Showing off Sliabh Luachra's music at Cork Folk Festival
Eoin 'Stan' O'Sullivan plays at Cork Folk Festival this weekend.
Newmarket fiddle player Eoin 'Stan' O’Sullivan is gearing up for his second year as Sliabh Luachra Musician-in-Residence, and he has big plans.
Resurrecting the Sliabh Luachra Young Musician of the Year competition and starting a record label to release recordings of the emerging musical talent of the Munster region, famed for having produced some of Ireland’s best musicians for hundreds of years, are both on the cards.
O’Sullivan previously held the position, which is supported by Cork, Kerry and Limerick County Councils, in 2018-2019. But he says he’s keen to turn the challenges posed by Covid-19 restrictions into new opportunities for recording, archiving, and nurturing emerging generations of musicians.
The Star Above The Garter, the album recorded by brother and sister Denis Murphy and Julia Clifford in 1969, is still considered the definitive Sliabh Luachra album to this day, O’Sullivan points out.
“It was like the Sergeant Pepper of Sliabh Luachra music; everyone still listens to that,” he says. “But I think every generation provides something and I want to put out a few records.
“Sliabh Luachra is really strong for music and festivals, but it’s never really had a big presence on the web. Maybe now we can really use this time to get people into producing online content.
For trad outsiders, pinpointing the defining elements of Sliabh Luachra music, as distint from the rest of the country’s traditional music styles, is as complex as defining Sliabh Luachra’s geographical location, O’Sullivan admits.
“You know the Father Ted episode with the two pictures of the same sheep? It’s a bit like that for most people,” he says with a laugh. “There are subtle differences.
“Sliabh Luachra is the hill country west of Newmarket, back towards Castleisland and up to Abbeyfeale along the banks of the Feale river, and down towards the Derrynasagart mountains. That’s the heartland of the music. There’s a particular sound, like an accent you might hear in people’s voices. There’s also a richer palette of dance music: In the rest of country, there might be a jig, a reel and a hornpipe, but in Sliabh Luachra there’s also slides, polkas, and things like barndances and waltzes.”
Another aspect of the Sliabh Luachra tradition is certainly the prevalence of musical family lineages. O’Sullivan is himself the son of fiddle player Raymond O’Sullivan.
I'm doing a concert of Sliabh Luachra music for @CorkFolkFest at @Kino_Cork with these legends @OLearyBryan, @peggyfiddler, Maura O'Connor & Emma O'Leary. Get tickets here: https://t.co/gXPLoegCGF https://t.co/10ObKzfwe5
— Eoin Stan O'Sullivan (@eo_sullivan) September 25, 2020
For this year’s Cork Folk Festival, rebranded as “The Festival Behind Closed Doors,” O’Sullivan will perform a celebration of Sliabh Luachra music to a small, seated audience in Cork’s Kino, alongside fellow musicians who are very much Sliabh Luachra musical royalty, including Tureencahill accordion player Bryan O’Leary, the grandson of the famous Johnny O’Leary.
For the next generation, Sliabh Luachra is very much a living tradition, O’Sullivan says: “The music is always changing, but that’s because it’s alive. People take the music and make it their own and there are always musicians adding little things to it. But that’s why it would be good to record a good belt of the new stuff.”
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