As it happens, I know and play ‘The Boy on the Hilltop’, and I know and play a tune called ‘The Bag of Spuds’, but as Patsy launches into the second one, I realise that this is another kettle of fish, as it were, a completely different tune. It’s not, to be sure, a ‘new tune’. This ‘Bag of Spuds’ has been around since long before I was thought of, and will no doubt still be around long after I’m gone. It’s not even new to me, for as Patsy plays it I begin to have a dim recollection of how it goes, and it’s quite possible that I first heard it from him, some time back in the 1970s, perhaps, one of those tunes that flit in and out of one’s consciousness without ever being assimilated. If I did hear it then, I never attended to it properly. I never learned it then. But I want to learn it now. I don’t learn many tunes these days. For one thing, I’m not out that much, certainly nowhere near as much as I was some thirty years ago, when some three or four nights a week were given up to playing in various music sessions. To learn tunes you have to be around them, or they around you. In this instance, I’m immediately attracted by Patsy’s playing, as are the RTÉ audience, who let a couple of whoops out of them as he makes the change from the first tune to the second. It’s a great change, seeming to shift up a gear, and the playing is full of drive and verve and humour. I’ve no doubt that behind this particular rendition of the tune lies a fund of memories of other times Patsy has played it, and whom he played it with. The music is a kind of mnemonic for all those times. It’s about people as much as it is music.

When the programme is over I get hold of a tin whistle and try out what I remember of ‘The Bag of Spuds’: a vague framework with a few definite phrases here and there. ‘Is that the way it goes?’ I ask Deirdre, and she says, ‘Something like that, I never learned it myself, but I remember Desi Wilkinson played it through the letterbox of a pub when he got locked out and everyone else was inside having a big feed’. ‘And what was the upshot?’ ‘Oh,’ says Deirdre, ‘the woman of the house came out and chased him.’ ‘And where was it?’ ‘It was at a fleadh in Buncrana,’ says Deirdre, ‘before I knew you properly. But when we got out I remember you were walking up the other side of the street having an argument with some woman or other’.

Patsy Hanley is one of those great musicians who, for whatever reason, have never made an album of their own. He has, however, guested on a good few records, and there are three tracks of his playing on The Flute Players of Roscommon Volume 1, issued by Roscommon Arts Centre. Asked to supply a sleeve-note for himself, he came up with this: ‘My mind flashed immediately to musical accomplishments, recordings, et cetera – not worth writing about. Instead, maybe a word of appreciation for the characters with whom I stumbled, sped, shuffled, raced, hobbled and socialised (is that the right word?) with through the chaotic world of traditional music, which runs almost parallel with reality. I thank them for all their influence which shaped my music and my personality’. Just so.

As for my learning ‘The Bag of Spuds’ – that’s still ongoing, though I think I might have the gist of it by now. The next column in this series will be a progress report on the learning of that tune. It will be called ‘The Little Bag of Spuds’.