Lee Jones striking the right notes on and off the pitch

If he’s not in the purple of gold of Derrygonnelly Harps there’s a good chance he has a six-string slung over his shoulder as the guitarist for his folk-rock group

Derrygonnelly’s Lee Jones celebrates after their Ulster Club SFC quarter-final win over Dromore. Picture: INPHO/Bryan Keane

Thankfully, mercifully, there’s nothing in the diary beyond football for Lee Jones this weekend.

Normally, the dual identities of footballer and musician are wrestling each other for space in his calendar.

Tiring him out in equal measure and demanding huge energy.

If he’s not in the purple of gold of Derrygonnelly Harps who face Kilcoo in this Sunday’s Ulster club final, there’s a good chance he has a six-string slung over his shoulder as the guitarist for the folk-rock group, The Tumbling Paddies.

In his spare time, if it can be called that, he works as an electronic engineer in Galway, making the six-hour round trips up and back to training on Tuesday evenings before returning home for weekends of football and music.

Winning Championships and a busy schedule of gigs mix like oil and water. In order to make it work, Jones is the cleanest-living rock ‘n’ roller about. If he has any pre-gig nerves, he can’t reach for a settler or two.

Lee Jones playing with The Tumbling Paddies. Jones has mixed his music passion with his love of football which can be a struggle. Picture: Donnie Phair

“It’s the choices you make! I still want to play football and if you want to do that, you have to bite the bullet and not take the pint before a gig or after,” he laughs.

“I am usually coming late to a gig from training or a match, there’s not much time for pints!”

The music came from his Grandfather Trotter, a self-taught master of the fiddle who learned by ear. Lee and his sister were brought to music lessons when he was eight, starting with the piano.

He moved on to the guitar, then drums and finally back to the guitar again. There was always a session for him to play in, and Derrygonnelly is host to the Eddie Duffy and Mick Hoy Memorial Traditional Music Festival every October. Like everything, Covid has halted it, but it will come back.

A few years back, Beoga — the band who Ed Sheeran collaborated with for his cover of Steve Earle’s ‘Galway Girl’ had a gig in Enniskillen’s Ardhowen Theatre. They needed an opening act and Jones was one of those roped in to form a group for the night.

Now, the posse roll six deep, all young men from Fermanagh. They made their debut in the Mountview Hotel in Derrylin and their schedule has taken them all over Ireland and into interesting venues such as a cave in Germany one Saturday night, followed by a flight home and an appointment to play in Carrick-on-Shannon the very next day.

All the while, Jones has combined it with football and the battle between the two has been a struggle.

Usually a mainstay of the team, he came on in the county final to help steer the ship in the final quarter against Enniskillen Gaels.

He came on in that tumultuous Ulster opening win over Tyrone champions Dromore and made it back to the starting line-up for the Ulster semi-final victory over Clann
Eireann.

He’s a busy middle-eight player, one that showed enough in previous seasons to earn a county call-up in Ryan McMenamin’s first season in charge back in 2020.

“I suppose looking back now, I don’t know how I did it,” he recalls.

“I will never forget there was one Boxing night and we were playing in Killarney. There was county training on the next morning up in Lissan (the Fermanagh training ground).

“Any time we would be going further down south we would normally just stay. The venue would put us up.

“So I got my father to come down with me in the car. And he drove back up so I could sleep in the back seat. Even at that, it was 6am before I got home.”

He made it in time for a brisk start at 8.30am. All around him were serious footballers with eight or nine hours sleep banked and a couple of coffees already in the system.

One of the management team walked into the dressing room and announced that the session they had laid out was intended as a test of character. Just to see how much punishment the panel could endure before quitting.

“You can imagine how that made me feel!” he laughs now.

“But we never seen a ball that whole session. It was just torture. Running on top of running. Just brutal.

“After that, I knew it would be one or the other. There were a lot of gigs in the pipeline at that stage and I might have stayed about for a month or two, played a couple of McKenna Cup games and then I pulled the pin. I just wasn’t fit to do it. The body wasn’t letting me.”

The first Fermanagh club to contest an Ulster final in 20 years, the Derrygonnelly story is an interesting one, soaked in sorrow. It wasn’t until 1995 that they won their first county title. They followed it in 2004 and 2009 but started a run in 2015 that has only been interrupted by St Joseph’s in last year’s final.

At the start of this run, they lost club stalwart Damian McGovern to an industrial accident. Like many others in the club, Jones had worked with him and played for him.

He took an underage team Jones played on that were sitting in Division 3. By the time they were minors, they won the county Championship at ‘A’ grade.

Just last summer, another cast-iron club man in Peter Jones — father of current players Leigh and Aaron, died in a drowning accident. Any club would be on their knees thanking their good fortune to have one like them. Derrygonnelly have lost two, many years before their time.

When they met Slaughtneil in 2015, the scoreline was 4-13 to 1-4.

They have learned their lessons in the meantime. They have knocked out Tyrone opposition two years in a row and in their 2019 Ulster semi-final loss to Kilcoo, the margin was a mere two points.

“We are lucky,” says Jones.

“Derrygonnelly have a bunch of players who are well drilled and they want to go places. They want more and more.”

All singing off the same sheet.