Sliabh Luachra, in the Kerry, Cork, Limerick border, is indeed a place apart. The Irish word draiocht has been used, according to the journalist Donal Hickey, to describe its atmosphere when traditional music is being played at its best and most authentic.
"In English, draiocht means magic or enchantment, but words cannot fully describe something that reaches into the soul; depending on the occasion, it could be a feeling of exultation or deep sorrow evoked, for example, by the playing of a slow air," he adds.
Hickey, who comes from Gneeveguilla, in the heart of Sliabh Luachra, tells its remarkable story in his book Stone Mad For Music, published by Marino. He became aware of its marvellous lore and tradition while a child. Now a senior journalist with the Examiner, he tells the story in a highly readable book that is as much a piece of social history as anything else.
Bleak countryside
He writes that Siabh Luachra is not a clearly defined geographical area but a bleak and wet stretch of countryside best known for its treasures of traditional music and poetry. "The area has its own beauty - nothing like the so-called Heaven's Reflex or manicured refinement of nearby Killarney, but something more primeval - bracken, gorse, foxglove, buttercups, birch, hazel, peat, marshes, an endless maze of bohereens, farms reclaimed from the moorland, patchworks of cultivated fields and heather-scented uplands.
Poets drew inspiration from seeing the sun rise over Clara and from the lengthening shadows that glide over Caherbarnagh on summer evenings." Loosely outlined, the area is bordered, Hickey says, by the towns of Killarney, Castleisland, Abbeyfeale and Newmarket. But, he adds, some would argue that such a description was too wide and that the true Sliabh Luachra is around the core area of Gneeveguilla, due to its close association with the poets Rathmore, Knocknagree, Ballydesmond and Scartaglen.
Musically, however, it is broader than that, he says. The book chronicles the names, places, events, the changing social climate over the decades. There was the growth of the rural dance-halls from the mid-1920s, with one of the best venues being Thady Willie O'Connor's hall, opened in Gneeveguilla in 1927. "In spite of having a sheet-iron roof, wonderful sound could be generated in the hall. A small farmer, Thady was a dapper, smartly-spoken man with a flair for business, an impresario of his time. He charged 2p admission and personally welcomed each patron with a warm handshake."
Prominent Sliabh Luachra musicians, such as the Murphys of Lisheen, Padraig O'Keeffe, the Cronins, John Clifford and Johnny O'Leary, played there, and it continued as an entertainment venue through the show-band era up to the early 1980s. Hickey writes that many of the gas-lit halls survived the Emergency, and the late 1940s heralded a more liberal era. "You could dance in Gneeveguilla in the afternoon and then head for Ballydesmond, six miles away, where another dance began at 7 p.m."
Eamon Kelly
The Kerry-born actor and storyteller, Eamon Kelly, all of whose people had their roots in Sliabh Luachra, also features in the book, not least in his contribution of a foreword. Hickey writes that Kelly first heard a traditional storyteller when he worked in Waterville as a young vocational teacher. Prior to that, however, he had been familiar with Sliabh Luachra's oral tradition while working at an early age with his father, Ned, a carpenter and builder.
The seeds of his later career were sown. "The work brought him into the homes of the people, and he also met journeymen and stonemasons who were very interesting characters with stories to relate. He remembers such people as being fairly literate and very much steeped in what he describes as oral literature. He unconsciously picked up stories from them, stories that were as old as time itself."
Kelly, according to Hickey, became a professional storyteller by accident. "At a Radio Eireann party, he told a story he had heard in south Kerry. Micheal O hAodha, then head of entertainment programmes, was impressed and asked him to go on a programme as a result. When Eamon went around the country afterwards, people who had heard him on radio gave him stories."
Radio programmes
Hickey recalls that as a young boy growing up in Gneeveguilla he was allowed stay up late on Saturday nights just to hear Kelly, the seanchai, on programmes such as The Rambling House. "Some of the characters in Eamon's stories were identifiable locally and provided ample food for conversation as people left the chapel after Mass the following morning. Phrases from his stories, such as `in my father's time', and `things rested so', became popular cants at the time."
There was Kelly's standard theatrical garb when playing the role of a seanchai: the hat, the shirt with a stud closing the top, the waistcoat and short coat. Kelly's father always wore a hat, and never took it off except to go to bed, or to the church, and "as my mother would say, he slept in both."