MUSIC: Joe Holmes: Here I Am Amongst YouBy Len Graham Four Courts Press, 328pp. €55/€25
‘THE SUB-CULTURE of the céilí-house,” Len Graham writes in this spirited study, “was that of ordinary people with extraordinary skills and imaginations.” A vernacular culture was in safe keeping while musical families in Ireland went about maintaining and handing on a wealth of indigenous songs and tunes, with variations from district to district only adding a touch of localised esprit.
Graham's subject is the Co Antrim singer and fiddle- player Joe Holmes (1906-1978), and all the songs he includes in Here I Am Amongst Youcome from Holmes's repertoire.
Holmes was born at Killyramer, near Ballymoney, and spent most of his working life as a scutcher in a nearby mill. He grew up in a céilí house where family, neighbours and fellow musicians would assemble in the evenings before the second World War to raise the roof.
Holmes, a singer with a sure and delicate touch, nearly failed to realise his vocal potential after a teacher at his primary school told him he was tone deaf and should keep his mouth shut (or words to that effect).
He concentrated on playing the fiddle instead, and it took a long time before the confidence came back to him to sing in public – indeed, his musical friendship with Graham, during the final 15 years of his life, played a key part in Holmes’s vocal rehabilitation.
The songs Holmes favoured – many of which he got from his mother – are about love and loss, fidelity, exile, local attachment and ghosts, among other themes.
Some strike an innocently bawdy note, like the one about the five-and-twenty boys and girls a-tumbling through the hay. Most have nothing to connect them to a partisan spirit, though one laments a Protestant Sandy Row girl, Annie Moore, killed during a Twelfth of July riot in 1835; another, Come Tender-Hearted Christians,has as its hero the United Irishman Roger, or Roddy, McCorley, hanged at Toomebridge in 1800.
Alas, we’ll never know whether it was Duffin or Dufferin who betrayed McCorley – some versions have one, some the other – though the McErlean “who set the snare” remains pretty constant.
Indeed, these wonderful songs and tunes, and all the outstanding singers and players over the years, add up to a force inimical to the sectarian drive. Even the term “céilí house” applied to a Protestant gathering place like that of the Holmeses of Killyramer is telling in this respect.
And here’s another heartening circumstance to ponder: when a branch of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, the Irish musicians’ association, was set up in Ballycastle, Co Antrim, in the 1960s, its first chairman, Frank McCollam, was at the same time master of the local Orange Lodge. “Traditional music,” as the fiddle-player Alex Kerr was fond of pointing out, “knows no border, nor no creed.”
The texts of Holmes’s songs are accompanied by Len Graham’s extensive and exuberant commentary, which manages to be scholarly and anecdotal, factual and insightful, all at once. It evokes the world in which the songs originated, and also the 1970s world of competitions, fleadhanna cheoil, great gatherings and wild nights, as applause from the public escalated for the songs and the singers. The great revival of interest in traditional music was under way.
We’re put in touch with the heightened emotions of an older world, along with all the ardours of the moment. We’re transported from the bleaching green and the Murlough Shore to marathon night-time drives in cars crammed with exhilarated musicians.
Joe Holmes: Here I Am Amongst You, a beautifully produced book, illustrated with photographs, woodcuts and engravings, brings it all together. It's an important contribution to social and musical history, and a subtle and generous tribute from one great traditional singer to another.
Patricia Craig's most recent book is a memoir, Asking for Trouble, published by Blackstaff in 2007
