Traditional Music:When the essential accoutrements of your chosen career are a bicycle and a hardy recording apparatus (with, on occasion, an electric hairdryer or even a sacred-heart lamp as back-up power supply), it's a fairly safe bet to suggest that you have a hankering for good company and a genetic make-up that's more attracted to society's offerings than to the solitude of the artist's garret.
Tom Munnelly, singer, song collector, intrepid folklorist and (probably above all else) consummate and genial listener, has carved a picaresque pathway through the world of traditional singing for more than half a century now, and this eclectic collection of essays in his honour is both timely and apposite, given Munnelly's liking for the devil that lurks deep in the detail.
Dr Anne Clune, formerly of Trinity College Dublin, and a fellow member of Miltown Malbay's Old Kilfarboy Society alongside Munnelly, has drawn together a vibrant, pulsating communion of contributors to populate this volume. Like a pendulum on overdrive, it swings elegantly from Irish Traditional Music Archive director Nicholas Carolan's lucid introductory overview to Ciaran Carson's sinuous attempt at nailing the essence of song collecting (its inherent slipperiness miraculously netted in Fishing for Eels). It also reaches into the furthest corners of academic scholarship to finger the magic that marks the discovery of another song, another singer.
Born in Rathmines, and raised in Crumlin, Tom Munnelly was a stalwart of the burgeoning Dublin folk scene in the early 1960s, and although he left school in his mid-teens, his voracious appetite for mining the crevices, clefts and fractures of our folk-song tradition lured him firstly in the direction of the Irish Folklore Commission (which evolved in 1971 to become UCD's Department of Irish Folklore, the UCD Delargy Centre for Irish Folklore in its latest incarnation) and ultimately to Miltown Malbay, where he settled in 1978.
An overarching thrust of this collection is that it is Munnelly's essential humanist qualities, and his capacity to see the global in the particular, that define his suitability for field collection. A social historian, with an innate "feel" for people, he belongs to a long line of distinguished field collectors that includes Seamus Ennis and Mícheál Ó Domhnaill. Munnelly recognised the symbiotic relationship between field collecting and textual scholarship, and to his credit, married these divergent talents with ease. He is the quintessential "collector's collector", whose democratic ability to capture such a wealth of music by the people, of the people, for the people, has lured the enthusiast and reluctant listener alike into his company.
Caoilte Breatnach paints a hilarious picture of how not to go about song collecting, throwing into sharp relief Munnelly's effortless ability to "muster credibility among singers", as Angela Bourke insightfully remarks. Whether it's the recording of Roscommon Traveller John Reilly, in all his florid glory, on The Well Below the Valley, or simply sharing a song and its story with fellow singers at the Traditional Song Forum, Munnelly has been at the heart of the action for more than five decades.
Occasionally, this collection sinks beneath the weight of its own ambition, its scholarly provenance burying the spirit of the music beneath an avalanche of dry observation, and so David Atkinson's contribution, From Text to Work: Reconceptualizing Folk Songs as Texts, lumbers in the undergrowth and rarely lifts its head sufficiently high to savour the perfume of Munnelly's life work.
Still, such diversions are minor, in an itinerary that takes in Terry Moylan's gloriously transparent account of Collecting Sets in the Early Days of the Revival, Lillis Ó Laoire and Sean Williams's Singing the Famine: Joe Heaney, 'Johnny Seoighe' and the Poetics of Performance. Munnelly is a man who revels wherever "life pours ordinary plenty" (with apologies to Patrick Kavanagh). And anyone who's relished the intricate delicacies of Little Musgrave or Matty Groves would surely gladly join his company, given half a chance.
Siobhán Long is a traditional music critic
Essays in Honour of Tom Munnelly: Dear Far-Voiced Veteran Edited by Anne Clune The Old Kilfarboy Society, 404pp. €38