'My mother's song was Bantry Bay': John Creedon on the latest Musical Atlas Of Ireland
John Creedon presents a new season of the Musical Atlas Of Ireland, on RTÉ One.
It’s hard to think of a better music show than John Creedon’s nightly jukebox weekdays on RTÉ Radio 1. It’s partly due to his easy manner and the soothing voice. He puts the nation at ease. And as much as anything, it’s thanks to his uncanny ear for the right tune. He’s often asked how he picks a song.
“It's part science, part rhythm method,” says Creedon. “I listen with my solar plexus, not with my ears and not with my head. It bypasses the head, really. OK, the lyrics will speak to me. I'd say, ‘My God, there's a great truth in that’ or ‘There's a brilliant turn of phrase there’.
“But for the most part, if I listen to, say, funk, my inner African man is roused. I start walking differently. I'm walking with two. I walk around the kitchen like a funky James Brown. Where do you feel it? How do you feel? Do you feel like punching someone's head in because of a war-like march? Say I'm really moved by that. I'm connected with all the people on the terrace beside me.”
In the latest edition of his travel series around Ireland, there’s a twist on the formula — he focuses on how music shapes the identity of Irish people. In a three-part series, he chats with the country’s finest musicians and balladeers, including Phil Coulter, Mary Coughlan and Damien Dempsey.
He investigates the revival of folk music in the 1960s, and he searches for Ireland’s greatest love songs, old songs about forbidden love (the woman in love with the priest) or, for example, , a ballad about a glorious chancer promising his lover “gold rings on every finger”.
“Episode one has a very clear roadmap,” he says. “There were three primordial moods in Irish music. These go back to pre-Christian times. The Dagda was a Celtic God who was said to own a harp. With his harp, he could summon up any emotion. He could summon Suantraí. That means a dream — a lullaby, a slow air might fit in there. Suantraí was music to soothe.
“The second mood was Geantraí — the battle, the bonfires, the chest-beating, the drinking, the shouting, the roar, the bad language, the lepping, the dancing, the jigs, the reels. Even though these are very ancient notions, people get it. It’s in there that lilting goes — diddle ey dum dee, diddle ey dum doh. Geantraí is about lifting the mood.
"There were some great old lilters like Seámus Faye or there are these two now called Absolute Lilt. They’ve millions of hits online; the Yanks are mad about them. They’re two red-haired Irish girls and by God can they go — it's vocal gymnastics.”
The third strand from the Dagda is Goltraí, which comes from “ag gol” — to cry, to lament. It’s about sorrow and sadness. Songs and music that are catalysts for grief. In a powerful segment of the show, Creedon calls on Eimear Noone, the only woman to conduct the orchestra at the Oscars ceremony, to reflect on mourning and her personal story of loss.
“She broke it down and explained to me how a conductor or a composer induces grief,” he says. “We spoke about the Confutatis, as it was called in Mozart's where he's struggling between life and the other life, where he wants to go, but he wants to stay. He's been pulled forward and back. It was the first piece I ever conducted upstairs in my bedroom. I used to constantly be conducting Mozart's as a kid.
“She played for us [conducting an orchestra and the soprano Celine Byrne] this piece she had composed as an elegy for her child who didn’t make it. She had a little boy who [died shortly after birth]. It induced a lot of good, healthy grief on the floor where we filmed it. It was very moving. If you watch her, she's not just a conductor, she's a performer. When you see her face, when she's angry, she’s angry. When she's pulling the soprano in, she reaches out her hand and pulls her into the music.”
In the third and final episode of the series, Creedon catches up with John Spillane to unravel why, as the old saying goes, “every Irish song has two sweethearts — the person and the place”, unpicking songs like , and Spillane’s own classic , for their magic and love of place.
“When you look back, Seán Ó Riada was our great nationalist composer. Elsewhere, you had by Jean Sibelius, which tells the story of Finland privately through music and rising up against Russia. Emmanuel Chabrier wrote
“I realise now that my parents lived in a romantic period in Ireland. Very hard times financially, but it was romantic. Boys had Brylcreem. The swashbuckling man with the broad shoulders was very much in vogue. The shy girl, all these things were very much part of that 1950s' Ireland. As tough as things were, there was a great attraction to romance. We have a capacity for romance. That's why I'm glad we did love of place as being one of the great loves.”
- The first episode of screens Sunday, August 2, 6.30pm on RTÉ One
Jimmy Crowley’s work is totally underestimated. That work he has saved is gargantuan — he has gathered thousands of Irish songs. He has a song about — that's the street I grew up on. Well, technically, I grew up on Devonshire Street, but the house next-door was on Coburg Street. It’s a love song. We need to salute Jimmy Crowley.
My mother's song was , so I'll never hear that without thinking of her. People assume that children don't get scenery, but we did. We got it because my mother loved her own place so much. She grew up on a farm in Adrigole in West Cork on the Beara Peninsula, the most beautiful place. I often say, ‘You can't ate scenery'. We could see the beauty of Bantry Bay spread out before us. We could see the dramatic hills that ripple all the way along Beara out to the Atlantic. That's captured in .
My father’s song was I can remember him singing in the car. He had a fine voice. We've songs for every town and village in Ireland. The melodies are often borrowed because a lot of people didn't have instruments so they'd know a tune and a poet would write a song to fit that. is a classic example that sits on the melody of Skibbereen. It's set in Boston, Massachusetts, about this guy, an outlaw, who legged it out of Ireland. That’s the tale. 'My winsome rogue, my Máirín Óg, my Inchegeelagh Lass.' He never gets back to her, of course. A story replicated all over this country, people separated by one problem or another. It’s the most beautiful song.
