Reviving Tunes in East Clare

Reviving Tunes in East Clare

A new CD by Orla Harrington (fiddle), Andrew MacNamara (button accordion) and Jim Higgins (percussion and piano), revives tunes found recorded on a reel-to-reel tape in Cratloe, County Clare.

Orla Harrington, Jim Higgins and Andrew MacNamara

Given the nature of much of the material they work with, traditional musicians tend to get excited about recovering old material from near-oblivion. When a reel-to-reel tape recorder and box of tapes from the 1960s and 70s was found in the Harrington household in Cratloe, County Clare, it didn’t take much prompting for the process of reviving the tunes to begin.

Flagstone Memories is the result: a new CD launched at the Tulla Trad Festival earlier this month. A collaboration between Orla Harrington on fiddle, Andrew MacNamara on button accordion, and Jim Higgins providing percussion and piano accompaniment, it aims to ‘acknowledge and pay tribute to the many musicians who have passed on and the great musical legacy they left behind’.

The tapes featured local musicians — Michael Kelly and his wife Lil from Oatfield, Cratloe, on fiddle and piano accordion respectively, Ned Mangan of Sixmilebridge on fiddle, and the accordion player Peter Griffin from Lisdoonvarna, where some of the recordings were made — and many tunes new to the ears of Harrington and MacNamara.

Tunes they chose to record, and for some of which they had to dig around a good deal to unearth names, include ‘Paddy Kelly’s’, ‘Wheels of the World’, ‘The Girl I left Behind’, ‘The Dangerous Reel’ (or ‘The Galtee’), ‘Wellington’s Advance’ and ‘The Leg of the Duck’. Harrington explained to The Journal of Music that it wasn’t just the tunes the musicians decided to revive, but also stylistic elements: ‘We wanted to keep the ornamentation and the variations of the playing [we heard], to bring them into our own playing.’

Other sources for tunes on the CD include an old RTÉ recording of concertina player Ellen O’Dwyer from County Limerick, a recording of Joe Bane from Magherabawn, Feakle, County Clare, and another of Joe Cooley from Peterswell in County Galway.

The trio will be playing music from Flagstone Memories on 29 October at the Willie Keane Memorial Weekend in Doonbeg, County Clare, and on 10 November at the Ennis Trad Festival.

www.orlaharrington.com
www.andrewmacnamara.com

Published on 29 September 2011

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