Peggy Lynch was raised on songs and stories in Cork scoraíocht tradition

Singer Peggy Lynch takes Pet O’Connell on a musical journey from the ballads of Ballinagree to hosting this week’s Cork Fleadh Cheoil in Macroom.

THE three-year-old Peggy Lynch was rarely allowed to stay up late enough to hear the parish gossip when neighbours visited her family home for a scoraíocht.

But the welcome her parents regularly afforded to singers, musicians, dancers, and storytellers meant the little girl couldn’t but soak up the ballads and melodies of the locality.

Raised in Donoughmore and Ballinagree, the ballads Peggy first heard echoing from these social gatherings, the likes of ‘The Láine Long Ago’, ‘The Blackberries’, and ‘Banks of Sullane’, sparked a love for the songs of home that would resonate throughout her life.

“As a child I never sang in a scoraíocht — I was never allowed up that late — but I would hear them,” recalls Peggy. “It was part of life — I didn’t know anything else. ‘The School at Ballinagree’, ‘My Own Darling Nora from Ballinagree’, and ‘The Road to Ballinagree’ — when I was a young child they were the songs I heard because we had a scoraíochting house.”

Music and song were only part of the attraction of the scoraíocht, however. “It was talking they’d be. The men had stories that we wouldn’t be allowed to hear, talking about the neighbours as well as playing music. It was where news was spread. There was no way you’d be allowed up. You’d be put out if there was something that wasn’t fit for little ears.”

But with her parents both keen singers, Peggy learned songs from the age of three and continued adding to her repertoire during her schooldays.

Though Johnny Tom Gleeson’s ‘Bold Thady Quill’ may have secured Ballinagree’s fame in ballad-singing circles, he was only one among generations of poets and songwriters from the area.

“We had a wealth of old songs from Ballinagree and Aghinagh,” says Peggy. “We’d have lots of poets, like Poet Aherne, who composed ‘Banks of Sullane’, Peter Golden, Davy and Neily Carroll, and Dan the Master Coakley, the master of Ballinagree School. They’d make a song about anything, but mostly about the native place.”

It was those songs of her youth that came instantly to mind when, in adulthood, Peggy chanced to hear a Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann programme on RTÉ radio.

The songs and the music were totally different to any other programme I’d be listening to; all the old songs that you wouldn’t normally hear, about all the localities, and I thought ‘that’s what I grew up with, that kind of singing’.

Her interest piqued, Peggy decided a Comhaltas branch was what was needed to preserve and promote her own area’s songs, and a letter to the cultural organisation’s Dublin HQ was duly dispatched. In 1978 Aghinagh Comhaltas came into being, with Peggy as secretary, and within a year she was organising an American tour, along with local seanchaí Neily Coakley and a group of musicians, supported by a two-year fundraising campaign.

Having sung and played their way around New York and Boston, the group got a taste for promoting Irish culture abroad. They have since made visits to countries including Estonia, Lithuania, Germany, Spain, and Slovakia, taking the songs of Mushera mountain and the Laney (Láine) river with them around the world.

The area’s songs have been recorded on three albums, Reminiscing Around the Fire, Wandering Through Mushera, and Memories, with Peggy accompanied by Jerome Coakley on accordion.

Peggy even made it into the movies, appearing in Ken Loach’s The Wind that Shakes the Barley, performing the film’s title song at a wake.

Back home in Aghinagh, the branch started running music classes, and hosted Fleadh Cheoil Chorcaí in Macroom in 2001, 2008, and 2012, plus the 2005 Munster Fleadh.

Though one of Cork’s smallest Comhaltas branches, it hosts Ireland’s biggest county fleadh for a fourth time on May 9-13, with 1,200 competitors and hundreds more audience members and supporters converging on Macroom.

While competitors celebrate their success in music and singing competitions, Aghinagh Comhaltas will be celebrating 40 years since Peggy Lynch was inspired to put her native place on Cork’s musical map.

The Cork Fleadh Cheoil takes place in Macroom from Wednesday to Sunday. See corkfleadh.ie