was a break for tea and a few jars of something, and there was a fiddle sitting on the chair; so I picked it up and pretended to play and people thought I was playing. So I said to my parents would they get me a fiddle, and they did. I'd always be walking around the house with two sticks, pretending to play. My father used to collect the old 78 records. He worked on the canals from Limerick up to Dublin and he'd always be on the lookout for the 78s that came from America. We had an electric Gramophone; you could pile up ten 78 records, one on top of the other, and they'd all fall down one after the other. My father put a couple of records on, like Leo Rowsome, then all of a sudden I heard this fiddle player, and I started to cry. I had never heard anything like it. And being a young fellow at the time, maybe eleven, it hit me emotionally so much. It just went right through my body, this is what I want. That was Michael Coleman.
And so what I used to do was slow down the record from 78 speed to 16, and tune down the fiddle and play along and try to get that same sound. It was very hard to get down that low because the strings were very slack and you could barely get a sound out of it. I taught myself all this stuff, so I had this thing in my head that the fiddle should be tuned do-mi-so-do in fourths instead of fifths. I played for ten months with the fiddle tuned in fourths. I didn't think that I had to use my small finger at all, so I used to stretch up the third finger up to where the fourth finger is. I used to keep my little finger in the palm of my hand, 'cause I never saw anybody playing the fiddle. My uncle Fred Collins was the local barber, so all the men would go in to get their hair cut. This one day a man went in who was a stranger in town, his name was Tom Tuohy, and he was a fiddle player. My uncle was telling him about me so Mr. Tuohy said, "Will you bring him in so I can see him. I'd love to hear him." My uncle brought me down to the house that night, and I played a couple of tunes for him; one of them was "The Boys of the Lough," because my father grew up in a Lough House in Shannon Harbour, County Offaly, and that was one of the first tunes he taught me. So Mr. Tuohy's looking at me, and he couldn't figure out what I was doing. It was all sort of backways, but the tune was coming out. So he says to me, let me see that fiddle. So I gave him the fiddle and he was going to play a tune and he couldn't play it at all. So he tuned it up and he played away, and God, I thought he was great. And then he gave me back the fiddle again and God, I couldn't play it all. So I went home and my mother says, "How did you get on with Mr. Tuohy?" and I said, "I have to start all over again from scratch." "What do you mean," she says, "aren't you playing alright?" I said, "No, but I'm playing it wrong." My brother was learning piano at the time, so before I went to bed I went into the room where the piano was and I got a pen, what we called a biro, and I hit the strings on the fiddle and found those notes on the piano, and I put a little dot on the corner, where my mother wouldn't see it, and when the fiddle went out of tune I'd go in and get that note and try and tune it up. Eventually I got that sound into my head, and I started all over again, at about twelve and a half.
In four and a half years you were winning competitions. How did you get so good, so quickly?
I practiced. But I also feel that I have a gift from God, which I want to give back to people by teaching and by doing things. I think we need to give back. I was lucky. I practiced; I had great people to listen to. ...
Brendan Taaffe is a farmer and musician in central Vermont. He plays fiddle, whistle, and guitar.
Gaelic Roots ; Boston College. Info: (617) 552-0490
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