Tag Archives: folk music

Mind me Harp, Mind me Harp – – –

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Jack barely scrapes over the line this week – –

The title of this post is a reference to a comedic recording of a mythical Irish ceili band featuring the great Peter Sellers and produced by George Martin (later famous as the ‘fifth Beatle’).

But this is about ‘something completely different’.

My good friend Tom Swadley who leads a rather better band playing Irish traditional music, and based in Virginia and Tennessee, sent me a link to a documentary a few days ago. It traces the history of the Bothy Band from their inception to their recent 50th anniversary reunion concert.

The Bothy Band emerged in the 1970s along with a few others such as ‘Planxty’ and ‘De Danaan’ playing not just very skillfully but with an obvious deep understanding and love of their inherited Irish music. One of their first recordings was of a concert in Paris and like everyone else I was blown away when I first heard it.

They play mainly instrumental sets of tunes with the occasional song thrown in to break things up, but it’s the sets of tunes that grabs you. There’s a tremendous energy and drive that comes from the combination of guitar, bouzouki and keyboard topped with the pipes, fiddles and flute. As others have said – this takes Irish music into the equivalent of ‘rock and roll’!

The documentary is really excellent and traces their career from the earliest days, using archive material, fly on the wall snippets of their rehearsals for the reunion concert, and then finishes with the actual concert. It reminded me of another great documentary about ‘The Weavers’ preparation for their farewell concert at Carnegie Hall (not the one in Dunfermline!). The treatment seemed very similar. In some ways the Bothy Band did for Irish music what the Weavers did for American music, so somewhat fitting!

Here’s a link –

https://www.tg4.ie/en/player/home/?pid=6349887690112&fbclid=IwAR3KSqj3T8rHCeBdTy7PcdTFrEe_UH_yLsvhtmaaXmrd7vY7KnxwswoglIE_aem_AaJbdgKoHkYjsBqJaKLYBlndsm4HXbOpoE2puYj6jeu-iJxfL6UCorf2maGeJgrGj5B2oSv-XDTKSeJk376x_ZEN

Bob’s Your Uncle–

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Jack just barely made it in time – –

I was thinking about my late teenage years when I was finishing my apprenticeship as a painter and decorator in the late 1950s and into the early 1960s.

I mentioned this in my post last week and about going to a dance.

But much more interesting were my weekly drives in my first car for twelve miles to the neighboring town, where I attended advanced classes and which opened the path to my eventual college career.

Those advanced classes took place in the evenings once a week and in what once had been an elementary school. It now housed P&D students (all young men) and hairdressing students (all young women) – use your imagination – –

One of our instructors was Bob, and he had a lovely ability to adapt words that became much more useful – a favorite of mine usually went as follows: “Jack – will you replentish the bucket?” He meant me to re-fill a bucket with a generous amount of water. For him the color magnolia was Mongolia, and caramel became Carmelite (an order of nuns). He was a very knowledgeable and patient man, though, and we all loved him!

There were only four of us studying for the advanced exams, so we were allowed to use the instructors’ office as our private space. It had a radio, and we always tuned to ‘Radio Luxemburg’ because back then the BBC had the only station in the UK, and they refused to play pop music. So my first experience of hearing the Beatles was on that radio tuned to RL.

After the class finished I would head to a local pub in the town, where there was a weekly jazz club that ran on the same night, and they often had folk song intervals while the band took a break.

It would be fifteen years later that I would bless having that qualification, which made me eligible to become an instructor/teacher/professor and which now provides me a generous pension!

Come back next Wednesday for more from Jack