Peggy Bulger: Welcome, everyone,
and welcome to the American Folklife Center's last in a series.
We were just talking about how sad it is.
This is the last in the series of our part
of Rediscover Northern Ireland,
which is a huge program that's been going on here in Washington,
DC all this spring, leading up to, of course,
the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the Mall,
which will be the last week in June and first week in July.
And I hope if you're here, you'll definitely go down for that.
There'll be many people here from Ulster,
presenting a lot of different traditions.
For those of you who don't know me, I'm Peggy Bulger,
Director of the American Folklife Center.
And all of this May, we've been bringing in some
of the best scholars and musicians and artists from Northern Ireland
to share with us their work.
And while we're doing that we have an ulterior motive,
which is that we are recording everything for the collections.
Those of you who work here at the Library of Congress know
that that's all-important; the collections building.
And what we are ending up with is really a wonderful,
discrete collection of Northern Ireland music, dance and traditions
at the beginning of the 21st century.
So at the beginning of the 22nd century, people will be able
to look back on this day and see what was going on.
And it's very exciting.
This is a collaboration, actually, between the Library of Congress
and the American Folklife Center and the people
and government of Northern Ireland.
And of course it's especially gratifying at this point in time --
I think, with all the political things that are going on in Ulster,
it's a momentous time in the political history, and also,
I think probably a momentous time in cultural history.
Today's event features two speakers and musicians, Brian Mullen
and the Reverend Canon Gary Hastings.
And we're very happy to have these two longtime friends who just happen
to be of two different religions, but who are both dedicated
to the idea that Irish musical traditions know no
religious boundaries.
And I think we could definitely agree with that.
The events today are being cosponsored by the Department
of Culture, Arts and Leisure of Northern Ireland,
the Northern Ireland Arts Council
and the Northern Ireland Bureau here in Washington, DC.
I wanted to also -- since this is the last event --
just thank our team at the American Folklife Center,
who've been so great in putting on all of these things; first of all,
the coordinator, Maggie Kruzie   [ spelled phonetically ]

.   [ applause ]

And she's kind of wrangled the rest of the team, which is Jennifer
and Steve and Thea and Jonathan.
And if I've missed anybody, I'm sorry.
But they've been doing a great job
in putting together all these events.
Thanks.   [ applause ]

And if you want to know about all the feature events that are coming
up at the Folklife Center, please do check
out our Web site, www.loc.gov/folklife.
So now, to introduce the performers and tell you a bit
about Rediscover Northern Ireland,
I'd like to introduce our wonderful collaborator, Philip Hammond.
And Philip is a musician and composer,
and also the Creative Director for the Department of Culture,
Arts and Leisure of Northern Ireland.
Philip?   [ applause ]

Philip Hammond: Thanks, Peggy.
I won't say very much, but to thank Peggy
and indeed all her marvelous team here at the Library of Congress.
It's been a real pleasure dealing with the Library of Congress.
And I'm not just saying that because I'm standing here.
It really has been a most pleasant experience indeed.
Today we've got the final event here at the Library of Congress to do
with Rediscover Northern Ireland,
with the venerable Gary, as he told me today.
And Brian -- I don't think he's venerable, no.
And not only from different religions,
but from different cities; Gary lives in Westport, in County Mayo,
and Brian still lives in Derry City in the north of Ireland.
And it's great that they have been, for many years, showing the rest
of the world that Northern Ireland is not as divided a community
as perhaps the rest of the world thinks.
And that has been the whole reason
for doing Rediscover Northern Ireland here in Washington;
to show that the vast majority of people
in Ireland actually get along terribly well together.
So it's a great pleasure to welcome both of them to Washington.
I know they arrived very late last night
after a very circuitous route getting here to Washington
from good old Ireland, but I know that they're going
to entertain you wonderfully.   [ applause ]

Reverend Canon Gary Hastings: Hello.   How are you all doing?

First thing I have to do is give you a government health warning --
I think that'd be the best way to put it.
We're going to talk about music, but not as we're used
to music being an entertainment form.
We're used to music from all over the world, and we like it
and we listen to it and we enjoy it.
We take crack out of it, as we'd say at home.
But we forget that music once had very strong meanings
in its real context.
And the stuff that we're going to be talking
about today still does have a very strong meaning.
Back where we come from, if you play the wrong tune or the wrong song
in the wrong place, you're a dead man walking.
Music still has meaning and power where we come from,
and that's very important to remember.
So what we're doing, it's not just entertainment.
Now, I'm a Church of Ireland rector in Westport, in County Mayo,
which is the same as the Episcopalian church over here.
I was born and reared in East Belfast.
I'm what they call a "wise man from the East" back home.
East Belfast is a Protestant Loyalist Unionist area of Belfast,
and I was brought up in all that tradition.
My grandparents' generation were all members of the Orange Order,
the Royal Black preceptory   [ spelled phonetically ]

, apprentice boys, members of the RUC and the UDA and so forth.
These are pretty full credentials where I come from;
I don't know how much they mean to you all here, though.
But as a result of where I was brought up and how I was brought up,
I had no exposure at all to what is known as Irish traditional music.
It was something very foreign to me; it was something Catholics did
and something Nationalists did.
And like the Irish language, it was very exotic to me.
I remember when I wanted a degree in Irish,
my granny didn't actually know that there was an Irish language.
So, Ulster Protestants are that far removed from the whole thing.
My people would have played in pipe bands, flute bands and walked
on the 12th of July with the Orange Order.
And that was the music that we used to differentiate ourselves
and give ourselves identity.
Nationalism had a different bag of tricks.
But my side of the house, that was what they did.
The traditional musics in Ulster are used
as a strictly delimited identity marker, especially in urban areas.
We'll probably all -- in Ulster now, it's assumed without thought
that things have always been like that.
So, Orange and Loyalist, Unionist Protestants
[ unintelligible ]
all do this kind of thing, and Irish nationalists play this kind
of stuff.   And this is how people think it is

at the minute, and how it always was.
What Brian and I would like to do is put you briefly
through the same experience that the two of us had with the music.
That is, to find out that it's a very complex thing rather
than coming from simple, straightforward origins.
And I hope it surprises you as much as it surprised us.
We're both children of the revival of folk music
in the late '60s and early '70s.
We came to Irish traditional music through the chieftains and
[ unintelligible ]
and the Bothy Band, and in Brian's case, after a short detour
into English traditional music as well.
When I started off playing Irish music I knew nothing about it,
but neither did anybody else.
At the time there was no research on it, there were no books on it.
The only information anybody ever had was got off the back
of an LP cover.   Don't trust the back of LP covers.

[ laughter ]
I assumed -- as did, and probably still do, everybody else --
that Irish traditional music was Irish and traditional,
by which I thought it meant that it was exclusively unique to Ireland.
And I thought traditional means very, very old.
And that's pretty much what people think about it.
Irish music was Irish, as far as they were concerned, and ancient.
And being brought up in East Belfast, I knew and was also certain
that Orange music was Orange, and was played by Orange men,
which isn't saying very much anyway.
But you don't need to say very much in Northern Ireland.
Much human culture is implicit and intuitive.
You don't need to talk about it while you're swimming in it.
Indeed, I played music for quite a long time before I found
out any different.
Most of what I thought I knew I learned from record covers.
But nothing is simple in life,
and there's no reason why music should be simple either.
Now, the first person that confused me was a man called
Brendan Breathnach.
He wrote a book called Irish Folk Music and Dance;
it was the first academic book on Irish music that came out.
And he's said that   [ unintelligible ]

came from Scotland, hornpipes came from England.
Most of Europe was covered in jigs; single, double and otherwise.
Polkas were from somewhere else as well.
And that was true, too, with Highland Strauss, waltzes,
one steps, barn dances, marches, clap dances,
sets and whatever you're having yourself.
[ laughter ]
There was no indigenous Irish dance form; all the rhythms,
all those dance rhythms had come from somewhere else.
It came as a tremendous shock to me when I found it out,
and it all happened in perhaps the last two and a half hundred years.
Now, there must be older tunes than that;
there must've been a dance tradition before all this new stuff came
into Ireland from foreign parts.
Well, the answer is that there was a tradition,
but whatever there was we know very, very little about,
because it was never written down.   It was oral.

We know next to nothing about it.
We do know a bit about the aristocratic traditions.
We know about harpers and Fe-lee   [ spelled phonetically ]

and Bothy and Rock-er-ee   [ spelled phonetically ]

and all the stuff that was going on in the big houses and was going
on in chieftain's courts and stuff in Ireland.
But we don't know what they were playing,
we don't know what it sounded like.
We have oral descriptions of it, but oral descriptions
in music really aren't much use.
So, Irish music before the mid-1700s is pretty much a mystery.
We have wee glimpses and descriptions and bad carvings
of high crosses and stuff.
The Irish had war pipes; we don't know what they looked like.
We know that they had two drums; we don't know what they played on them.
They were wiped out entirely in the 1600s; completely lost.
The harp tradition died out.   By 1803 the last harper died.

We only know a bit about it because Bunting wrote it down in the 1790s.
So a lot of Irish music before the 1700s is gone.
Now, Allen Feltman, from this neck of the woods or from this side
of the water, anyway, he wrote a book called The Northern Fiddle
Player, which confused me even more.
And in the introduction he said, "The vast majority of tunes as found
in the repertoire of the average traditional musician nowadays go
back little further than the late 1700s; or at least that's
as far as we can trace them."
Around the latter half of the 18th century, and at the beginning
of the 19th, there was a dance boom in Ireland, it seems --
like hula hoops, skateboards and yo-yos --
when the peasantry of the country seemed to do very little else other
than be out dancing; other than eating
and doing things associated with spuds.
So that's when most of the tunes came to be.
The majority of the repertoire
of tunes we're playing nowadays originates back in the late 1700s.
So, as they say, is everything else lost?
Well, it's not lost, but we can't find it, if we can put it that way.
[ laughter ]
The older tunes must have been maimed and cannibalized to serve
for the new rhythms and dances that came in.
But since it was never written down, we can't tell which stuff,
which tune is older than another, except in very few cases.
Even the song tradition doesn't seem to go back very far.
Little of the stuff   [ unintelligible ]

, as they say in Irish, currently sung at the minute is older
than the 1700s -- even in the Irish language material.
You can trace stuff back of it.
There's a romantic tradition going right back to the Normans arriving
in the 1200s and so forth.   But the claim to the ancient --

and that was something that fascinated the Victorians.
That claim to be ancient is actually false.
And the claim to be Irish, in an exclusive, definitive,
unique sense proves to be false as well.
So, what was going on?
Well, what goes on everywhere all the time; adoption and adaptation.
Those are the signs of a strong, healthy culture and tradition.
When something new comes in, people get excited by it
and they make their own of it.
And if there's already a strong tradition in the country,
it gets fitted into the tradition.   So I'll play an example now.

This is a tune; it's a waltz.
And waltzes come from Strauss and Vienna in Austria
and Eastern Europe and all that stuff.
But there are waltzes in Ireland,
and they came in when they became fashionable in Europe.
This is a waltz that came from a man called Tommy Vetty,
[ spelled phonetically ]   who lived in Derelyn

[ spelled phonetically ]
, outside of Naskelnan County Farmana
[ spelled phonetically ]
. And I don't know anything about him; he's a fiddle player.
Tommy Vetty, his mother's name was Vetty, so he was called Tommy Vetty.
But Cal McConnell's   [ spelled phonetically ]

mother, Mary -- I remember her telling me about him
because I wanted to find out about him, and I said, "What was he like?"
And she says, "He was the kind of fellow" she says,
"when you're going along the road, if you met him, you would say,
'Hello, Tommy, how are you doing?'
and he would say, 'ach, Mrs. McConnell, I'm dying.'
And true to his word," she says, "he did."
[ laughter ]
This tune I'm about to play, I'll just play it once as an example.
It's an example of an import.
It's adapted, adopted, and it sits quite happily
in the eclectic oral music tradition of Ireland.
And in fact, it's as Irish as any older style of traditional dance,
which, going by what I've just said doesn't actually mean very much.
But anyway.   [ flute music ]

[ applause ]   Stop that.

You can hear it' s Irish, but it's not an Irish dance.
So, what is going on?
Fashion. When the fashion changes, whatever the culture is,
if it's a good strong culture, it will adopt it
and adapt it to suit itself.
And that's exactly what's going on there.
Now, I was very shocked when I found out all that stuff
because something -- how would you say, a dream had been shattered.
You knew exactly what you thought was going on,
and you discovered it wasn't that at all;
it was something completely different.
I turned back -- it was interesting, and I had learned a lot of music
and I was doing a bit of research and I turned back to look
at the music of my own people, my own side of the house as they'd say
at home, and Orange, the music associated with Orange-ism.
The Orange Order was founded in 1795.
It was part of, how would you say --
secret, peasant, agrarian societies were fashionable around then.
And this was a particular Protestant kind of defense organization.
But it became fashionable.
Instead of staying amongst the peasants, the aristocracy took it
up as well, and the thing spread over Ireland,
and now there are lodges.
Especially in Canada here, there are lodges still --
Ghana and Kenya and Africa, Australia and New Zealand,
all over the place; anywhere where Ulster men went they took Orange-ism
with them, though it's pretty much defunct outside the north,
as far as I know.
They had a tradition of marching on the 12th of July,
which was to commemorate King William III's victory
at the battle of the Boyne   [ spelled phonetically ]

. So they march.
And right from the start of the order, they marched.
And when they started to march, they were playing a fife and drum.
You guys know about people dressing up in revolutionary outfits
and playing fifes and drums and stuff,
so you know what fifes and drums are like.
This is an Ulster fife; it's exactly the same
as the fifes they play here.
But they used to march down the road with one fife and one drum.
It was a long drum, was what it was called.
You know a side drum?
You would see in a band, they play the top skin on it?
Well, imagine that turned this way, and they would play the two sides.
But it was quite a small drum.
But over the space of time, it grew into what we now call a Lambeg.
So, early 1800s, 1803, 4, 5, 6, somewhere around there,
they're playing a long drum.
By the time you get to 1870 the drum had grown from being about this size
to being about this width and about this thick.
Okay? So you could just about get your two arms around it.
I didn't bring one with me for obvious reasons.
They play them with two keens   [ spelled phonetically ]

. I have an example of one; I'll play it in a minute on a CD.
The noise is vicious.
We're talking 120 decibels; light aircraft engine,
pneumatic road drills, that kind of thing -- pain threshold stuff.
It's amazing.
If there's a Lambeg drum up here and I gave it a slap,
you would feel the soundwave hitting your eyes.
It makes you blink, right at the back of the room.
They are amazing things.
They grew to be so big because people used to have competitions;
I had a drum made by such a maker, and you had a drum made
by another guy, and you and me decided who had the best drum.
And what they would do was called a stekan
[ spelled phonetically ]   . And they would eyeball each other

across the two drums, like this here.
And I would play my drum and you would play yours,
and the idea was I would put you off your beat, right?
The first man to break or to stop playing had lost.
So they might be playing for six, seven, eight, nine, 12 hours, right?
And there are stories of men standing with blood flowing
from their wrists, from the edge of the drum, you know,
drumming the whole time and staring at each other.
And of course crowds of bystanders standing around, making bets
and drinking, and whichever drum they liked the most,
they used to take off their cap and put that on the drum.
So you'd be standing there, playing -- the drums weigh about 34,
40 pounds of weight, okay?   They're big

[ unintelligible ]
, right? So you're standing there with this drum on and a big pile
of caps on it, right, eyeballing this guy across, you know?
And if my drum was louder than yours,
you couldn't hear yourself playing, so you'd be liable to lose the beat.
So if my drum was bigger than yours -- the drums got bigger and bigger
and bigger, and the only thing that stopped this was the size of goats.
And they may now have bred races of super goats, I'm not sure,
but at the time you could only get a drum so big, you know?
But they're very spectacular.   And they play the fife with them.

At the start they were just -- the drums weren't too big,
and they weren't up too tight, and you would have heard the fife.
And it was a musical arrangement.
As you came in there was some fife and drum stuff playing.
And it was nice, musically speaking,
but as the drums got big you couldn't hear the fifes.
You could hear a wee sort of a squeal in the background, you know?
But that whole drumming tradition comes out of a European tradition
of marching with fife and drum.
They used fifes to call orders in the British army, and again it came
over here -- revolutionary times, again,
through the British army, which is why it's here.
So the Orange Order modeled itself on that kind
of melody marching music.
Now, I wanted to study fifing because it was nearly dead.
There was only about two or three boys left playing the fife
on the 12th day.
There was an old man called Wally Mickey
[ spelled phonetically ]
I went to see, and another fellow called John Kennedy
and Wallace Patten   [ spelled phonetically ]

, and they were good musicians.
They were singers and whistle players and flute players
in their own right, as well as being fifers, which surprised me,
because in Belfast the Protestants do this and the Catholics do that,
and there's no in between.
I wouldn't have known a Catholic to talk to until I was 18,
because that's the way we were reared in Belfast.
But these guys were playing whistles and flutes
and playing Irish dance music.
And it was all a wee bit strange at the start.
But I went to chat with them about fifing.
Wally and Wallace had learnt from a man called Jock Lackee
[ spelled phonetically ]
. Jock Lackee would have been born maybe in the late 1890s.
And he had one eye and a bad leg, and he used to fife
on the 12th day, like this here you see.
And he played the pipes as well,
and he taught all the local bands and fifers.
I made a copy of all these fifing tunes
that Lackee had written maybe in the 1920s.
And so I got this, and most of them, they couldn't remember them.
And we were able to pick some of them out of the music.
The music wasn't written -- there were no bar lines.
I don't know if you can read music.
Without bar lines you're guessing the tune.
So I would play a succession of notes,
because we couldn't tell the rhythm -- they're just dots, right?
And the other fellas, sometimes it would remind them of the tune.
And we might not get the tune on the page,
but we'd get another tune that they remembered.
But anyway, we got about 100 tunes out of the whole collection.
But coming from Belfast,
I had expected what are called party tunes.
In every traditional repertoire, probably in every place
in the world, there is a chunk of music that is political;
that means something political.
That when you play it, gets people excited and they wish to go
out and hit other people.   That kind of music, right?

Usually the state army has got it; they keep it to themselves,
and they don't let ordinary people do it, which is why in England,
for example, you get Highland pipe bands.
The Highlanders out there in 1745 were taken away quietly and put
into the army and made to play in pipe bands,
and dressed up in daft outfits, right?
And that kept them nice and quiet so they wouldn't kill anybody.
Martial music is important because it works.
Martial music is connected, excuse me saying this;
it is connected with testosterone.
And testosterone is not usable for very much, right?
[ laughter ]
But one of the things it's good for is hitting people.
Right? It's designed to make you want to hit people.
The other uses of it you can work out yourself, right?
But testosterone, this kind of music is linked with that
because it gets people excited.   Men go off on it.

You play a national anthem, you hear armies marching up the road,
drums going all the rest of it, men stand up all straight
and start getting -- and the hairs stand up on the back of your neck,
and you want to hit somebody.
The music is designed to make you want to do that.
It's true.   Music is a drug, right?

It's not as expensive as the stuff you smoke
or drink, but it is; it works.
Party tunes up north are political tunes.
There's usually words connected to them, a song, but not necessarily.
It may just be a tune in its own right.
But when you hear it you know that's a Protestant tune,
or that's a Nationalist tune.
My wife lectured in folklore in the university in Culrean
[ spelled phonetically ]
. And she had students going out, collecting from people round
and about, and she had one fellow who went out and collected material
from provisional IRA prisoners who had been in the
[ unintelligible ]
blocks. And talking to them, the interesting thing that came up --
a couple of them said that the reason they joined the provisional
IRA was because of the songs.
Not because of the British, not because of politics,
not because of anything else; because of the songs.
So remember what I said at the beginning?
There's a health warning in this stuff.
Now, I don't live here, but I'm sure
in American culture somewhere you know this stuff is
out there as well.
There's a form of music or songs or whatever
which makes other people wish to hit other people.
It may be connected here with color or racial groups
or whatever, but it probably exists.   That's how humans work.

So, party tunes.
I was expecting when I looked at the fifing tunes to find party tunes;
the Orange stuff that they usually play on the 12th day in Belfast.
Out of 100 tunes, only two of them were party tunes.
Which was weird.
One of them was "The Boyne in the Water"
[ spelled phonetically ]   , which in the rest of Ireland --

the title of it in Irish is "Las cahanamoorin,"
[ spelled phonetically ]   the battle cry of Munster.

Which came as an awful shock to me as well,
because this was a big Orange Protestant tune,
and here it was in Irish somewhere else.
This was a bit weird.
And the rest of the tunes were jigs and reels and hornpipes
and Highlands and all the rest of it, adjusted to fit the drums.
Well, that was weird because that's what Catholics did.
We didn't do that.
We didn't play jigs and reels and horn pipes; Catholics did those.
And here all these fifing tunes --
now, the majority of the fifing repertoire dates right back
to the 1820s and '30s.
It hasn't changed, because the fifers only go out once a year.
So you're chatting about a frozen, ritualized performance.
John Kennedy, who's in his 80s now, told me he played the same set
of tunes as his granddad did, and that knocks us right back to 1850.
So we're chatting about a ritualized repertoire ,
nd the repertoire then was taken, not out of some bunch
of Orange music somewhere, but out of the local Irish tradition,
as it was going on in the early 1800s.
That was a tremendous shock to me,
because we had nothing to do with that.
I had never heard it until they started playing it,
if you know what I mean.
I didn't know it existed, and that was what
[ unintelligible ]   did, as we say at home.

That was   [ unintelligible ]

music; it was Green Nationalist music.
But here were Orange boys in the middle of County Antrim
[ spelled phonetically ]
, using it to walk to on the 12th day.
That came as a dramatic shock.   I'll play you an example.

Most of the tunes were jigs and reels and stuff.
They had changed the rhythm to fit the drums;
the drums drum hornpipe time.
I don't know why they drum hornpipe time; it's very strange.
I keep asking this every time I do this talk; somebody,
somewhere will tell me the answer.   You can march to jigs.

You can march to marches, of course.
But hornpipe is a strange time to walk to.
Wally Nickel told me he had heard of -- in the "Peninsular wars,"
he called it -- was the Spanish campaign and the Napoleonic wars.
A British regiment was in trouble,
and there was a regiment coming up to relieve them.
And they heard the drums way off in the distance,
and they knew it was the Orange drum,
they knew it was an Ulster regiment
because of the strange time of their drums.
It's not strict march time; there's a kind of a swing
to it if you know what I mean.   It's not military tempo.

This tune I play, I play it first of all in fifing time,
which is 4/4 hornpipe time.   And I play it in double jig time,

which is how it would be played everywhere else.
Okay. It's called "Young Man in Their Blue."
[ music ]   [ applause ]

Same tune.   You kind of change

[ unintelligible ]   somewhere in the middle of it,

and then it's transposed in a different time.
The first way is fifing time, drumming time.
What was more interesting was in the middle
of all these tunes was two tunes;
one was "Kelly, the Boy from Kellan,"
[ spelled phonetically ]
and the other one was "The Wearing of the Green."
Now, those are not tunes you associate with the Loyalist,
Unionist people of Ulster, right?
They're Nationalist, rebelist songs, they would be known as.
And it turns out that Jock Lackee --
this came as another shock as well --
taught the fifers of the Roman Catholic ancient order
of Hibernians.
Have you heard of the Order of Hibernians here?
It's not unfamiliar.
It's, how do you say, it's a mirror image --
a lot of the troubles up north cast up mirror images,
because it's a small place.
So the paramilitaries wear combat uniforms and scarves
and black glasses and draw murals on the walls.
Right? That's my crowd.
After a while, the Catholics started to wear black glasses, combat things
and draw murals of hunger strikers on the wall instead of King Billy.
But they looked exactly the same, right,
so they get the mirror image effect.
So the Orange men walk around in orange sashes with big banners
and drums and fifes and all the rest of it.
And the Catholics started this thing called the Order of Hibernians,
and they had big green banners and their green sashes
and they had shamrocks on the drums; a mirror image entirely.
If you just adjust the details, change from orange to green,
change the pictures on the drums and banners and change the tunes,
it's a mirror image the whole way around, right?
What the paramilitaries did
on the one side the paramilitaries did on the other.
It's a very weird thing.
But the Order of Hibernians carried Lambegs and they fifed tunes.
They were fifing exactly the same repertoire, bar two tunes.
I'm not sure which way around you do that in America; better not.
Sorry, a bit of a cultural faux pas there perhaps.
But the OH did the same thing as the Orange men were doing.
They were playing exactly the same tunes.
And they stopped; it died out in the 1920s.
I asked Wally, "Why was that?"   Wally Nickel.

"Oh," he says, "them boys, the Sinn Feiners stopped them."
I said, "How did that happen?"
He says, "The commander said it's really a bunch
of Green/Orange men; stop doing that."
So Sinn Feiner put an end to it,
because Sinn Feiner had a slightly different definition of what it was
to be Irish Catholic Nationalist,
and it wasn't a mirror image of the Orange Order.
So it was a complex thing going on there.
Now, I'd like to play you just what I was chatting about drums.
Could we play that track 11 I asked you to play?
This is a man drumming solo music on a Lambeg.
[ music ]
This man is actually playing music, right?
He's not just hammering a drum.
You can hear the tune rolling and stopping in places and all the rest.
He has the tune in his head, right, and he's drumming it on the drum.
So this, it's very unique in history.
It's the only form of drum music,
as far as I know, outside the Middle East.
When you get to the Middle East there's a drum music culture
that goes right over into India and all the rest of it, Africa.
In Europe, it had gone.
They play drums that accompany stuff,
but this is a man playing music on a drum, on its own, himself.
And he knows exactly what he's doing.
Not only that he's playing a tune on the drum;
if you get 10 more drummers and put them beside him,
they'd be playing the same thing in their heads.
The effect is amazing from the volume,
from the sheer weight of the sound.   It's absolutely amazing.

It's unique to Ulster.
There are very few things unique to Ulster, but that's probably it.
But it is not seen as being Irish; it's seen as being Orange.
But yet Ulster's part of Ireland, and this thing comes out of Ireland
and grew up in Ireland and couldn't happen anywhere else.
The jigs, reels and hornpipes that were all imported are Irish,
but this is not seen as being Irish.
Can you see there's weird cultural fancy footing going on here?
Anyway, the fifing tunes that I collected are interesting
because as I said, they preserve but a snapshot of the musical repertoire
from the 1830s and '40s, and they show
that what was being played wasn't the party music as we call it.
By party music I mean -- so I'm not confusing anybody --
it's not music that you play at a party, okay?
It's music that belongs to one party or another,


From our modern point of view,
we assume that history was the same way all the way back.
We look back with Green glasses or Orange glasses,
and we assume that this is how things always were.
What I discovered -- and it came as an awful shock --
when you go back not very far,
things were completely different and we just didn't know.
Orange music is, if I can say it this way, as Irish as anything else
on the island of Ireland, whatever that means,
and possibly much more Irish than much of the stuff peddled
as being Irish at the minute, whatever that means.
And by Irish I mean that it happens in Ireland, and has been adopted,
adapted and developed there,
and they don't just do it exactly the same anywhere else;
just like waltzes and so forth.
Unfortunately, as I say, we look back now
and we think we know what was going on,
and we think people back then thought the way that we did.
And it was generally believed -- I believed all my life --
that northern Protestants don't
and never ever did play Irish traditional music.
That was what Catholics did.   This isn't the case.

The three fifers that I mentioned earlier that I learned stuff off
of were good, traditional players.
John Kennedy's a great singer and a flute player
and a fifer and a whistle player.
Wallace Patten is possibly -- while he was still playing,
was one of the best whistle players in Ireland.
He was magic.
Two hundred years ago in Ireland, if you go back,
there only was one kind of music: music.
It wasn't Irish music.
It was just music, because there wasn't any other kind about.
Now, all right, in the opera house in Dublin you would've heard Handel
or in the big houses you might have heard classical stuff.
But for the ordinary punters, the ordinary
[ unintelligible ]
out in thatched hovels with no shoes, they just had music.
But they didn't call it Irish music, and the language they talked,
they didn't call it the Irish language either.
Those Irish labels became stamped on as political definition had to come
about through cultural means in the late 1800s.
So that's when you start to get that whole cultural
and political movement in Ireland that starts to divide things apart.
So the Protestants suddenly found that they couldn't do certain things
because the Nationalists had their stamp on it.
So the Protestants got this whole Orange stuff and put their stamp
on that, and the Catholics couldn't have anything to do with that,
except the Catholics painted it green and did it a different way.
Right? But the whole musical tradition associated
with the Orange Order has its roots squarely in the dance
and song traditions, as well as the military traditions
of Ireland, Scotland and England.
It is a growth and a development and an adaptation just
as the dance music tradition is, too.
But it is still part of Ireland's musical tradition; you can't look
at the traditional music of Ireland without some acknowledgment
of the musical traditions that have grown
up around the Orange Order in the north.
Just as an example, the population in the north is what, 1.5 million?
People playing in bands, Orange bands,
are about 30 to 40,000 people.
That's a big -- imagine if you got the same percentage of people
in America playing one kind of music.
And these are people actually out playing it,
not listening to it on iPods.
They're actually out playing flutes and drums.
That's an amazing percentage of people.
So it's possibly the biggest musical tradition definitely in Ireland --
active, living, powerful musical tradition --
possibly in the British Isles, as well.
There may not be 30,000 other musicians
in any other classical music, pop music or whatever.
So it's massive.
It is an elephant in the room that people don't like to talk about,
because it's nasty and political and it's Orange,
and we don't do that sort of thing.
And yet it's huge and it is important,
and it has roots going right back into all sorts of stuff.
Music and song traditions are living.
That means they grow, that means they adapt,
that means they steal stuff here because they like it,
and they drop other stuff because they get bored with it.
To survive they have to do that.
As living things, then, they're going to be complicated and messy,
because living things are complicated and messy.
And you can't just divide them up into Orange and Green,
or Unionists and Nationalists.   They don't work that way.

They keep jumping over the fence.
They might comfortably, and very often are not just one thing
and another thing, but exactly the same thing; only,
one of them is painted green and the other one's painted orange.
The threads of the traditions of the musics I'm talking
about here today run in all directions;
to and fro from Scotland, Wales and England and the continent,
and here in America as well, and Gaelic Ireland.
You cannot separate them.   You shouldn't separate them.

But sometimes you can trace a thread.
But it is true -- possibly all over the world, but definitely
where we come from -- that we use music and song to identify ourselves
as being on one side or another side, which is sad.
There is good music on both sides.
But it's how you use it or how you hear it or what you want to hear
that determines what sort of music it is.
But in the end, it's just music, good or bad.
Thank you for listening to me.   [ applause ]

I will hand you over to my beautiful and vivacious assistant.
Brian Mullen: Like Gary said,
he didn't meet a Catholic until he was 18.
I think I was that Catholic.   [ laughter ]

He came to university when he was 18, and I was there.
Basically, what I'm going to be talking
about is exactly the same thing, but with words attached.
And I actually have some hymn sheets my beautiful assistant will pass
among you.   [ laughter ]

He's used to this sort of thing every Sunday,
handing out hymn sheets.
And I'll be singing more songs than are on the sheets,
but only snatches of them.
And this is something that you can take home;
some songs that you may wish to study later.
And you might actually want to learn some of them,
because some of them are very good.
As Gary was saying, traditional music
in Ireland is very complicated.   It's a mixture of music in Ireland.

As a mixture of music it's a mixture basically of three separate musics;
Irish music, whatever that is, Scottish music and English music,
which is all mixed up due to various factors such as plantation,
migration or importation in the three countries, and in the North,
in Ulster, are a mixture which we call for shorthand
in some places the shamrock, rose and thistle mixture.
It is very strong and very rich.
And most of the music, as I say, would be Irish music; that is,
music that is found in Ireland, though as Gary was saying,
music can come from anywhere and be adapted
to fit the musical traditions of Ireland.
And when you're looking to get a song into the minds of people,
a very good way of doing it is to write the song
to an already well known tune.   And people will have the tune.

They get the words, they can sing the song.
And I'll actually sing you a small example; one verse from a song
which the tune was imported from America.
It's a song which I'm sure some of you know call, "Tramp Tramp Tramp,
the Boys are Marching," a Civil War tune written by George Root in 1863.
And it became such an international hit as a tune
that four years later a fellow called T.D. Sullivan wrote a Fenian
song; that is, a song in praise
of the Fenian brotherhood, to the same tune.
And he wrote it -- it was published in the nation in Ireland
on the 7th of December, 1867.
And Sullivan himself said, three days later he was
in Hythe railway station outside Dublin,
and he heard somebody singing it.
Within three days the song had entered the popular consciousness.
And it's still sung.
And when I was putting this talk together years ago,
a man of my acquaintance who's been known to march on the 12th,
heard me going through this tune and said, "We have that tune as well.
We march to that tune on the 12th."   I said, "That's very interesting."

And he said, "Actually, there's a verse to it."
And he sang me the verse, and I said, "Have you any more of that?"
And he said, "No, that's the only verse I ever heard."
And when you've heard the verse, you might think
that that's all you need.   It tells a story in four lines.

So it's the same tune with three different contexts;
American Civil War, Fenian and Orange.
[ Sings ]
Tramp, Tramp, Tramp the boys are marching, Cheer up comrades,
they will come And beneath the starry flag we shall breathe the air
again Of the free land in our own beloved home 'God save Ireland,
cried the heroes 'God save Ireland,' cried they all Whether
on the scaffold high, or on battlefield we die, What's it matter
if for Erin dear we fall No pope, priest or holy water,
No home rule for Ireland And if I had a gun, I would shoot them,
every one For walking on the Queen's highway.
So there you are.   [ applause ]

And I could practically stop there.   That sums it all up.

That's what it's all about.   The song came from America.

It didn't matter that it came from America.
It suited the purpose, and it was a good song, and it carried the story.
But the idea that Gary mentioned, that Orange-ism was one thing,
and Green-ism, Fenian-ism, Catholicism was another thing;
that exclusivism wasn't always part of the tradition.
People began to see after the partition of Ireland into North
and South in the 1920s, Ulster
as something separate, as being not of Ireland.
But before that the Protestants, the Orange men, saw themselves as part
of Ireland; a different Ireland,
a different colored Ireland, but Ireland no less.
And they took their traditions from the traditions of Ireland,
but made something different of them.
The first song on your hymn sheets is a song that points up that.
It's called "The Orange Maid of Sligo."
Sligo of course is now in the Republic of Ireland,
but still boasts a number of Orange lodges.
The Orange lodges were set up after the Battle of the Diamond in 1795
and spread like wildfire throughout Ireland.
By the time of the 1798 rebellion there were only three counties
in Ireland that didn't have an Orange lodge; the counties of Mayo,
Clare and Kerry, if my memory serves me right; they encroached
on Mayo at least after that.
But this is a song, and it's very strongly based in the tradition
of Gaelic poetry, which is called the "ashling."
And ashling is an Irish word;
it's now used as a girl's name, but it means "a vision."
And in the vision, in the poetry, the poet either falls asleep
or has a waking vision of a beautiful woman, whom he meets
and immediately falls in love with, and marries
and lives his life with her.
And that began to be used by the political poets
from the 17th, 18th century on.
The woman that he met became an embodiment of Ireland.
She was   [ unintelligible ]

or   [ unintelligible ]

, or a daughter of Daniel O'Connell, or
[ unintelligible ]
, and she had been wronged by the foreign foe.
And he must marry her.
He falls in love with her, falls in love with the cause of Ireland
and marries her; that is, signs up to that cause
and fights for her greater glory.
Well, that exact image is the image behind "The Orange Maid
of Sligo," except she's not Green.   She's not Green Ireland.

She's Orange Ireland with whom the youth falls in love
and fights for her cause.
The song was actually written by a Brother William Archer in the 1850s,
who Gary has done some research on,
and tells me he wrote quite a number of songs.
But this is the only one that still survives, and one of the reasons
that it still survives is it's got the most gorgeous tune.
I love the poetry in it as well, but I think it's a fabulous tune.
[ Sings ]   [ Unintelligible ]

and lofty heights The evening Sun was setting bright It cast a ray
of golden light Around the Bay of Sligo A tiny craft
with glancing oars And flowing sails the wind before It blew the tiny
craft ashore To this, the Bay of Sligo
And at the Bay there sat the girl With lovely cheeks
and flaxen curls Her tender beauty was
like a pearl 'Twas the Orange maid of Sligo
And glancing o'er the vessel's side She saw upon the waters glide An
Orange laddie, his golden pride Upon the Bay of Sligo Make haste,
make haste and save that flower I prize it more
than any other No traitor must have it within his power Around the Bay
of Sligo An Orange youth, and with a bow That catch that flower
and with a vow Bestowed it on the lovely brow Of the Orange maid
of Sligo She soon became his lovely bride And oft they thought
at even tide Upon that laddie's golden pride Around the Bay
of Sligo Come all true blues
and fill your glass A better toast will never pass We'll drink unto
that lovely lass The Orange maid of Sligo.
[ applause ]
Now, what would happen, and still does happen, is that if one side
of the house has a good tune, then anybody can pick it up
and use it for their own purposes.
It took about 100 years before the Nationalist side of the house picked
up on that tune that we know; maybe there were other songs
under that tune between times.
But the best-known song from the Nationalist side came in, I think,
the late 1950s when Dominic Behan, the brother of the poet
and playwright Brendan Behan - Dominic, who was a singer
and songwriter himself, wrote a song in praise of Charles Stuart Parnell,
a Protestant Nationalist, called "Avondale."
And I'll just sing you one verse of it to show you
that it's a version of the same tune.
Oh, have you been to Avondale And lingered in her lovely vale
Where tall trees whisper low the tale
Of Avondale's proud eagle The same tune, just that wee "da dum";
that's the only difference at the end of the last line.
It is quite a nice song, and still sung, but it's a song
that I haven't actually learned.
I'm more attracted to the Orange song.
There may be something in my roots which I'm not telling you about --
[ laughter ]
-- that attracts me to the Orange song.
It seems to me a better song than the Fenian song.
And one of the best known of Orange tunes is a tune called
"The Sash My Father Wore."
Would there be anybody in here who wouldn't be familiar with that tune?
I imagine there'd be some people who wouldn't.
It's a very well-known tune which is played on the 12th of July,
mostly for marching bands.   And the chorus of it goes:

[ Sings ]
It is old but it is beautiful, and its colors,
they are fine It was worn at Derry, Aughrim, Enniskillen and the Boyne.
My father wore it as a youth in bygone days of yore,
And on the twelfth I love to wear the sash my father wore.
And there are loads more verses and versions of it, but it's a tune
that would have been, as I say, used by one side of the house generally
to show who they were, solidarity among themselves,
and perhaps to scare the other side a wee bit by saying, "This is us.
We have our sashes and our tradition.
We are not you, and you are not us."
But the tune itself -- though the words probably come from the 1800s,
the tune itself is older than that.
It is actually a very fine tune, used for loads of different songs.
And interestingly, this song, "Irish Molly-o ,"
which is on your sheets, is from America again.
It was discovered in a book
in a Philadelphia library by Mick Moloney.
I'm sure some of you know Dr. Mick Moloney, the folklorist who -
does he work here, or is he in New York these days?
He's in New York, is he, these days?
Originally from Limerick, but now in New York.
Mick and a fellow called Tommy Sands, who's a local singer
and songwriter from our neck of the woods, discovered it in a book
in a library in Philadelphia.
And it's printed right about the early 1800s, 1820, and it says,
"a very old and popular song,"
so it probably predates the 1800s; older than "The Sash."
But you can see, if you look at the chorus, the chorus says,
"She is young, and she is beautiful."
You can see where a man writing the song goes, "It is old and
[ unintelligible ]   -- that'll do me.

That's a good line, there.   I go on from that."

Sometimes that's the way you write a song; one line strikes you
as a possible springboard for the rest of the song.
Those songwriters among you will possibly know that.
It's a song of love.
There may be a political element in it as well because it's about a man
from Tyrone, which is in Ulster, whose daughter falls in love
with a man from Scotland.
And the father doesn't like the Scotsman; he calls him a foreigner,
and says that if she marries the Scotsman he'll never see her again.
This comes from the days, of course, when daughters took some note
of what their parents said.
And she knocked the romance on the head,
and everybody was brokenhearted except the father, who's delighted.
But the young man has gone off to die of a broken heart,
and I suppose she, like "Romeo and Juliet," goes off and dies as well.
There may be, as I say, a religious element, because the man being
from Tyrone, he may have been Catholic.
The man coming from Scotland may have been Protestant,
or it may have just been a racist thing,
or maybe he just didn't like him.
But it's a gorgeous tune, and if you sing it slightly slower,
in the martial beat of "The Sash," you get a very sweet tune.
If you feel like joining in, this is your chance.
Any of you who do know the tune can join me in the chorus,
which happens three times.
Tell me who is that poor stranger That has lately come to town
And like a pilgrim all alone He wanders up
and down He's a poor forlorn Glasgow lad And if you would
like to know His heart is breaking all in vain
For his Irish Molly O She is young and she is beautiful
And her likes I've never known The lily of old Ireland And the primrose
of Tyrone She's the lily of old Ireland And no matter
where I go My heart will always hunger for My Irish Molly O Ah,
but when her father heard of this A solemn vow he swore
That if she wed a foreigner He would never see her more He called
for young McDonald and He plainly told him so 'I'll never give to such
as you My Irish Molly-o' She is young and she is beautiful
And her likes I've never known The lily of all Ireland And the primrose
of Tyrone She's the lily of old Ireland And no matter
where I go My heart will always hunger
for My Irish Molly-o McDonald heard the heavy news And sadly he did say,
'Farewell, my lovely Molly I am banished far away 'Til death shall
come to comfort me And to the grave I go My heart will always hunger
for My Irish Molly-o' She is young and she is beautiful
And her likes I've never known The lily of old Ireland And the primrose
of Tyrone She's the lily of all Ireland And no matter
where I go My heart will always hunger
for My Irish Molly-o Lovely singing, thank you.
[ applause ]
Now, not only would songs like that cross what would be seen
as religious and political boundaries, but tunes,
because they're tunes, can cross linguistic boundaries as well.
And the next song on your list would have crossed that boundary.
It's a song called, "Allum   [ spelled phonetically ]

Punch," "I Drink Punch."
It's a song, as you might guess from that title, about drink.
It's about a man who is very fond of strong drink,
and in fact he spends his life doing nothing else but drinking.
And the way he gets the money to do that is he depends,
like Blanche DuBois, on the kindness of strangers
who give him enough money to keep his drinking habit going.
But as he says in one of the verses, some days he drinks punch,
and other days he drinks tea.
That's the days when he hasn't got the money.
It has a chorus as well, but I haven't really got time
to teach it to you in Irish.
But if you pick it up, as it goes along, it's a lovely song,
a lovely tune, and the man makes a strong case for strong drink.
He says that he doesn't care if the children are screaming,
if the cows are lying in a ditch; as long as he has enough money
for drink, then his garden is fine.
The chorus goes "Allum punch is alum tae
[ spelled phonetically ]
," which means "I drink punch and I drink tea," and "
[ Unintelligible ]   allum toddy" -- "and the day

after that I drink toddy," toddy being hot punch.
"   [ Unintelligible ]

;" "I don't get drunk except once in a while."
And he may be lying to himself as well as lying to us, in that line.
"   [ Unintelligible ]

;" "My love is begging, I'm the man that invented it."
[ Sings ]   Now, that song, that tune, has --

[ applause ]   Thank you very much.

That tune has crossed the language and political barrier.
I don't know which came first, that song or the next song,
"Lurgan Town," which uses the same tune except that you have
to repeat two lines to incorporate the chorus.
And this is a chance where we not only bring you the present
but we bring you the past, and I get a chance to shut up
and you get a chance to listen to something
on a CD which I brought with me.
A singer who is a good friend of both of ours,
the late Geordie Hanna, who came
from a place called Derrytresk in the county Tyrone.
He was one of the greatest singers ever to come out of Ireland,
and I think possibly in the world; a man with a marvelous style,
a great personality, and actual beautiful voice quality.
When you're singing traditional songs, you don't really need
to have a brilliant voice.
Singing any song you don't have to have a brilliant voice;
you just have to be able to put the song across.
But Geordie has a lovely, smoky, inviting voice as well.
And he takes delight in this song.
It's a song about an Orange march which was banned through the town
of Lurgan and the County Arma   [ spelled phonetically ]

in the 1840s.
'Round about that time there had been a lot of violence at marches;
people had been injured, and people had even been killed.
And the government put a blanket ban on all marches.
And the Orange men in this song are very upset
that they're not being allowed to do their traditional route;
something that is now still going on in Ireland.
And people wanted to march their traditional routes
around Lurgan in the same place.
And in the second line it's blamed on Papish Hancock,
who was the man who enforced the ban.
And later I discovered that he wasn't a Papish at all,
or a Catholic, but he was in fact a Quaker.
A local magistrate Quaker, but his was the job of enforcing the ban.
He was therefore tarred with the feather of being a Papish supporter.
So whether it's a mishearing by a traditional singer
of the word Papish, Quaker, you'd never know, or whether he thought,
"He might as well be Papish if he's supporting them
by banning our marches," but he got tarred with that brush anyway.
And they are giving out yards.
You know that the song comes from the 1840s
because in the second verse it mentions Dan O'Connell,
who's agitating for the repeal of the act of the union in the 1840s.
He unfortunately died before he could see that introduced,
and so this march is taking place in the 1840s.
And I say, this is Geordie Hanna with his version
of "Lurgan Town," track seven.   [ audio clip ]

Well, Lurgan Town's an altered town, Since Papish Hancock he came to it
If you walk on the twelfth day of July,
I do declare he'll make you rue it, And if you sing an Orange song,
Ye'll be jailed for eight and forty hours.
For the police knew well what to do, To prosecute no one but ours.
Whack fol la, Too rye ay Whack fol right fol too rye addy Now,
Lurgan hill is a high, high hill, The devil's hill where you saw it.
And there the Fenian master lives His name unstyled is Francis Kelly;
And meetings every night he holds, About Repeal and Dan O'Connell;
And not a step he'd let you march, Unless your name be Pat or Donal.
Whack fol la, Too rye ay Whack fol right fol too rye addy Now we run a
dance in ould Kilmore, These Papish bulldogs they came to it.
They danced our girls around the floor, And 'Patrick's Day,
they made us play it 'Patrick's Day' and 'White Cockade,
These were the tunes that they did play, sir, They danced our girls
around the floor, Sayin' 'You never stood before such dancers.'
Whack fol la, Too rye ay Whack fol right fol too rye addy
When the twelfth day of July came round, We made a stand
of forty colours; We placed an arch upon the hill,
And on it wrote, 'Here are no cowards.'
We then shook hands, all we could do, Saying, 'Boys,
remember the Boyne Water.'   Kelly says, 'lf you come through,

Your Orange blood we'll surely scatter.'
Whack fol la, Too rye ay Whack fol right fol too rye addy Whack fol la,
Too rye ay Whack fol right fol too rye addy
[ end of audio clip ]
Brian Mullen: The only man I think I know
who could split a one syllable word into three syllables
and still make it sound right.
Geordie mentions in that song that "Patrick's Day"
and "The White Cockade" were the tunes
that these Fenians wanted them to play.
Now, "Patrick's Day" would have been seen as a tune from the other side;
you can tell from its title why that would be so.
But "The White Cockade" is slightly different
because although it's originally a Scottish tune,
and therefore you would think would be embraced by our Ulster Scots,
Scots/Irish heritage, it was seen as a rebel tune
because the white cockade was the symbol of the Jacobites,
the followers of King James and Bonnie Prince Charlie.
They wore a white rosette in their caps
to show they supported the Jacobite cause,
and therefore would not have been the Protestant ascendancy.
So, their playing "The White Cockade" was anathema to these boys;
they didn't want to play it.
But still in all, the tune was used extensively for all sorts of songs;
Orange, Green and otherwise.
And I'm going to finish off with two versions of "The White Cockade"
to two very, very different songs.
The first one is on CD here; it's called "Moyenna mar"
[ spelled phonetically ]   . Any of you here who are academics

and studying Irish may know the song.
It's normally spelled g-i-o, g-i-l-e -- the word gile, meeting bright --
but I've decided that that's wrong.
And I've decided it's "Moyenna mar," my lively young boy,
because gile is a word that they used
in Scots Gallic all the time -- "gile maroon
[ spelled phonetically ]
;" "my gile down, my brown-haired boy, the boy of my heart,"
and is very, very common in Scots traditional Gaelic song,
though not any longer in Ireland.   But the tune is Scottish, so I think

that the poet was probably aping the Scottish tradition and using
that version of the word gile.
It's a song about Bonnie Prince Charlie,
and it's his true love lamenting his loss when he was defeated
and sent away back to the continent.   She's his wife in this song.

It's either her lamenting the loss of her true love,
a physical love song, or it's an allegory
of the Gael lamenting the last chance for a Catholic,
Gaelic king in these islands, or those islands, as they are now.
I still think I'm at home.   The chorus goes

[ Gaelic ]   ; "he's my hero, my lively boy,"

[ Gaelic ]   , "he's my Caesar, my darling boy,"

[ Gaelic ]
, "sleep or prosperity I have never got
since he went away from me, my lively boy."
And it's a song which is from Munster,
written by a fellow called Sen Clrach MacDomhnaill,
a Munster poet.
Clarach would mean that he came from County Clare.
But it's still sung quite extensively in Munster,
particularly by the group I'm going to play you now, the Culay
[ spelled phonetically ]   Choir, Corr

[ spelled phonetically ]   Coolay, which was set up by Sean

[ unintelligible ]
, and is currently run by his son, Pather
[ spelled phonetically ]   [ unintelligible ]

. And they sing it as their national anthem.
And they sing it as the last song in the pub at night;
that means it's time to go home, there'll be no singing after this.
And it's a great song for a national anthem.
And I'll play you a couple of verses of Corr Culay singing that.
It starts off with Pather, Sean's son himself,
on the harpsichord to bring it off.   [ music ]

Now, if you take the tune of that song and just change the rhythm from
[ sings ]   to

[ sings ]
-- some of you may know various songs to that.
The first one I ever heard was:   [ Sings ]

"As I walked out through Dublin city, at the hour of 12 at night,
who should I spy but the Spanish lady,
washing her feet by the candlelight.
First she washed them, then she dried them,
over a fire of angry coals, in all my life I ne'er did see a maid
so fine as the Spanish lady."
Well, that same tune is used for this song called "The Sons of Levi,"
which is our last chance to sing together.
It's an Orange song; about as far as I can make out,
it's about an initiation ceremony into the Orange lodge.
And the imagery of this ceremony is based on a Biblical template
where you cross over the River Jordan
and you carry 12 stones in your pocket.
What the 12 stones are, I'm not quite sure,
coming from a different, non-Bible tradition.
I'm not really sure of these Biblical references,
what they exactly mean, but they sound great.
And I love to sing the song because of that, and it's a song
that is now embraced by the Orange Order;
you'll find it in Orange songbooks.
But it was originally a Masonic song, a Freemason song.
And the Orange Order, when it was set up, was based on the rituals
and structures of the Freemasons.
They used the lodge system; sashes, secret handshakes,
initiation ceremonies and so on, took the whole thing over,
and took over songs as well that had a religious dimension in them.
And this one, as I say, is possibly
about an initiation into an Orange lodge.
And this particular brand of Orange-ism may,
it would seem from the song, believe that they are descended from one
of the lost tribes of Israel; they call themselves The Sons of Levi.
Or that may be just a Biblical reference and the name
of the local lodge; Sons of Levi local lodge 153.
And actually, oddly enough I was looking up this yesterday
because I remember hearing a version of this years ago on a Library
of Congress recording by -- I think it was Walter Caldwell,
Walter and Lola Caldwell, and it was just re-released last year,
I noticed, on a CD.
And they sing a version of this from America, "Sons of Levi."
So I may be buying that in the shop before I go home, out of here.
This is a County Ant-rim version of it.
And if you see it in Orange songbooks, it has about 50 verses,
which means if you sing it with 50 choruses,
it would certainly put a long winter's night in.
But the man I got it from only had the five verses, and that does me.
So, if you want to sing along in the chorus, the chorus goes,
"For we are the true-born sons of Levi, none on Earth with us compare,
we are the root and the branch of David, the bright
and the glorious morning star."
So when it gets to that bit, you have five chances.
[ Sings ]   Come all you brethren that do wish

to propagate the grand design Come enter into our high Temple
and learn the art that is divine For we are the true-born sons of Levi,
none on Earth with us compare, We are the root and the branch
of David, the bright
and the glorious morning star Noah planted the first garden,
Moses planted Aaron's rod He smote the waters of the Egyptians
and turned the Jordan into blood For we are the true-born sons of Levi,
none on Earth with us compare, We are the root and the branch
of David, the bright and the glorious morning star As Joshua
and I passed over Jordan, we did 12 stones bear along 'Twas the high
priest and our grand master that bore the Ark of God along
For we are the true-born sons of Levi, none on Earth with us compare,
We are the root and the branch of David, the bright
and the glorious morning star
With our seven trumpets Avram's horn sounded long before the Ark Gilgal
was our resting quarters, there we left our holy mark
For we are the true born sons of Levi, none on Earth with us compare,
We are the root and the branch of David, the bright
and the glorious morning star So come all you brethren, join with me,
and learn the art as I have done Come enter into our high Temple,
to this, the new Jerusalem For we are the true born sons of Levi,
none on Earth with us compare, We are the root and the branch
of David, the bright and the glorious morning star
So I think you can see from all that, that the music
that we're singing has a lot
of connections all the way down the line.
It's not Orange and Green.
It's green, white and orange, it's red, white and blue;
it's whatever color you're having yourself.
It comes from the one well, and it's used for different purposes,
maybe by different sides of the house.
But it's worth knowing about, and it's worth remembering.
And some of it is very, very worth singing.
Thanks for coming, thanks for listening and thanks for singing.
[ applause ]   Unless anybody would have a question

that they may wish some elucidation --
if we know the answer, we'll tell you.
If we don't, we may lie.   [ laughter ]

Or if you have any information you would like to give us,
you can either say it out loud or talk to us privately, later on,
if you are too embarrassed to speak.
Yes? Female Speaker: Could you talk about love songs?
Are there happy ones?   Is there a difference between --

[ laughter ]   Brian Mullen: Good question.

Female Speaker: -- love songs in the North and love songs in the South?
Brian Mullen: No.   In that sense there wouldn't be.

There'd be a general tradition of love songs
which would be common to the whole island.
And love songs, you're saying happy love songs -- there are very few,
as it turns out, as far as I can see from my long exposure,
of happy love songs, because, as somebody once said to me,
"The truly happy people leave nothing behind them."
Art is about dealing with pain.
Possibly that could be the reason behind it.
And unhappy love songs help people through an unhappy time.
You don't actually have to experience the thing
to write about it, either.
You can write about other people's experiences,
pretending to make them your own.
But I don't think there are very many happy love songs, very few.
I know a friend of mine, Eddie Butcher, the late Eddie Butcher
who was a great singer from Magilligan, sang quite a lot
of songs which were unhappy.
And he was never completely happy with songs that ended up unhappily,
so he wasn't above making an extra verse where the fellow went
to America with her; said, "Hold on a minute, I'll get a ticket too,
and I'll go, and we won't be separated."
[ laughter ]
So he did that on a couple of occasions,
thinking that there were too many unhappy love songs.
And you can't put up with that all night, right enough.
So the happy songs might be about other activities such as drinking
or hunting or whatever, or womanizing,
which is not the same thing as love.
But happy love songs, there may not be too many of them, no.
That's what I think, anyway.   I would like to be proved wrong.

Anyone else?
Female Speaker: Has the younger generation taken
to this form of music?
Is there a renaissance with the younger people?
Are they following this?   Are they discovering it?

Have they developed into lovers of this kind of music?
Brian Mullen: Go ahead.
Reverend Canon Gary Hastings: Who, me?
[ laughter ]
I thought he was going to be able to do it all.
Yeah. As regards the fifing tradition
and Orange tradition, it's very, very strong.
Most of the bands are composed of youngsters.
The average age is probably 20,
because they have more testosterone than boys my age.
As regards traditional music, dance music is very strong as well.
Of all the musical traditions, the singing one would be,
how do you say, the most different from modern music.
Unaccompanied singing, people are not used to it anywhere;
everything is accompanied by drums and bass and the whole works.
So, unaccompanied singing is -- saving your presence, Brian,
no offense -- but it would be a taste you would have
to get accustomed to.
And youngsters, few of them come into the singing.
Brian Mullen: Yeah, I think that's true because, just as an addendum
to that, Gary's wife had actually pointed that out to me
when I was singing a song a few weeks ago,
that most people nowadays, especially the younger generation,
would not have heard a song unaccompanied.
There's plenty of Irish songs sung, and they're on albums,
but they're always arranged with the   [ unintelligible ]

and guitar and fiddle and whistle and interludes,
and they're part of a bigger picture.
The raw bar of just one voice singing the song
without accompaniment seems to me to be
in a precarious position, all right.   Male Speaker:

[ Inaudible ]
, I'm just curious about how drums got in the traditional music;
the bodhran, is it called?   Brian Mullen: The bodhran?

Has it got any traditional music?   Male Speaker: How did it get in?

Brian Mullen: How did it get in?
That is a vexed question, as they say.
Some people are of the opinion
that it's a very old traditional instrument, and other people think
that it was invented in the 1960s by Sean
[ unintelligible ]
. The truth probably lies somewhere between the two.
I think, as far as I can make out from reading and talking to people,
particularly I think as I read in Brendan Breathnach book
that Gary was talking about, Folk Music and Dance in Ireland,
that it was used, the bodhran, as a ritual instrument in Munster
on St. Stephen's day, the 26th of December,
when people went out with the raen   [ spelled phonetically ]

, as they call it there, round the houses,
and they'd beat the drum and play tunes.
Now,   [ unintelligible ]

play a couple of tunes; I think they come from Charlie Peggett
[ spelled phonetically ]
, actually, which they call raen tunes,
which are fife and drum tunes.
And he reckons that tradition of fifing and drumming in Kerry came
from British garrisons, and that part of the country.
So it may be related in that way.
As far as I can make out, the bodhran as an accompaniment
to music flowered since the '60s.
Before that it doesn't seem to have been very common,
though there were some records made in America in the 1920s or '30s
by a fellow whose name I cannot now remember,
and which there is bodhran accompaniment.
But it wouldn't, as far as I can make out, have been widespread.
It seems to have been a Munster thing,
and possibly only used on ritual occasions.
Some of the bodhrans would have had wee tin rattle-y things in them,
and you rattle them as well as banging them,
maybe to scare away evil spirits or whatever.
So I think as an accompaniment to dance music,
it seems to have been fairly recent within the last century.
I hope that's right, having said it all.
Male Speaker: Were the songs you sang
in Irish Gaelic, Scots Gaelic or   [ inaudible ]

? Brian Mullen: Both of them were in Irish Gaelic,
though that "Ma gile marra" -- I think that "gile" may have come
in from Scotland, but it's a word that we have as well.
"Gile" in Irish Gaelic tends to mean a servant or a servant boy.
But "gile" is used as, like, boyfriend in Scots Gaelic.
But both the songs are in Irish Gaelic.
Scots Gaelic is a related, but different language.
It's quite difficult for me to understand, anyway.
Yes. Male Speaker: Are you aware that the tune
for "Irish Molly-o" has been recycled by Tommy
[ inaudible ]
into a song commemorating the explosion of the Nelson
[ inaudible ]   in Dublin in the 1960s?

Brian Mullen: That tune there?   I wasn't aware of that, no.

I wasn't aware of that.   I must have a look at that and see.

Thank you very much for that piece of information.
But tunes are very easily recyclable, let me tell you.
I recently came across one called, "Come All You Young Protestants
and Hear What I Say," which uses the same tune as the Patriot game.
"Come all you young protestants and hear what I say,"
which apparently is, as well as being a song written
by Dominic Behan and a song written by Bob Dylan,
"With God on Our Side," is an Appalachian tune
which both of them stole.   So it belongs to none of them.

Somebody else there, yeah?   That lady there.

Female Speaker: I was wondering if you could explain the Lambeg
[ inaudible ]   , especially the "Lam" part.

Reverend Canon Gary Hastings:   [ Laughs ]

Okay, Lambeg is a place outside Lisburn.
It's an island in the River Lagan   [ spelled phonetically ]

. In Irish it's "lannbeag."
"Lann" is the blade of a knife, and so it's just the shape of the bend.
Female Speaker: So it's -- Reverend Canon Gary Hastings:
L-A-N-N-B-E-A-G.   Brian Mullen: I never knew that.

Reverend Canon Gary Hastings: See that.
Brian Mullen: I always thought it was "Lann,"
meaning a church from the witch.   Reverend Canon Gary Hastings: No.

Male Speaker: The solo singing where you hit so many different notes
and stretch them up and down, is that more Irish?
[ Inaudible ]   lack of an instrument?

What's that about?
Brian Mullen: Indeed, what is that about?
There are many, many theories, and the great thing about theories is
that you can't prove them and you can't disprove them.
You cannot be wrong.
I have the feeling that part of it is lack of an instrument;
because you have no instrument, you're singing unaccompanied.
But it seems to be a fairly ancient tradition all over the world.
So, unaccompanied singing, nothing particular to Ireland about it.
Reverend Canon Gary Hastings: When you sing unaccompanied,
you have to do something to stop it from being boring.
So you go loud or soft, and the other thing you do is you mess
about with the melody and you go   [ clicking noise ]

, stick in twiddly bits.   But people love the bass.

There's a guy, Bob Quinn, in Ireland who says that
[ unintelligible ]
that he says came from North Africa and Arab
[ unintelligible ]   traders going up the coast,

[ inaudible ]
, which may well be true, on the other hand,
which may well not be true, or it could have come from India
where boys get lost, anyway, or the 10 lost tribes of Israel, or --
the world is your oyster when you go back that far, you know.
Brian Mullen: So I think it's a thing you can talk about forever,
and we do, believe you me.   [ laughter ]

We spend all our nights and all our days trying to make sense of it.
And then you, somebody else, you find out an actual fact
which changes your whole perspective on it.
But thankfully there are very few facts; it's all theory.
[ laughter ]   Anybody else?

You've learnt all.
Reverend Canon Gary Hastings: They know it all.
Brian Mullen: We've taught you all we know.

Our work here is done.   Thank you very much.

[ applause ]   [ end of transcript ]