Irish Music Abroad

Irish Music Abroad:

Diasporic Sounds in Birmingham

By

Angela Moran
 Irish Music Abroad:
Diasporic Sounds in Birmingham,
by Angela Moran

This book first published 2012

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2012 by Angela Moran

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-4037-8, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4037-8

For my parents
The conversation drifted, as it always did, towards music.
—Jonathan Coe, The Rotters Club
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .................................................................................... ix

Irish Words and Abbreviations................................................................... xi

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
Locating Paddy

Chapter One............................................................................................... 21
The Trip to Birmingham

Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 55

In Handsworth Stands a House: Lily Lawrie and Comhaltas

Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 89

Kelly the Boy from Kings Heath: The Folk and the Critics

Chapter Four............................................................................................ 117

Whiskey on a Sunday: The Lord of the Dance

Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 147

Marching Along in the Big Parade: Piping for St Patrick

Conclusion............................................................................................... 175
Ongoing Intercultural Performance

Bibliography............................................................................................ 193

Index........................................................................................................ 209
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book owes its existence to the generosity of a number of people.

First and foremost, I would like to thank Ruth Davis for her academic
advice and shoring up when the project began as a doctoral thesis. The
loan of Ruth’s own domestic site facilitated much of my writing and I
extend thanks also to Franci for allowing her house to become my
temporary lodgings. I am grateful to Sean Campbell, Nicholas Cook,
Philip Bohlman and John O’Connor, for encouraging and guiding me
through various stages of this research. Other diligent readers who have
kindly assisted in sharpening my arguments include Wolfgang Marx, Anne
Hyland, Sinéad Hynes, Liam Ó hAisibéal, Carol Pegg and Emma Ainsley.

I extend sincere thanks to the staff at an assortment of libraries and

archives, particularly Sian Roberts and Fiona Tait at the Charles Parker
Archive in Birmingham Central Library, and Margaret Jones at the
William Alwyn Archive in Cambridge University Library. Further credit
must be given to the British Association for Irish Studies and to the Sir
Richard Stapley Education Trust for help with funding my work; and to
those at St Catharine’s College who made the space and time available for
me to compile a manuscript on this subject. The steady accompaniment of
Sundeep Lidher, Heather Battey and Sophie Eastwood throughout my
residency of Catz MCR cannot be underestimated.

To all who have made—and continue to make—Ireland sound in

Birmingham, go raibh míle maith agaibh. I remain grateful, in particular,
to Irish residents of the West Midlands who have shared their anecdotes
over many decades, especially Tommy and Kathleen Boyle, Meg
Burnham, Jenna Underwood, Vince Jordan, Mary and Liam Tomlinson,
Paul O’Brien, Kieran Kelly, John Fitzgerald and the Moran and Cahill
families. In addition, my investigations have been fuelled by those
describing experiences of Birmingham from beyond the local Irish
community, including Pam Bishop, Paul Long, Denis Turner, Sean
Mulready, Peggy Seeger and Andrew Downes. Charlotte Millions has
also performed heroics in bringing out and immortalising on film the Irish
tones of Birmingham Town Hall.
x Acknowledgements

I have benefited immeasurably from many interesting conversations

with my brother, James. Our tête-à-tête at Tyberry Close served to clarify
my ideas, motivate my arguments and strengthen my focus. I am glad also
for the company of Thérèse, Maria and Thomas in that same family place,
which enabled me to break my focus at the most necessary moments.

The primary inspiration for this publication comes from my grandmother

Elizabeth Kelly, a bean an tí and survivor from the rebel County Cork,
whose hard work and perseverance in a foreign city would afford me the
ideal vantage point from which to write.

Finally, I owe an incomparable debt of gratitude to my parents, Alana

and Michael, who have always indulged my delight in music and whose
unrivalled version of “Four Green Fields” first opened my ears to the Irish
soundworld of Birmingham. Without their unwavering enthusiasm this
book could never have been written. Le grá go deo.
 IRISH WORDS AND ABBREVIATIONS

An Life River Liffey

Amhrán na bhFiann Soldier’s Song (National Anthem)
Ardchomhairle General Council
BBC British Broadcasting Corporation
Bean an tí Woman of the House
CBSO City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra
CCÉ Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann
Céilí Gathering/Party
Clann na hÉireann Family of Ireland
Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann Association/Gathering of Irish Musicians
Conradh na Gaeilge The Gaelic League
Craic Fun/Entertainment
Cultúrlann na hÉireann Irish Cultural Institute
Dun Mhuire Place of Mary
Erin Grá Mo Chroí Ireland Love of My Heart
Fear an Tighe Man of the House
Feis Lár na hÉireann Competition in the Centre of Ireland
Fleadh(anna) Festival(s)
Fleadh Cheoil Festival/Feast of Music
Fleadh Cheoil na Breataine/hÉireann All-Britain/All-Ireland Music Festival
Fleadh Nua New Festival
as Gaeilge in Irish
Gaeltacht Irish-speaking district
GPO General Post Office (Dublin)
Lá Fhéile Pádraig daoibh Happy St Patrick’s Day and welcome to
agus fáilte romhaibh go
IRA Irish Republican Army
Meitheal Gang/Team
Páirc na hÉireann Field/Park of Ireland
Raidió Teilifis Éireann Irish Radio and Television
RTÉ Raidió Teilifis Éireann
Scoraíocht Social Evening
Sean-nós Old Style
Taoiseach Irish Premier
Thar Sáile Overseas
Treoir Guidance/Index
 INTRODUCTION

LOCATING PADDY

As I was a walking down London Road,

I came to Paddy West’s house,
He gave me a feed of American hash,
And he called it Liverpool scouse.

“Paddy West” was a hit for The Clancy Brothers in America in the
1960s. Its opening verse, above, sets up a narrative describing a man born
in Ireland during the nineteenth century, who has travelled to Britain to
run a boarding house on Liverpool’s Great Howard Street. Revealingly,
these lyrics triangulate the Irish migrant’s experience between three
significant locations: the USA, Liverpool and London, a geographical trio
that has often been the prime focus for studies of the Irish abroad. Even in
popular culture, recent bestselling novels, such as Joseph O’Connor’s Star
of the Sea and Roddy Doyle’s A Star Called Henry, have described
Irishmen charting a course to America’s east coast via the docks at
Liverpool, reminding their readers of Ireland’s past historical migrations.
The fact that these books are printed by well-known London publishing
houses (Secker and Warberg, and Jonathan Cape, respectively) gives
modern Irish writers such as Doyle and O’Connor an imprimatur of
success in the mode of earlier London-Irishmen such as Shaw, Wilde or
Yeats. When it comes to talking about the Irish worldwide, then, those in
the USA, Liverpool and London have received the lion’s share of
scholarly and literary attention, whilst important communities of Irish men
and women living in other locations—such as Birmingham, England—
have tended to be overlooked.

Whilst the British cities of Liverpool and London are prominent in the
discourse of Irish exodus, urban American centres, such as Boston and
New York, tend to head the hierarchy (one only has to look at where the
Irish Premier travels to on St Patrick’s Day each year for evidence of this)
and the USA continues to dominate musical investigations of the Irish
diaspora. By contrast, regional Britain has tempted far fewer scholars
2 Introduction

examining Irish music during the twentieth century. The musician Reg Hall
was so astonished that London’s Irish music and dance remained
unexplored territory in the 1990s (despite the fact that céilí bands had
originated there over a hundred years earlier under the watch of Conradh
na Gaeilge) that he completed a doctoral thesis on the topic himself.1 Hall
concluded his study of the English capital just as Nuala O’Connor
launched Bringing it All Back Home, a publication celebrating the music
of Irish America in contrast to the bleak musical picture she believes to
characterise the Irish expats who travelled east instead of west.

O’Connor’s penultimate chapter is a counterpoint to the affirmative

American sections that constitute the majority of her book. It is instead
dedicated to the “lost Irish soul” in Britain, whose musical representatives
she struggles to find, including, as her main examples, the English-born
folk singer Ewan MacColl and the fourth generation Irishman and pop star
Elvis Costello.2 The glaring blind-spot in O’Connor’s analysis is
particularly surprising, given that, throughout the twentieth century, the
Irish were the largest foreign-born population in Britain. Unlike in
America, where people from across Europe, Latin America and Asia
arrived in vast numbers from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth
centuries, people from Ireland provide the only example of a statistically
significant labouring group of migrants in Britain for much of the period
until 1939. Moreover, the majority of those leaving Ireland after the
Second World War travelled to the cities of England and Scotland rather
than across the Atlantic.

The presence of people from the island of Ireland on the island of

Britain was hardly a phenomenon of the twentieth century of course.
England experienced large-scale Irish immigration as early as the 1400s
and the two countries have a long and troubled history of conquest and
resettlement, with English landowners in Ireland, Irish labourers in
England and the imposition of the English language across the Atlantic
Islands. The presence of a distinctive Irish sound amongst English and
Irish audiences in the UK has often corresponded with this disquieting
sequence of events, verifying the fact that, as Martin Stokes and Philip

1
Hall dates the first céilí band to 1897. Reg Hall, Irish Music and Dance in
London 1870-1970 (PhD Thesis, University of Sussex, 1994), p.16.
2
O’Connor explains that the “lost Irish soul” is epitomised by Paul Brady’s song
about Irish migration to England, “Nothing but the Same Old Story”. Nuala
O’Connor, Bringing It All Back Home (Somerset: Butler and Tanner Ltd., 1991),
p.157.
 Locating Paddy 3

Bohlman have eloquently put it, “we travel with music”.3 Irish music
enjoyed a particular vogue during the Elizabethan era, for instance, when
the Queen set a tradition for Irish harpers at her English Court. In turn,
their repertoire influenced her decision to learn the Irish language.4

The appreciation of Irish music by the Establishment would not

positively affect Irish social standing in England at this time however.
Elizabeth’s disregard for the Irish became apparent through her ruthless
foreign policy and, as Hugh Brody has argued, the power inequality
caused by the Queen of England’s imposition of a ruling class in Ireland
would define Irish culture from this point onwards. The Cromwellian
settlement of the Elizabethan era may have stripped Catholic Ireland of
wealth, but Brody believes the establishment of a Protestant authority
distinguished the unique language, religion and social mores of Ireland’s
peasantry at this juncture, and “imbued Irish solidarity and determination
to preserve a distinction”.5

Regardless of how popular Irish music has been at certain moments,

separate social statuses have meant that migrant communities from Ireland
since the administration of Cromwell have not necessarily been in the
privileged position of preserving this cultural distinctiveness for
themselves in England. Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley indicate the
limited public display of Irish cultural activity in Victorian England, for
example, citing a “progressive accommodation by immigrants to their host
society”.6 Swift and Gilley do not expound on some essential features—
such as Irish musical performance—that may have served to define these
immigrant communities. In this way, they are quite typical of those who
research the Irish in Britain. Scholars, generally working within the
academic disciplines of history or literature, often apply a narrow set of
frameworks to the questions associated with such topics as census returns,
high politics, economic history, literary elites, or revisionist historicism.

3
Martin Stokes and Philip Bohlman, ‘Introduction’, in Celtic Modern: Music at
the Global Fringe eds. by Stokes and Bohlman (Maryland: Scarecrow Press Inc.,
2003), pp.1-26 (p.9).
4
William Grattan Flood, ‘Irish Music in the Time of Queen Bess’, Journal of the
Irish Folk Song Society, 13 (1913), pp.20-21 (p.20).
5
Hugh Brody, Inishkillane: Change and Decline in the West of Ireland (London:
Allan Lane The Penguin Press, 1973), p.49.
6
Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley, ‘Introduction’, in The Irish in Victorian Britain,
eds. by Swift and Gilley (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999), pp.7-13 (p.12).
4 Introduction

The historian Kaja Irene Ziesler produced one of the earliest studies of
Irish people living in Birmingham, which, like most of those that have
been produced about Britain, entirely neglects the importance of music in
securing a recognisable public presence. Ziesler does, however, conclude
her important doctoral thesis of 1989 with the thought that, according to
the archetypal statistical and sociological evidence, “Birmingham will
have a thriving active and increasingly vocal community for many years
yet”.7 Ziesler’s prediction for Birmingham’s Irish diaspora into the
nineties is one of a loudening political and economic voice, but her use of
that very adjective “vocal”, perhaps unintentionally, alludes to the visceral
power of sound for defining Irishness in Birmingham. Taking my cue
from Ziesler’s rhetoric, this book is concerned with the primary ways in
which an audible, “vocal”, aspect of Irish identity has been created.

The central premise here is that a distinctly Irish musical sound has
been formed in Birmingham since 1950. Its volume has increased with the
expansion of the city’s Irish community from this time, as the children,
grandchildren and great-grandchildren of post-war migrants have counted
themselves amongst the Irish diaspora and sought to compensate with
music for that most obvious audible signifier of nationhood, a spoken
language or accent from Ireland. For these younger sections of
Birmingham’s Irish community, the silencing of music in studies of
historical and social migration from Ireland has often been deafening. As
the English-born Irish musician Paul O’Brien explains, “I think the whole
second generation discussion is well overdue...we have a voice, and a
rather loud one at that!”8

By protecting a musical ethnicity, recent Irish migrants and their

descendants have coloured the soundscape of the Birmingham mainstream,
just as those harpers finding favour with Elizabeth I gave the English
Court a certain Irish identity in the sixteenth century, with the Queen
herself often heard “travelling with music”, humming Irish songs around
the corridors of Greenwich Palace.9 So too, my study of contemporary
Birmingham presents the two-way nature of Irish cultural interaction,
tracing the ways in which a spatial change has occurred for the minority
community in this city. Distinguishable Irish music has moved from a

7
Kaja Irene Ziesler, The Irish in Birmingham 1830-1970 (PhD Thesis, University
of Birmingham, 1989), p.345.
8
Email correspondence with Paul O’Brien, 13 January 2009.
9
For more on the Irish musical performances at Elizabethan court, see Albert L.
Lloyd, Folk Song in England (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1967), p.164.
 Locating Paddy 5

private area protected in the city centre to a public realm from which it
now creates a distinctive sound of Birmingham that has fed back to the
home nation. By presenting a panorama of live instrumental and sung
musical performances in the city I ask, if the Irish diaspora in Birmingham
has indeed proved to be increasingly “vocal”, as Ziesler forecast, during
the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries, then what is that sound,
where is that sound, who is listening and why on earth would they want
to?

Musical Space for the Birmingham Irish

1950 makes for a significant start date when ascertaining where and
how Irish music exists and has existed in Birmingham because, at this
time, the local area was boosted by a vast wave of post-war migration
from Ireland. From this point, Birmingham became a partial answer to the
more comprehensive question, in what environment does Irish music
flourish outside Ireland. More specifically, I question where the national
identity of Irish musicians in Birmingham has been replicated or
conserved. When and why have local non-Irish musicians participated?
How have social contexts affected the manner of Irish musical
performance in the city? Beginning with these enquiries sidesteps a
chronic problem in the general study of Irish music: as John O’Flynn
explains, “what is included and what is excluded under that term [Irish
music] is very often contested”.10 This book largely avoids such
controversies because, rather than the identity of the music per se, my
concern is music within a definite place. I seek to discover how all
audiences for Irishness in Birmingham relate to the evocation of a shared
national past, by connecting the ideas of contemporary urban group
identity with that of Ireland’s cultural traditions that travelled with
migration. This book investigates the development of a unique
Birmingham-Irish style of music and the ways in which this informs the
musical performance of some of its participants.

I nevertheless remain vigilant about any essentialist notion of what

Irish music itself, or “the Irish” themselves, might be, mindful of the great
deal of work scholars such as Gerry Smyth and Harry White have
undertaken in recent years that attempt to define Irish music within

10
John O’Flynn, The Irishness of Irish Music (Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), p.1.
6 Introduction

international, changing, fluid geographic contexts.11 The most straightforward

definition of something Irish is to say that it is anyone or anything that is
found or locatable on the island of Ireland. But this is clearly inadequate
as a definition when we consider the history of migration of people from
that island (no European country has experienced the ratio of emigration to
population on such a scale as Ireland over the past two centuries) and the
prevailing globalisation of Irish music. During the 1990s, the former
president of Ireland, Mary Robinson, recognised the fact that Irishness
could not simply equal “Ireland”, but rather, that “notions of the diaspora
circulated in official and media discourses of Irish identity”.12 The
physical and cultural globalisation of Ireland, which leaves Roy Foster
questioning “whether the country actually is still an ‘island’ in any
meaningful sense”, has meant that Irish music and traditions can scarcely
hope to be insulated in some kind of pure form from other systems and
repertoires.13

Globalisation also provoked the international Celtic fashions of the

nineties, in the wake of which Irish music has been assured its public place
as the world’s favourite “other”. In turn, Irish music may include elements
that originate in performance traditions on the island of Ireland, as well as
those perceived to be Irish but that actually derive from elsewhere (Phil
Coulter’s famous song about Derry, “The Town I Loved So Well”, with its
classical score for piano, De Danaan’s reworking of Handel’s “Arrival of
the Queen of Sheba” for flute, fiddle and bodhrán, or the inspiration Bill
Whelan took from the Greek bouzouki for his Riverdance composition, are
straightforward examples of this). As Breda Gray explains, being Irish
away from Ireland has “involved a re-territorialisation of identity and re-
embedding of culture”.14 Irish music ebbs and flows from Ireland, and it
relies on the diaspora.

Studying Irish music in Birmingham provides a unique opportunity to

observe at close range the processes of this re-territorialisation and re-
embedding. In this book I engage with the theoretical literature, like that

11
Gerry Smyth, Noisy Island: A Short History of Irish Popular Music (Cork: Cork
University Press, 2005); Harry White, The Progress of Music in Ireland (Dublin:
Four Courts Press, 2005).
12
Breda Gray, ‘The Irish Diaspora: Globalised Belonging(s)’, Irish Journal of
Sociology, 11/2 (2002), pp.123-144 (p.123).
13
Robert Fitzroy Foster, The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in
Ireland (London: Allen Lane, 2001), p.xi.
14
Gray, ‘The Irish Diaspora’, p.135.
 Locating Paddy 7

of Gray, which implies “diaspora” almost as a verb rather than a noun; as a

mobile and mobilising space for continual cultural exchange. I associate
musical identity with personal identity in this study of an urban English
society. At times in the book I will wish to qualify exactly where a
particular performer comes from, but being Irish for the purposes of this
project is something that is self-defining. If music is recognised as being
Irish by an audience in Birmingham and, under the same edict, if a person
chooses to consider themselves Irish, then they will be included as Irish in
this book, whether that person is of the first, second, third, fourth, or nth
generation. This ruling may be contentious. David Lloyd has written
scathingly about the way in which those who claim the title “Irish
American” do so in order to seek “the cultural distinctiveness that they
have learnt to see as the ‘privilege’ of ethnic minorities”.15 After all, lots
of these self-declared “Irish” have absolutely no intention of returning to
Ireland, being prosperous and well-integrated in countries such as the UK
or the USA. In the chorus of his song “Plastic”, the second-generation
singer Paul O’Brien celebrates ethnic marriages of the “Birmingham
Irish”, “Glasgow Irish”, “Toronto Irish” and many others. The pride in
O’Brien’s own dual nationality is endorsed by the title of social historian
Carl Chinn’s comprehensive study, Birmingham Irish: Making Our Mark
(the first publication to celebrate this local community as current and
successful).16

The examples in this book present Irish ethnicity channelled into a

multicultural flow away from Ireland. Avtar Brah provides a useful
template for this in her deconstruction of the “myth of return”.17 In Brah’s
interpretation, “staying put” is the priority for a diaspora whilst “diasporic
space” is an area constructed by migrant subjects alongside an indigenous
populace. In pointing to the myriad of ways in which music provides the
ultimate symbolic transformation of a social space, I relate the same notion
to the Birmingham Irish and to the accompanying broader influences of
Irish music on England’s culture. Rather than following the straightforwardly
chronological approach of Carl Chinn’s previous historical study of the
Irish in Birmingham, then, this book complements Brah’s impression of
“diasporic space” by focusing on specific musical locations, in which the

15
David Lloyd, Ireland After History (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999), p.102.
16
Carl Chinn, Birmingham Irish: Making Our Mark (Birmingham: Birmingham
Library Services, 2003).
17
Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (Routledge:
London, 1996), p.36.
8 Introduction

native space of Birmingham has assimilated Irish music as part of the

broader city sound.

Such presentations offer the kind of sites defined by Pierre Nora

“where memory crystallizes and secretes itself”.18 Interestingly, Nora
separates the realms of history and memory, arguing that, whilst the
former is the property of academic annals, the latter might be embodied in
particular venues such as museums, cathedrals, palaces and so forth.
Taking inspiration from this idea, my interest lies with certain places for
Irish musical performance in Birmingham, including churches, public
houses and concert halls, with the reasoning of Johanne Devlin Trew that
“concepts of ‘homeland’ and ‘Diaspora’ are tied to identity, history, and
place”.19 However, “place” in Trew’s context refers to the origin of the
music and from where the performer has moved, whereas I prioritise a
present “place”, in which music continues to create the diasporic space
relevant for the city. By analysing Irish music in association with the
places of its exhibition, I introduce a Birmingham performance archive of
the music played and the musicians who play it, and, most crucially, of the
Irish sites of the region in which it occurs.

This musical mapping of Irishness onto Birmingham is inspired by all

kinds of evidence connected with the performance process. According to
Nora, objects associated with the event such as tickets, programmes,
souvenir T-shirts, performers’ instruments and costumes might also be a
site of memory, although it must be noted that these items are only
fragments of the contemporaneous experience of that live performance.
Whilst an academic history, therefore, might try to fix the past and analyse
exactly what happened during a particular period, memory does something
different. It is, as Nora explains, constantly evolving and changing. The
Irish music creating a communal ethnic event in Birmingham is often
played live, often remembered only hazily, and to some extent

18
Between 1984 and 1992 the historian Pierre Nora edited a seven volume project
about French history, called "Les lieux de mémoire" (or "sites of memory"). In the
1990s, a condensed three volume version was published under the title Realms of
Memory and it is Pierre Nora’s introduction to this English-language edition, an
article named ‘Between Memory and History’ that I refer to here. Pierre Nora,
‘Between Memory and History’, Representations, 26 (1989), pp.7-25.
19
Johanne Devlin Trew, ‘Diasporic Legacies: Place, Politics, and Music Among
the Ottawa Valley Irish’, in Celtic Modern: Music at the Global Fringe eds. by
Martin Stokes and Philip Bohlman (Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2003), pp.93-117
(p.96).
 Locating Paddy 9

unrecoverable, reformulated as history. If something is recorded we can

go back and replay it; the music is more fixed and easier to transcribe than
that of a performance that has not been documented in this way. As
Deborah Weagel has argued, when it comes to performance interpretation,
a particular triadic relationship occurs between composer, artist and
audience that cannot be duplicated outside the live event.20 Even a full
recording of a concert has no hope of immortalising or explaining
adequately the significance of that concert to each individual member of
the audience located in a particular historical space, place, and time. Nor
indeed can this be made explicit in any verbal or written account of the
musical display, including my own.

Our experience of music is rarely a stable one. My own personal

opinion changes throughout the act of listening to a programme. It
depends on what other people say after the music has ended (my attitude
in the second half of a concert might change dramatically as a result of
interval conversations over a glass of wine) and the judgment alters in
retrospect. The wider implications of this are clear; those who sang pro-
IRA rebel songs in Birmingham in the early 1970s, for example, were
likely to see their participation and the meaning of those songs quite
differently after the Provisional IRA detonated bombs in the city centre in
1974. Thus this book does not assert the “facts” of the Birmingham Irish
in the same manner as statistical studies of Irish migration. I engage rather
with the musical events lived by some Irish migrants in Birmingham,
following Brah in investigating the “multi-realities” of ethnic performance
that provide our “on-going sense of self”.21 In The Irishmen (1965), the
unreleased film by BBC producer Philip Donnellan, a soundtrack
compiled using Irish musicians in Birmingham is coupled with the
diegetic singing and playing of Irish men in London pubs. The sound of
the production evokes the absent Ireland in an urban English milieu. In
the same way, performances of Irishness have reconfigured the English
life of Birmingham with a diasporic music.

20
Deborah Weagel uses as her evidence the work of the pianist Glenn Gould. See
Deborah Weagel, Words and Music: Camus, Beckett, Cage, Gould (New York:
Peter Lang, 2010) p.111.
21
Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora, p.21.
10 Introduction

Developing an Urban Ethnomusicology for Birmingham

Specific incidents such as the Birmingham pub bombings of 1974
suggest that Irish music cannot, in fact, always be “global” in Britain; that
is, performed unregulated to an entire population without definite
geographical and political boundaries. When linked to certain sites, Irish
music has provoked social turbulences. Perhaps this thought encouraged
Malcolm Chapman to cover his back when contributing the Celtic portion
to Martin Stokes’ music volume with a proviso; “The author of this piece
makes no claim to be a specialist in Celtic music, or any kind of
musicologist”.22 Chapman investigates the case for global “Celtic music”
providing the audible compensation where a language and political voice
is lacking. Specific place-based Irish music has often achieved the same
ends in Birmingham, but my introduction can include no such caveat as
Chapman’s. Indeed, I began conducting fieldwork that would uncover an
Irish musical identity in Birmingham before holding any notion of
compiling this book. During the 1990s, when ethnomusicology became
increasingly interested in the identity of the ethnomusicologist (with the
effect that fieldwork became less about observing and more about lived
experiences), I was unknowingly cooperative with the trendsetters in the
discipline; learning traditional Irish fiddle music, competing in Irish
dancing competitions and enjoying regular family get-togethers and
religious ceremonies at important centres for the Irish in Birmingham.

In essence then, the idea for a book arose from my own attachments to
the Irish diaspora in Birmingham, rooted in these childhood experiences.
After all, my family was part of that mass migration to Birmingham during
the second half of the twentieth century and because I was raised in a
central English conurbation, I engaged in a variety of Irish musical (and
other) activities throughout my childhood and adolescence, typical for a
second or third generation upbringing. It is through music that I continue
to form my own personal belonging to Ireland alongside a strong sense of
identification with Birmingham. By means of the classic participant-
observant method of ethnomusicology, therefore, I initiate and seek to
answer these questions, acknowledging, as Brah does, that where “I” or
“Me” is used as some kind of autobiographical authority, “this experience

22
Chapman defines “Celtic music” as malleable and compensation for a language
and political voice. See Malcolm Chapman, ‘Thoughts on Celtic Music’, in
Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place ed. by Martin
Stokes (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1994), pp.29-44 (p.29).
 Locating Paddy 11

matters”.23 Nevertheless, instead of providing an opportunity for some

“confessional” research, my ethnomusicology at home uses these personal
reflections and prior knowledge in order to provide insights into an
overlooked but significant part of the musical heritage of the English
Midlands.24 The composition of this book is largely ethnographic, based
on oral histories of the last sixty years from people still living in
Birmingham or else with whom there is a palpable link.

An ethnomusicological study of the diaspora opens new interpretive

insights into an overlooked aspect of Irish music as a whole, because,
according to O’Flynn, “where the focus is on the last 50 years or so, most
musicological studies purporting to engage with Irish musical identities
either ignore domestic music or at best regard a limited number of artists
as a phenomenon”.25 Investigating such areas as the ignored “domestic
music” outlines how Irish music has engaged and developed with
Birmingham in recent decades. Ruth Finnegan’s publication The Hidden
Musicians was the first to present the amateur music of a contemporary
town—Milton Keynes in her case—as a signifier for the workings of
society. Finnegan sought to rectify the fact that, when it comes to
acknowledging the cultural dimension of England’s urban centres, the
onus is generally placed on sports or media with music disregarded, unless
in a professional capacity. In her sequel, Tales of the City, Finnegan went
further in claiming music to be not a hobby, but rather a “moral focus”.26
Finnegan’s “invisible system” of musicians in Milton Keynes enjoys a
similar dynamic in Birmingham and it is beneficial to adopt her
investigative technique of presenting particular case studies of musicians,
groups and places. With a spotlight on Birmingham, it is apparent that
some of the most fruitful sites for examining the Irish community in the
English Midlands echo those that Finnegan has explored; primarily private
houses, public houses and churches. Furthermore, although avoiding any
overt diasporic theories in her study of Milton Keynes, Finnegan implies a
fluctuating connection between regional performances in urban Britain and

23
Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora, p.9.
24
Jeff Todd Titon explains that some autobiographical ethnomusicology has been
attacked as “confessional”’. See Titon, ‘Knowing Fieldwork’ in Shadows in the
Field eds. by Gregory F. Barz and Timothy J. Cooley (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1977), pp.25-41 (p.34).
25
O’Flynn, The Irishness of Irish Music, p.15.
26
Ruth Finnegan, Tales of the City: A Study of Narrative and Urban Life
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p.103.
12 Introduction

Ireland with an initial dedication in The Hidden Musicians to “music-

makers in that other fair city, Derry”.27

Gendered Space
The particular sites of investigation in this book—domestic houses,
public houses, churches, parish halls and private clubs—are often coded as
specifically female or male. This points to another recurring dynamic.
The Clancy Brother’s song “Paddy West” may have inspired my
construction of a musical narrative for the ignored, silent Paddy West
Midlands, but women play a key role in protecting Irish culture and music
in Birmingham. Sharon Lambert has explored the role of women in
facilitating Irish cultural traditions in Lancashire, adding to a growing
corpus of social scientific work on Irish identity in England, which
recognises the insight of women, including that by Mary Lennon, Marie
McAdam, Joanne O’Brien and Bronwen Walter.28 Whilst this book does
not prioritise female musicians, at times I follow Lambert in emphasising
the gendered consideration necessary for a comprehensive understanding
of Irish music-making in Britain’s Second City. As Sylvia Walby asserts,
“gender cannot be analysed outside of ethnic, national and ‘race’ relations;
but neither can these latter phenomena be analysed without gender”.29

In a sense, a gendered reading of my topic needs no metaphorical,

sonic code. By 1950 the number of women arriving from Ireland in
Birmingham matched and, at many stages, overtook the number of men.30
In a way that was quite atypical for immigrant groups, women ensured the
permanence of an Irish community in the city, because, unlike the many

27
Ruth Finnegan, The Hidden Musicians (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1989), p.xii.
28
Sharon Lambert, Irish Women in Lancashire, 1922-60: Their Story, (Lancaster:
University of Lancaster, 2001). See also Mary Lennon, Marie McAdam and
Joanne O’Brien, Across the Water: Irish Women’s Lives in Britain (London:
Virago Press, 1988) and Bronwen Walter, Outsiders Inside: Whiteness, Place and
Irish Women (London: Routledge, 2001).
29
Sylvia Walby, ‘Woman and Nation’, in Mapping the Nation ed. by Gopal
Balakrishnan (London: Verso, 1996), pp.235-254 (p.252).
30
From July 1946 Irish females could enter Britain regardless of any suitable
employment at home. Regulations on males were brought in line in 1952.
Between 1946 and 1951 the average net migration to Britain saw one thousand
three hundred and sixty five women relocate from Ireland for every one thousand
men.
 Locating Paddy 13

labouring Irishmen in Birmingham for whom constant movement was a

prerequisite, the employment of women included jobs predominantly in
nursing, administration and domestic service, which were comparatively
static. Increasing urbanisation stabilised the nuclear family, but, although
Ireland’s fine strong sons were building the city, it was the case that “the
overall increase in net migration is accounted for by the volume of female
migration”.31 National belonging to Ireland switched from maternal duty
to participation in the paid labour force when in Birmingham.

Nonetheless when it comes to public presentations of Irish music,

women are typically overlooked in song lyrics, tend not to be famous
performers and have often been in the minority of audience members
(generally taking on childcare duties rather than entering the traditionally
male sphere of the social and drinking clubs). In seeking to unmask the
hidden narrative, Jim MacLaughlin explains that, separate from the
celebrated male identity of Ireland, which travelled easily with emigration;
with the bravery, daring tales and noble exploits involved in leaving home
for the greater good, was the marginalisation of women’s lives, bound up
with widespread gendering of the nation as a “poor mother”.32 Such
vessels as the gentle harp or the ethereal vocal lilt allow this predictable
vulnerable feminine identity of Ireland to be created in music. It is an
image contrasted, more often than not, with that of bullish Britain. When
brought to bear on a physical, practical level however, this nurturing,
national stereotype led to frequent criticism of Irish females who left
Ireland, on account of their denying the country her native sons, in what
was seen as a selfish pursuit of pleasures in America and elsewhere.33

This attitude is certainly reflected in the musical soundtrack to the

situation in Birmingham. The experience of Irish migration is
predominantly that of men’s experience, as expressed through the manual
labouring songs, the male-dominated pub sessions, the clergy-controlled
music accompanying parish hall dances or the raucous street parades for St

31
Enda Delaney, Demography, State and Society: Irish Migration to Britain, 1921-
1971 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), p.162.
32
As discussed in MacLaughlin, ‘The Historical Background to ‘New Wave’ Irish
Emigration’, in Location and Dislocation in Contemporary Irish Society:
Emigration and Irish Identities, ed., by Jim MacLaughlin (Cork: Cork University
Press, 1997), pp.5-29.
33
See particularly the inclusions by Jim MacLaughlin, Breda Gray, Bronwen
Walter and Eithne Luibhead in Location and Dislocation in Contemporary Irish
Society ed., by MacLaughlin.
14 Introduction

Patrick. Each of these presents an Irish performance site constructed in

England, although a biased audibility is not specific to diasporic display
(the traditional singer Brid Boland explains, so too in Ireland, “[women]
aren’t celebrated at all in nationalist songs or else they’re portrayed as
victims or elevated to being identified with their country”34).
Considerations of gendered space in this book nevertheless endorse Helen
O’Shea’s observation that women “as Irish emigrants […] have become
invisible”.35

The emergence of Birmingham as the progressive and pluralistic urban

centre of post-War England emasculated the concept of Empire. By
effortlessly relieving the Republic of Ireland of thousands of unemployed
residents during the following decades of recession, and itself providing
the stage for the vital contribution of women to the moulding of an Irish
musical aesthetic, Birmingham rewrote the colonial England blamed for
the sad history of Mother Éire. The public realm of the English Midlands
transformed previous gendered ideas of the home nation. Within the
sphere of ethnomusicology lies the scope—indeed the moral responsibility
—to study music as society. A musical ethnography of Birmingham
makes visible, or rather audible, women as Irish emigrants.

Focusing on Birmingham and Focusing on the Irish

Birmingham is an ideal location for a study of Irish identities in music
because when it became an important centre for mass immigration from
the fifties, those from Ireland were the first and most numerous groups to
arrive, advancing the rapid urban development of the city from this point.
This ethnography presents various movements of an audible Irishness
between Birmingham’s sonic architectural levels; a journey, ultimately,
from the city’s private to the public sphere. I share Jacques Derrida’s
enthusiasm for defining archives in terms of both place and process, as he
expressed in Archive Fever (by returning us to the etymology of the Greek
arkhe, Derrida shows that for audiences “archive” can denote both the
physical building and the written material produced there for purposes of
storage, retrieval and organisation).36 At certain moments in Birmingham,

34
Lennon, McAdam and O’Brien, Across the Water: Irish Women’s Lives in
Britain, p.73.
35
Helen O’Shea, The Making of Irish Traditional Music (Cork: Cork University
Press, 2008), p.117.
36
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, trans. by Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1995).
 Locating Paddy 15

the Irish migrant found space to protect domestic rural traditions, socialist
politics, a nationalist Catholic religion and the anniversary of St Patrick.
This book approaches each episode in turn, as structural levels forging
Birmingham’s Irish identity, while recognising certain social, political and
religious themes that interpenetrate the distinct sounds and successes of a
specific musical place.

Some of those sites shared with Finnegan are intriguingly liminal and
might appear neither fully private nor fully public. There is almost always
a risk of music being overheard in any location. As David Toop
ruminates, the “ears cannot hide themselves or save themselves”.37
Ascertaining the personal and communal spaces for Irish musical
performance and identity in Birmingham is particularly problematic. To
give one example, it was reasonably common for the Irish manual labourer
to lodge or share “digs” in the city centre during the 1950s and 1960s,
occupying a domestic room or bed for only a short part of the day (and
often sharing this personal space with others who might be working
different shifts). To conduct a private act, such as washing, or a musical
act, such as rehearsing a tune on the tin whistle, in this context was to
always risk instead performing a public act. Similarly, churches, clubs,
pubs and, particularly, city streets are venues where private thought,
prayer or musicianship might at any point transfer into a more
collaborative, shared endeavour that becomes identifiably Irish to a
general audience in Birmingham.

The arrangement of these sites for discussion as successive chapters,

beginning with private house displays of Irish instrumental music and
culminating with St Patrick’s public parade on the streets of Birmingham
city centre, means the evolution of this book itself endorses the social
phenomenon of music, acknowledged by Bohlman as a case of “private
domains persistently giving way to an omnipresent public sphere”.38
Irregular and unpredictable shifts in the extra-musical narrative have

37
David Toop, Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener (New York:
Continuum, 2010), p.90.
38
Bohlman makes this observation based on a Thomas Burger translation of
Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An
Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, published in 1962, and 1989. See
Philip Bohlman, ‘Composing the Cantorate: Westernizing Europe’s Other Within’,
in Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation and Appropriation in
Music, eds. by Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh (London: University of
California Press, 2000), pp.187-212 (p.196).
16 Introduction

affected the progress for Irish music’s route around Birmingham’s private
and public spaces. Because of this, a performance example from the
collective central city site of Birmingham Town Hall forms the starting
point for every chapter, providing something of an opportunity for the
community and reader to regroup.

In Chapter One I lay the groundwork for the various distinct musical
studies which follow by introducing the geographical parameters of the
city of Birmingham. I explore the adaptation of musical patterns as the
situation has demanded at different times for the Birmingham Irish from
1950. This first chapter references music-making in Birmingham that falls
within the overarching framework Brah provides, such as West Indian and
Irish migrants using the same dance halls in the city centre. By referring
to Andrew Downes’ orchestral composition Celtic Rhapsody, I nod to the
current scholarly idea of a rapidly increasing reunion between ethno and
historical musicological debate.39 This chapter also considers the popular
musician Paul O’Brien who sings about the perceived “plasticity” of
people born in Birmingham. This idea—that those living in England are
seen as mere Irish wannabes by those living in Ireland—can be linked to
broader arguments about the issues of authenticity and hybridity that has
had a bearing on the reception of Birmingham Irish music and other
musics associated with creating a diasporic space.

This first chapter discusses where and when Birmingham’s ears

became attuned to Irish migrants and summarises the multifarious
narrative of the community since its inception following World War Two.
I highlight the relevance of Baz Kershaw’s performance studies
dimension—in which he interprets the presentation of memories as serving
to decrease historical and geographical distances—for the continuing
Irishness of Birmingham.40 In exploring some of the particularities of the
Birmingham-Irish community (or rather communities), I demonstrate its
functioning as a microcosm of collective global trends in the migration
and integration of Irish music, relating Richard Schechner’s account of

39
As Nicholas Cook persuasively argues, ‘We Are All (Ethno)musicologists
Now’. See Henry Stobart ed., The New (Ethno)musicologies (Lanham: Scarecrow
Press, 2008), pp.48-70.
40
Baz Kershaw, ‘The Death of Nostalgia: Performance, Memory and Genetics’, in
The Radical in Performance: Between Brecht and Baudrillard, ed. by Kershaw
(London: Routledge, 1999), pp.157-186.
 Locating Paddy 17

restorative behaviour to those who are Irish outside Ireland.41 These

theories hold the crux of the book; this chapter something of the pizza base
accommodating four distinct “toppings” of subsequent chapters, in which
musical expressions unite with memory, time and place, in order to show
that a performance venue, whether a boarding house, a public house, or a
private house, presents a particular site or archive, as do the sonic practices
associated with it.

The first specific site for this investigation is presented in Chapter

Two. The focus here is Birmingham’s private domestic interior, which
creates a distinct contrast with some of the city’s more public spaces (such
as churches and parade routes) that are investigated consequently. Chapter
Two considers the establishment of the Birmingham branch of Comhaltas
Ceoltóirí Éireann in the city-centre home of Lily Lawrie from County
Roscommon. This establishes a loose chronology to the study, as I date
today’s recognisable Irish music in Birmingham back to the era of Lily
Lawrie. Birmingham’s earliest Irish music scene was nurtured in the
fifties within her four walls in Handsworth, a particularly pluralistic area
of the city. I present the pivotal role of the Lawries’ house in assisting a
version of musical performance in urban Birmingham that continued some
traditions of rural Ireland.

The socialist and Marxist spaces of the city are our location in the third
chapter. For a period during the 1950s and 1960s, the Irish musician Luke
Kelly, lead singer of the band The Dubliners, was a resident of
Birmingham. Kelly’s formation as a musician took place during these
decades, as he lived an active musical and political existence in the West
Midlands. Information on this time has often proved hard to come by,
save for minor references made by Des Geraghty in his biography Luke
Kelly-Dubliner. Hence my determination to unveil the relatively
unexplored influence that Birmingham had on the well-known Dublin
socialist singer. I claim, in this section, Luke Kelly-Brummie, rather than
Luke Kelly-Dubliner.42

This third chapter explains that Kelly’s inchoate socialism is

profoundly shaped by a number of specific sites in Birmingham, namely

41
Richard Schechner, ‘Restoration of Behaviour’, in Between Theater and
Anthropology ed. by Schechner (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1985), pp.35-116.
42
Luke Kelly’s gravestone in Glasnevin Cemetery, North Dublin bears the
inscription, “Luke Kelly – Dubliner”.
18 Introduction

the city centre folk clubs, his lodgings in Kings Heath and the seminar
rooms at Birmingham University; as well as Ewan MacColl’s house in
Beckenham where he encounters (at a distance) a Birmingham influence.
I present the paradox that the analogous musical ideas and singing
techniques Kelly took from these venues in Birmingham helped to create
what became his and his contemporaries’ recognisably Irish sounds. As
the BBC recently stated, “for a lot of people around the world, The
Dubliners are Irish music, and Irish music is The Dubliners”.43 Rather
than belonging to Irish Dublin, however, Luke Kelly belongs to the
diasporic space of Irish Birmingham.

Chapter Four locates an Irish musical identity within the religious sites
of Birmingham. Although Irish Protestants and members of other faiths
were involved in the great move from Ireland to England’s cities, the
Catholic Church forged a particular public identity for the newly arrived
migrant. More often than not, oral histories of contemporary Birmingham
echo that “antiquarian scholarship” to which May McCann refers; that
distinguishing ‘“Irish”, which appears to mean “Catholic”’, from other
Anglo-Irish scholarship.44 In the practice of Catholicism the authority of
the Pope supersedes that of the sovereign. This introduces another
dimension to a diasporic musical study concerned with protracted ideas of
the nation (one rarely considered by scholars). However, in this instance
the national identity is bolstered rather than confused because, for some
migrants, practising a Catholic religion aided their cultural distinction in
the new British city, upholding earlier versions of Irishness that equated
music, dance, language and religion. Most of the Irish residents of
Birmingham experienced Catholic churches in a most practical rather than
ideological way, however, utilising an important social outlet in lieu of the
family and friends who had stayed at home.

Unlike the other case studies up to this point, the church is often a
lucidly masculine public space and a very specific Irish musical identity
developed there through hymns and devotional chants under the
supervision of a male-only Catholic hierarchy. Despite the social
conservatism associated with this form of performance, at the same time,
parish events and dances in church halls fostered a freedom of expression
for Irishmen and Irishwomen and a musical fusion for Irish traditional and

43
‘The Rocky Road From Dublin: 50 Years of The Dubliners’
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01blk01> [accessed May 9 2012].
44
May McCann, ‘Music and Politics in Ireland: the Specificity of the Folk Revival
in Belfast’, British Journal of Ethnomusicology, 4 (1995), pp.51-76 (p.58).
 Locating Paddy 19

popular musics in Birmingham that was barely available in Ireland itself.

In addition, today a professional music duo based in Birmingham, Joanne
Boyce and Mike Stanley, perform songs popular amongst Catholic youth
that draw on influences from traditional Irish music. This chapter traces a
chronological trajectory from the protection of Irish music in the Church
to the projection of Birmingham’s Church in Irish music. I also exploit
the flippant understanding of football as a modern religion. Versions of
Irish songs chanted by the fans at Aston Villa football games since the
1990s have created another masculine space, Villa Park in Birmingham,
which assimilates Irish influences.

The final chapter examines music performed at Birmingham’s St

Patrick’s Parade, which became, during the Celtic Tiger period of
fashionable Irishness, the best attended of such events in the whole of the
UK and is now claimed as the third-biggest Parade behind New York and
Dublin. The diaspora hosts what is also the biggest annual civic promotion
of the city of Birmingham, where a steady stream of different music
creates the palpable Irish atmosphere. Based on my own experiences of
attending the Birmingham St Patrick’s Parade in recent years, Chapter
Five presents the various musical tensions and contradictions of a parade
form; rethinking, for a soundscape, the processional mode of performance
critiqued from a vision-perspective by Domenico Pietropaolo.

Music has often been used to antagonise in sectarian marches in

Northern Ireland and across England and the Republic. Liverpool hosted
the July 12 Orange Order marches until the late 1960s, for example, and
Dublin’s disastrous “Love Ulster” march, commemorating the Unionist
victims of the Troubles, descended into chaos in 2006. Yet the St
Patrick’s Parade in Birmingham permits communal nostalgia for the local
Irish and non-Irish audience. In examining the Irish music presented in a
sequential manner to a static audience sharing Birmingham’s streets in the
name of Ireland’s patron one Sunday every March, this final chapter
characterises, quite literally, the journeying mode of my book.

Thus is recorded an overlooked aspect of the musical culture of

Birmingham, inspired by Ireland and her local diaspora. Ideas of the
individual and the collective have returned throughout my investigations.
In discussing traditional group or session performances in Chapter Two,
the concentration falls on the pursuits of an individual house and
housekeeper in Handsworth; in Chapter Three, we focus on Birmingham’s
community of socialists and folk, but through the experiences of an
20 Introduction

individual singer from Dublin, and so on. As such, this ethnography

forms, quite automatically, a connection to Nicholas Thomas’ system of
addressing both “individual and collective modalities”.45 These individual
and collective ideas inevitably segue into the broader conclusion that the
Irish diaspora in Birmingham has never been an individual homogenous
group, isolated from the rest of the city’s inhabitants. Since the fifties,
Irish music has steadily intermingled and integrated to secure
Birmingham’s own collective multicultural identity and Ireland’s place
within it. The coexistence in Birmingham of Sparkhill’s “Balti Mile”,
UB40’s customised Jamaican Reggae, and Solihull’s Páirc na hÉireann
indicates the diverse nature of this modern city. This book underlines the
cultural input of Irish migrants in locating Birmingham and the mutual
progression of Birmingham’s society with Irish music from 1950-2010.

45
Thomas analyses colonial discourse and culture through a split discussion of
theoretical questions and anthropological case studies of agents, locations and
periods. Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and
Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
 CHAPTER ONE

THE TRIP TO BIRMINGHAM

Through the music, then, that has touched all of these generations, we can
read the history of Ireland and her people, especially her emigrant
people.1

On 17 March 2010, the streets of Birmingham were filled with every

familiar signifier of globalised Irishness: oversized Guinness hats, green
O2 rugby shirts, shamrock-emblazoned flags. A predictable musical
soundtrack accompanied this anniversary of St Patrick at various spaces in
the city centre. A selection of Irish pop music, performed by a Saw
Doctors and Pogues tribute band, could be heard all night in O’Neill’s
Irish Bar on Broad Street, whilst the Birmingham Irish Centre in Digbeth
played CDs of well-known Irish rock groups such as U2 and The
Cranberries.2 In essence, there was nothing particularly distinctive about
these celebrations. CDs of such music could have been heard anywhere
from Adelaide to Arizona and similar festivals were taking place in many
cities with a sizeable Irish presence, as Mike Cronin and Daryl Adair’s
study of the worldwide phenomenon of St Patrick’s Day makes clear.3

My own celebrations on St Patrick’s Night 2010 took place in

Birmingham Town Hall, which, in many respects, hosted an event
similarly disconnected from regional conditions in the city. But this one,
in fact, consolidated the unique position of Birmingham in the cultural
expression of contemporary Ireland. The five-piece traditional Irish music
group The Dubliners were on the latest leg of their European tour, playing
many of the same tunes that they would perform in locations across
Ireland, Britain and beyond (indeed many of these tunes had been played

1
O’Connor, Bringing It All Back Home, p.7.
2
The Saw Doctors are an Irish rock band from County Galway. U2 are from
Dublin and The Cranberries were formed in Limerick. The Pogues are a London-
Irish band.
3
Mike Cronin and Daryl Adair, The Wearing of the Green: A History of St
Patrick’s Day (London: Routledge, 2002).
22 Chapter One

by one or another iteration of the band for nearly fifty years). The
customised introduction with which The Dubliners began their concert,
“Lá Fhéile Pádraig daoibh agus fáilte romhaibh go Birmingham”, could
have been adjusted with ease by changing one word to suit audiences in
any city.

Nonetheless, we can presume that concert promoters decided to put

The Dubliners in Birmingham Town Hall on St Patrick’s Day 2010
because of the large diaspora in this city and the importance of music in
defining them. According to the census of 2001, Birmingham boasts
28,933 Irish-born residents, more than two-and-a-half times the proportion
of Irish-born residents than the average for the rest of England, and 31,467
people in Birmingham claim that they belong to the Irish ethnic group.4
During this Town Hall concert, the members of the band, John Sheahan,
Barney McKenna, Eamonn Campbell, Sean Cannon and Patsy Watchorn,
reiterated the specific role of Birmingham in the grand story of Irish music
by sharing their own long-established connections to the city. They gave
an extended dedication to deceased lead singer Luke Kelly, who lived in
Birmingham before he joined the band. Kelly identified with an English
socialist music scene in the Midlands, which, in turn, affected the
recognisably Irish sound of The Dubliners. The band repeatedly referred
to, and pointed at, members of Luke Kelly’s family who were present in
the auditorium.

A collection of old photographs displayed on rotation at the back of the

stage reminded audience members of the group’s previous Town Hall
shows. In earlier years, The Dubliners socialised with fans prior to their
Birmingham gigs at the Highlander public house; the Highlander being
situated opposite the Birmingham Town Hall before falling to progress
with the regeneration of the city centre in the 1980s. In addition, digitally-
enhanced videos of songs featuring the original band, including the three
deceased members, Luke Kelly, Ciarán Bourke, and Ronnie Drew,
peppered the programme and were accompanied by the live playing of the
(then) current line-up.5 The aural effect of this combined force was
stimulating and the simultaneous real and recorded presence of two
surviving original band members held a particular social relevance for
Birmingham. Seeing John Sheahan and Barney McKenna playing in
unison with, but forty years apart from, their younger selves brought to

4
Birmingham City Council, Cultural Background: 2001 Population Census, tables
2.11 and 3.1.
5
The Dubliners’ banjo player, Barney McKenna, passed away in April 2012.
 The Trip to Birmingham 23

mind Carl Chinn’s appraisal of Irish people living out their lives away
from Ireland. Chinn has written about the demise of an original migrant
workforce in Birmingham when “once powerful McAlpine's Fusiliers
were elderly and jobless”.6 Chinn uses this phrase when talking
specifically about Birmingham’s recession during the seventies and
eighties, caused, in large part, by the collapse of many construction
industries that had attracted Irish labour to the city some twenty years
before. Moreover, these motion clips of the younger Dubliners played
alongside their live, older selves, located Birmingham in the current
debates about cultural interplay, as, in this paradigm, all the constructs of
modern global flow, as discerned by Arjun Appadurai, were related:
people, technology, economy and images.7

The Irish musicians interrupted their 2010 St Patrick’s Day concert in

Birmingham to draw attention to the famous Scottish-born folk singer Ian
Campbell, a resident of the city who was sitting in the Town Hall stalls.
Those onstage acknowledged the close friendship they had enjoyed with
the Birmingham-based Ian Campbell Folk Group since the sixties, giving
an impromptu performance of “The Nightingale”, a song that Luke Kelly
had learnt from Ian Campbell when living in Britain’s Second City. The
Dubliners summarised their metanarrative towards the end of the evening,
dedicating one specific song to the place in which they had spent the
anniversary of their national patron, St Patrick. Lead singer Patsy
Watchorn gave an extended introduction to Pete St John’s “Dublin in the
Rare Auld Times”, a song that makes explicit reference to Birmingham
(albeit in a reasonably derogatory way that highlights the pain of post-war
mass migration from Ireland, “when he took her off to Birmingham, she
took away my soul”). In his spoken preamble, Watchorn reflected on the
many times he had (on the contrary) gladly taken off to Birmingham as a
young man, singing at the Birmingham Irish Centre and at other social
centres through which the Irish population made their impact on the city’s
sound.

The 2010 St Patrick’s Night performance by The Dubliners at

Birmingham Town Hall epitomises the main contention of this book.
Birmingham has made a unique and valuable contribution to what we

6
Chinn, Birmingham Irish, p.164.
7
Arjun Appadurai has categorised five dimensions, “-scapes”, of global flow;
people (ethnoscape), technology (technoscape), economy (financescape), and two
images (mediascape and ideoscape). See Arjun Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and
Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’, Public Culture, 2 (1990), pp.1-24.
24 Chapter One

think of as being Irish music—the city having welcomed and preserved

Irish traditions that were disappearing in Ireland from the 1950s—and this
contribution has fed back to the English Midlands, boosting the private
music-making of Irish emigrants and creating an identifiable, locatable,
public Irish soundscape there. Although advertised celebrations of Irish
culture in Birmingham can sometimes appear to be simply part of an
international, homogenous and monolithic entity, individual and regional
particularities provide their secure architectural support. Irish music has
affected the sound of Birmingham; Birmingham has in turn affected what
we now know to be an “Irish” sound.

The ensuing chapters of this book focus on particular musicians and

musical events within specific locations in Birmingham. During the
period of this study, the Irish population of Birmingham has created Breda
Gray’s poetic label, “Ireland as a space of mobilities”.8 Social, financial
and political progresses of a migrant community over time have brought
about cultural absorption. Accompanying Irish musical identities have
broadened out from the city’s poorer central areas such as Deritend,
Sparkhill and Sparkbrook to the plush suburbs of Hall Green, Yardley
Wood, Erdington and beyond. But to begin with, it is important to
consider the overall location of Birmingham and the ease with which
migrants have been able to arrive there, subsequently sharing and
transmitting their national musical heritage.

Locating Birmingham
Birmingham, a large industrial city in the centre of England, achieved
phenomenal levels of growth between the late 1700s and early twentieth
century because of a ready supply of raw materials in the nearby Black
Country and a number of small-scale artisans and workshops. Having
always lacked the cultural and economic importance of London, or
Liverpool’s closeness to the Irish Sea, Birmingham tended to be a
secondary destination for those leaving Ireland in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Those who did arrive were difficult to discern in any
case, expressing apparently little interest in maintaining a separate national
identity. As the journalist John Denvir noted in 1891, “there were few
places where the Irish were more intermixed and intermarried into the

8
Gray, ‘The Irish Diaspora’, p.126.
 The Trip to Birmingham 25

general population than in Birmingham”.9 Consequently, whilst there had

been an Irish population in Birmingham since the early 1800s, and
numbers migrating to the area were comparatively higher during periods
of Irish famine in the Victorian era, the quantity of Irish inhabitants had
been negligible for most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The 1931 census records little over 6,000 Irish-born residents of the city.

In the years following 1950, the population of Birmingham was

boosted by Irish migration on a scale never seen there before. The
following census (of 1951) records more than 37,000 Irish-born residents,
and the 1961 census records more than 58,000.10 The development of
“clean” industry and the need to rebuild infrastructures meant that a large
number of migrants arrived in the Midlands region after the Second World
War. Many employees came from the West Indies or from India-Pakistan
and incidents such as the Handsworth Riots in the 1980s or the Behzti
Riots of 2004 sometimes give the false impression that, in recent times,
Black and Asian communities have been moving to Birmingham in the
highest numbers.11 Yet for much of the second half of the twentieth
century, by far the most numerous group of new residents in the city came
from Ireland. The number of second-generation Irish babies born in
Birmingham peaked in the sixties: During 1964 and 1965, 4,525 children
arrived into families with both an Irish-born mother and father, and 2,707
to couples with one Irish-born parent, making up one in every six births
across Birmingham’s homes and hospitals.12 Towards the end of 1965, the
Birmingham Mail reported that, by this time, one in ten people in
Birmingham could claim Irish identity by birth or extraction, describing

9
John Denvir, The Irish in Britain From the Earliest Times to the Fall of Parnell
(London: Kegan Paul Trench Trüber, 1892), p.415.
10
There was no 1941 census because of the war. Census of England and Wales,
1921, County of Warwick (London: HMSO, 1923), p.56. Census of England and
Wales 1931, General Tables: Comprising Population, Institutions, Ages and
Marital Conditions, Birthplace and Nationality, Welsh Language (London,
HMSO, 1935), p.213. Census of England and Wales 1951, County Report,
Warwickshire (London: HMSO, 1954), p.52. Census of England and Wales 1961,
County Report, Warwickshire (London: HMSO, 1963), p.20.
11
Two race riots involving members of the Black and Asian communities occurred
in the Handsworth area of Birmingham in July 1981 and in September 1985. The
Sikh community protested about Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s play Behzti (Dishonour) at
the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in December 2004.
12
Corporate Statistician, ‘The Nationality of Children Born in 1964’, table 11, and
‘Trends, The Nationality of Children Born in 1965’.
26 Chapter One

the eminent positions—including magistrates and local councillors—

achieved by arrivals from Ireland.13

During the final three decades of the twentieth century, Birmingham

suffered from economic recession, a decline in population and a slowing
of Irish immigration. All communities living in the West Midlands were
rocked by political turbulences in Northern Ireland, which culminated in
the blowing up of two city centre pubs (the Mulberry Bush in the Rotunda
and the Tavern in the Town on New Street) by the Provisional IRA in
November 1974; the worst terrorist incident on English soil until the Al-
Qaida attacks on the London Underground system in 2005. Twenty-one
people died and over 160 were maimed in the IRA attack that gave
Birmingham its unwelcome distinction as the site of the most devastating
episode of the Irish Troubles until the Omagh bombing of 1998. The
atrocity of 1974 resulted in a terrible backlash against the local Irish
community, manifesting itself in a reluctance on the part of migrants and
their families to discuss Irish issues, perform Irish music, or become
involved in public Irish events for a number of years. Only in the late
nineties did Birmingham reinstate the St Patrick’s Parade that had existed
prior to 1974.

Because of these national political difficulties, the Irish diaspora was,

at times during the 1970s and 1980s, somewhat disengaged in Birmingham
and, indeed, in the UK as a whole, as a campaign of bombing by dissident
republicans affected other cities—most prominently London, Guildford
and Bristol—and the reputation of Irish people living on the British
mainland.14 The social isolation of some Irish communities living in
Britain can be contrasted directly with the certain social integration that
was in the offing for some Irish communities living in Ireland.
Christopher Morash has argued that, with the coming of digital
communications from the 1980s, people resident in Ireland were “moved”
from the geographical periphery of Europe to the hub of an international
web of relationships.15 This repositioning continued into the twenty-first
century, such that, by 2004, based on its financial, political and
technological connectivity, Ireland was the most globalised country in the

13
Martin Davies, ‘The Flow is Slowing Down’, Birmingham Mail, 27 October
1965, p.10.
14
Bombs were also detonated in London (June 17, October 22), Guildford
(October 5) and Bristol (December 18) in 1974.
15
Christopher Morash, A History of the Media in Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010).
 The Trip to Birmingham 27

world, with reverberations echoing across cultural, economic and

ecological spheres.16 A most prominent resonance of this international
“movement” took place in music. As the composer Donnacha Dennehy
testified in 1999:

Up to Ó Riada’s time, there was a feeling that you had the burden of
European tradition on your shoulders and, almost contradicting that, a
feeling that we were on the periphery. Nowadays, it’s as if it’s being
turned around. We’re in the mainstream of European culture to an
extent.17

This imagined centralised position was appropriate for an island, which

became, during the 1990s, a focal point, importing people and ideas.
Ireland was unrecognisable from the country that had been so inclined to
export people, ideas and music to Britain’s urban centres for over half a
century before.

Birmingham’s location as the middle space of England means it has

also functioned as a kind of hub; one that is slightly different, in practice,
but no less important. At the heart of post-imperial Britain, with various
trade links, the Second City is a systematic and transitory realm, easily
passed through between north and south, east and west, ready to absorb
and mix communities and goods. Free movement was restored from
Ireland to Britain in 1952. The steady improvement in British and Irish
transport and communications networks from this point (from the road-
building and car ferries of the 1960s to the spread of home telephones and
high-speed ships in the 1970s and 1980s, and the internet and cheap flights
of the 1990s and early twenty-first century) made a brief or reversible trip
from Ireland to neighbouring Birmingham an increasingly feasible
prospect.

For many in mid-twentieth century Ireland, the ease of crossing the

Irish Sea prompted a sampling of life in Birmingham as much for a change
of scenery as for the necessity of an income. Martin Kilderry from
Galway told BBC Midlands employee Charles Parker (who was
researching the Irish in England for a radio production) in 1965: “I left

16
The broader inferences of this term are discussed by Manfred B. Steger in
Globalization: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
17
Barra Ó Séaghdha, ‘Crash Course’, Graph: Irish Cultural Review, 3 (1999),
p.29. Seán Ó Riada influenced revivals of Irish instrumental music from the
1960s.
28 Chapter One

[…] not because there was no work in Ireland—I first came over to
England on a holiday, that would be about six months previous to the five
years I’m here, and I liked England”.18 Kilderry was not unusual.
According to William Ryan, the reasons most people would give for
leaving rural Ireland in the mid-twentieth century were two-fold; of equal
importance was “the lack of work and the lack of vitality (‘craic’)”.19
National and local comradeship travelled to England. Friendships
becoming stagnant in Ireland’s lacklustre bucolic communities could be
rejuvenated amongst the burgeoning urban populace of Birmingham.

Hence, it is difficult to trust the accuracy of census figures about an

Irish population in the flowing diasporic space of Birmingham. A number
of seasonal labourers and curious youth who spent only a short time in and
around the city may have evaded the poll. Indeed, the historian Patsy
Davis believes that multiplying the official figures by 2.5 gives a more
truthful representation of the city’s Irish population in the twentieth and
early twenty-first centuries.20 Davis’ calculation does not seem too far
out: Whilst the formal census of 1991 states a figure of 38,290, the local
government website claims rather, “By the 1990s, there was an estimated
figure of over 70,000 people living in the city who were born in Ireland”.21

Further manipulation of these numbers comes from the continually

expanding Birmingham-born Irish community, especially seeing as the
categorisation of “Irish” as both a “national identity” and as an “ethnic
group” in the British census has proved problematic in the past. Prior to
the 2011 Census, the Federation of Irish Societies (sponsored by Kerrygold
Butter) launched “The Irish in Britain Census Campaign” to rectify this
issue. Acknowledging a common misunderstanding amongst the diaspora
in previous polls, their mission was to confirm that people of Irish descent

18
Charles Parker was producing The Crack, a radio spin-off of Philip Donnellan’s
film The Irishmen (1965). Scripts are held at Birmingham Central Library in the
Charles Parker Archive, MS 4000/2/107.
19
William Ryan, Assimilation of Irish Immigrants, (PhD Thesis, University of St
Louis, 1973), p.118.
20
Patsy Davis, ‘Birmingham’s Irish Community and the Murphy Riots of 1867’,
Midland History, 31 (2006), pp.37-66 (p.38).
21
Census Figure for Ethnic Minorities, 1991 (Birmingham City Council, 1992).
See Romain Garbaye, ‘City Template Birmingham’
<http://www.unesco.org/most/p97birm.doc> [accessed 30 October 2010].
Birmingham City Council, ‘Irish History in Birmingham’
http://www.birmingham.gov.uk/GenerateContent [accessed 23 June 2008].
 The Trip to Birmingham 29

could legitimately tick “Irish” for one or both of these questions. Of no

surprise is the particularly high-profile launch of this National Campaign
in Birmingham, given the extent of Irish representation there. On 18
February 2011, MP Stephen McCabe and Coventry University lecturer
Geraldine Hammersley joined Rob Cosson, a representative from the
Office for National Statistics, and Michael Keaveney, from the Embassy
of Ireland, to present the campaign to members of the public at the
Birmingham Irish Information and Welfare Centre.

From the 1950s, the improved accessibility of Birmingham—now

easily reached from the ferry ports at Liverpool and Holyhead by short
train journeys—facilitated straightforward arrivals and departures from
Ireland. Fitting, then, that Birmingham’s own provincial transport links
provided the means by which a great number of Irish people could relocate
to post-war Britain. The Midland Red and Birmingham Bus Corporation
set up recruitment centres in Dublin, actively recruiting staff from Ireland
(and often providing free ferry fares) to replace the local drivers lured into
Birmingham’s expanding factories. Improvements to Birmingham’s
roads, railways and sea links confined Ireland’s erstwhile harrowing songs
of migration to a different time and group of people. Musical
representations of the Irish nation presented by such songs of heartbreak as
“Kilkenny Ireland”, “Paddy’s Green Shamrock Shore”, “Erin Grá Mo
Chroí”, and others that had grown largely out of nineteenth-century
experiences in America—accompanied, of course, by the romanticised
visual representations of crowded boats docking at harbour—became
ironic at best. They did not apply to those modish young Irish people,
choosing to leave for landlocked Birmingham, and only staying there for
the weekend.

Various Irish musics could be shared with ease in Birmingham, a

transportation hub, inhabiting the country’s central space with often
transitory residents. In the fifties, for example, when such an activity may
have been widely disapproved of in white, mono-cultural Ireland, St Paul’s
Church Hall in Balsall Heath hosted social evenings where people from
the West Indies and from Ireland danced together in mixed couples.
Artistic ethnic ideas were further intermixed in Birmingham by the
International Céili Band, a group that comprised traditional musicians
based in Ireland who accompanied the mass wave of migration to
Birmingham. Utilising this urban base, at the very core of the British road
and rail networks (and with an increasingly significant airport link), in
1963, the band launched and concluded their national tour in the city.
30 Chapter One

Their performances of Irish music around the country were sandwiched

between a launch night at the Harp Ballroom in Sparkbrook on the 24
September and a concluding event at the Shamrock Ballroom in Small
Heath in October.22

The path to Britain was a route well-trodden for those from rural
Ireland. But twentieth-century Birmingham was unusual in that it became
the automatic antidote to Ireland’s capital city as well. According to
Miriam James, when it came to 1940s Dublin, “you had to go away in
order to regain your own self-respect”.23 Its east coast location makes
Dublin a most likely area from which to return from England.
Nevertheless, today, a number of elements reveal the permanent way in
which Birmingham assembled twentieth-century migration from this,
Ireland’s largest city. Most obvious is the homage paid by the founders of
Birmingham’s principal Irish pub “The Dubliner” in Digbeth. A more
historic sign is the Dublin Corporation statue of George I, sold by the
National Gallery of Ireland in 1937, which now sits at the entrance to the
University of Birmingham and the Barber Institute of Fine Arts.
Furthermore, Birmingham city centre’s “River” monument is known
colloquially as the “Floozie in the Jacuzzi”; this nickname is borrowed
from the fountain statue of Anna Livia, formerly of Dublin’s main
thoroughfare, O’Connell Street. Birmingham’s own “River” was installed
in the newly pedestrianised and remodelled Victoria Square in 1993 and
bears more than a likeness to the Anna Livia Statue, which was unveiled
as part of the Dublin millennium celebrations in 1988.24 Birmingham’s
statue also presents a play on the Livia’s original Irish title. While the
Anna Livia gets her name from Dublin’s River Liffey, in Irish An Life, so
too Birmingham’s female figure in the fountains is intended to represent
this city’s surging “life force”.

22
This final concert took place on the 4 October. For a full report of this tour see
‘English Tour’, Fonn: Bulletin of the Newry Branch of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí
Éireann, 3 (1963), p.10.
23
James blames the legacy of English colonialism and the selfish attitude of Irish
residents for what she sees as a post-war fashion for those born in Ireland to realise
their potential away from Ireland. See Lennon, McAdam, O’Brien, Across the
Water, p.69.
24
The Anna Livia was moved from O’Connell Street in 2001 and replaced by the
Spire. The statue is now in the “Croppy Acre” memorial park on Dublin’s North
Quays.
 The Trip to Birmingham 31

Birmingham’s iconic Rotunda, which opened in 1964 and is now a

listed building, provides another curious link with the narrative of
Ireland’s capital city. Dublin has had its own Rotunda; a venue attached to
the Rotunda Hospital on Parnell Street in the 1700s. The Rotunda in
Ireland accommodated music events to raise funds for medical facilities,
but has, like the statues of George I and Anna Livia, since disappeared
from central Dublin. The landmark reopened as the Ambassador Cinema
(next door to the Gate Theatre) in 1954. With adopted elements that
originated but no longer exist in the capital city, Birmingham, thus,
preserves an historic version of Ireland through the processes of migration.
Rather than becoming a carbon-copied mini Ireland, Birmingham cultivates
a new Irish ethnicity, home to a unique, current diaspora.

Despite the permanence of landscape, during the 1970s a reverse trend

in migration began. Many Irish people returned from Birmingham to
Ireland. A difficult social situation was exacerbated not only by the fallout
from policies in Northern Ireland, but also by recession and declining
manufacturing industries in the city and, conversely, economic boom in
the Republic following a recent enrolment with the European Economic
Community. It is rather apt that Birmingham’s reputation for attracting
fleeting residents attained its own grotesque metaphorical reality at this
time. The giant “Spaghetti Junction” road intersection opened in 1972; the
first construction of its kind, a web of transport relations in the city centre,
linking six motorways and dual carriageways, located above two railway
lines, three canals and two rivers. Ultan Cowley has suggested an Irish
workforce accounted for up to sixty percent of the labour for these
motorway links in the West Midlands.25 Catholic priests, such as Fr
Daniel Cummins, would often accompany the builders onsite to celebrate
Mass and transcribe letters home for them.

The story for Irish music in Birmingham is in accordance with this

wider narrative. In its broadest terms, the 1950s show an initial period of
creative confidence moving into self-censorship in the 1970s, before a
resounding return in the 1990s. Through music, then, the diaspora in
Birmingham invokes Gray’s reading of Ireland’s global space being a fluid
feast of interaction.26 Within each of these chronological episodes,
Birmingham mediates a series of dispersals, flows and journeys. The
seventies presented a situation repeated from fin-de-siècle Vienna, for

25
Ultan Cowley, The Men Who Built Britain: A History of the Irish Navvy (Dublin:
Wolfhound Press, 2001), pp.173-4.
26
Gray, ‘The Irish Diaspora’, p.126.
32 Chapter One

instance, where assimilated Jews had their ethnic identity recovered by

liberalists seeking a scapegoat for encroaching capitalism. Post-war
migrants from Ireland, who had successfully built Birmingham, living and
working with English and non-English residents for over twenty years,
became, after the IRA bombing in November 1974, the city’s subversive
“other”. Moreover, the emotional and technical character of Irish music in
Birmingham may be compared with that of traditional Jewish music,
described by the Italian composer Riccardo Moretti as “an insoluble blend
of imitation, reminiscence, and invention”.27 From the mid-seventies,
singing Thomas Osborne Davis’ common anthem “A Nation Once Again”
or John Keegan Casey’s popular “The Rising of the Moon” in
Birmingham’s pubs and social clubs was an incendiary act, an enigmatic
blend loaded with extra-musical political connotations. In this exposed
climate, blithe statements by musicians famous with the Irish in the city
during the fifties and sixties, such as Joe Lynch from County Cork,
seemed foolish and naïve: “I was singing Irish Ballads when it was
dangerous to do so!”28

Reluctant to have the history of that “original diaspora”, the Jewish

community, repeated in Birmingham, Irish people suddenly sought to
control their own musical identity. On the night following the pub
bombings, the Birmingham Irish Centre cancelled a concert that was to
have showcased the best of traditional music from Ireland and include
performances from the All-Ireland fiddle and banjo champions Bobby
Casey and Mick O’Connor, the Galway accordionist Raymond Roland and
Sligo flautist Seamus Tansey.29 Local Irish musicians, including the
singer Mick Hipkiss, flautist Catherine McEvoy, the Birmingham Céilí
Band and Kathleen Lawrie, amongst others, also featured on the
programme. Without lyrics, this instrumental music would have been less
controversial than Davis’ or Casey’s ballads, but traditional jigs and reels

27
Gruber refers to the Jewish scholar Enrico Fubini’s liner notes for the album
Ebraica (Nuova Era Records, 7287, 1997). See Ruth Ellen Gruber, Virtually
Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe (London: University of California
Press, 2002), p.27.
28
This collection, Joe Lynch: A Lot of Irish Laughter…And a Few Irish Tears,
produced in London, did not include overtly political songs however, but rather
glib crooning melodies such as, “Teaching McFadden to Dance”, “Mother
McCree”, and “Hannigan’s Hooley” (Hallmark, 1968) [on LP].
29
The “All-Ireland” title is afforded to winners of Ireland’s annual and
international music competition organised by Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Eireann. I
discuss this further in Chapter Two.
 The Trip to Birmingham 33

were now associated with inappropriate Catholicism and republicanism.

The recent story of the Irish in Birmingham had been largely peaceful and
few were intent on antagonising any residents of the wounded city further
with recognisable Irish music. This music included traditional
instrumental dance melodies and well-known drinking or rebel songs.
Soon, the Birmingham Irish Centre penned a new schedule of solely
American-style show bands, pipe bands and country and western groups,
such that, during the second half of the seventies, Birmingham had little
public Irish sound whatsoever.

In the following decade, Irish pop singers in Ireland, most notably

Moving Hearts (with the album The Dark End of the Street30) and U2
(with the single “Sunday, Bloody Sunday”31), received great public
support for questioning British involvement in Northern Ireland through
music. A hangover from the silenced 1970s continued to debilitate
Birmingham, but the London-based Irish pop group, The Pogues,
protested the injustice of a post-bombing retribution faced by the Irish in
Britain’s Second City. In 1988, The Pogues’ lead singer, Shane MacGowan,
penned the “Birmingham Six”, recorded by his band, in combination with
Terry Woods’ “Streets of Sorrow”, for their album If I Should Fall From
Grace With God. The song was subsequently banned by the BBC, not
least because its release coincided with widespread public agitation from
Irish and English communities in Britain, caused by the lengthy
incarceration of six men held responsible for the Birmingham pub
bombings whose innocence was becoming increasingly apparent.32

Hugh Callaghan, Patrick Hill, Gerard Hunter, Richard McIlkenny,

William Power and John Walker hailed from Northern Ireland. They
moved to Birmingham in the 1960s and were sentenced to life
imprisonment in 1975 for blowing up the city. In the aftermath of their
conviction, the homes of the Birmingham Six were petrol bombed; their
families threatened, relocated and renamed. One wife even moved her
children into social care as a safer option than living at home with her in

30
Moving Hearts, Dark End of the Street was originally released in 1982 (WEA,
2000) [on CD].
31
“Sunday, Bloody Sunday” is the title track on U2, War released in 1983
(Mercury Records, 2005) [on CD].
32
The Pogues, If I Should Fall From Grace With God (WEA, 1994) [on CD]. This
was not the first time The Pogues had been banned by the BBC. Radio One
refused to play their music in 1984, because of an original offending moniker,
Pogue ma thoin, translates as “Kiss my arse”.
34 Chapter One

the city.33 Recompense came after sixteen years when the six were
released from jail, eventually found innocent of the Provisional IRA
killings. People across Britain, beyond Birmingham, had been aware of
their plight since 1985, when the journalist Chris Mullin cast doubt on the
convictions in a report for Granada Television’s World in Action. Mullin
influenced more opinions two years later on the release of his book, Error
of Judgement: The Birmingham Bombings.34 Public outrage over an
ostensibly flawed justice system was such that Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher was encouraged to speak out in 1988: “We do not have trial by
television here”.35 Bosses at Granada Television begged to differ with the
PM and subsequently rallied additional support for the Birmingham Six
with a documentary drama, Who Bombed Birmingham?, originally
broadcast in 1990.36

Portrayals by the British media during the late eighties and early
nineties thawed attitudes towards the Birmingham Six, as did the single
“Streets of Sorrow/Birmingham Six”, through which The Pogues speak for
the six men guilty of simply “being Irish in the wrong place and at the
wrong time”.37 This band spoke to the diaspora, but they would not
necessarily have been appreciated as an Irish voice in Ireland. Indeed, in
1985, Noel Hill, a traditional concertina player from County Clare, had
appeared during BP Fallon’s interview with The Pogues for RTÉ Radio to
accuse these displaced second generation Irish musicians of performing a
“terrible abortion” of Irish music.38 MacGowan’s reaction to people, such
as Hill, who questioned The Pogues’ musical “authenticity” could be
vitriolic; “If anyone thinks we are playing pure Irish music then they are

33
Gareth Peirce, a solicitor who represented three of the “Birmingham Six” writes
further about their treatment and the immediate backlash in ‘The Birmingham Six:
Have We Learned from our Disgraceful Past?’, The Guardian, 12 March 2011
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2011/mar/12/gareth-peirce-birmingham-
six> [accessed 12 May 2011].
34
Chris Mullin, Error of Judgment: The Birmingham Bombs (Dublin: Poolbeg
Press, 1987).
35
Lance Pettitt, Screening Ireland: Film and Television Representation
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p.241.
36
The release of the Birmingham Six followed the quashed verdicts of the
Guildford Four and Maguire Seven in the late 1980s, who had also been
imprisoned incorrectly for the IRA attack on Guildford in 1974.
37
These lyrics conclude the second verse of The Pogues’ “Streets of
Sorrow/Birmingham Six”.
38
BP Fallon Orchestra, RTÉ Radio 2, 21 September 1985.
 The Trip to Birmingham 35

way off, we’ve got far too much respect for people like Seamus Ennis to
try to play like he does. We play stuff we like”.39

MacGowan’s folk-punk band never purported to be of Hill’s traditional

Irish music school. Nor were The Pogues performing a popular version of
Irish balladry in the manner of, say, the Aran-clad Clancy Brothers in
America or Joe Lynch from County Cork. Yet, in them, Hill saw a certain
termination of Irish tradition because here a primary Irish reference base
was in England. Before the British media began courting its Irish
audience from the late 1980s, the Irish media had given them a clear
message: A nationality promoted by popular music growing from the
diaspora in Britain could not be Irish. The Irish in Birmingham and other
British cities proved a political embarrassment for England and,
simultaneously, they were a cultural embarrassment for Ireland.40

Within a few years of the Birmingham Six’s release, “Celtomania”

would break out quite visibly across Europe, America and beyond. Ireland
would profit by it. In part, this “Celtic Globalisation” was connected to a
new fetishized, innocuous and controllable Irishness, introduced to the
public after a series of political peace processes in the state of Northern
Ireland. As John Nagle explains, embarrassing Irishness could now be
recast “as the hedonistic opposition of British rationalism”.41 This was a
transformation that lessened the perceived threat of Ireland in public
audible expressions in Britain and allowed packaged Irish pop bands such
as Boyzone, Westlife and B*Witched a great deal of success in the
international music charts. An appetite for this disarmed “Celtic” form of
Irish music had in fact begun to grow in Birmingham during the seventies
and eighties; during that period when much of the Irish community, still in
the shadow of the pub bombings, had seemingly gone to ground and
muted its music. Alternative, pioneering, depoliticised versions of Irish
music in the 1980s paved the way for Ireland’s pop scene in the 1990s. As
Martin Melhuish acknowledges:

An indication of the record buying public’s affinity for Celtic-flavoured

pop came in 1983 as Dexy’s Midnight Runners, a group from Birmingham,

39
See Gavin Martin liner notes for The Very Best of the Pogues (Rhino, 2001).
40
Sean Campbell provides a full account of the BP Fallon event in Irish Blood
English Heart, pp.78-80.
41
John Nagle, ‘“Everybody is Irish on St Paddy’s”: Ambivalence and Alterity at
London’s St Patrick’s Day 2002’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power,
12/4 (2005), pp.563-583 (p.567).
36 Chapter One

England, described as “Celtic Soulsters” by the Billboard Book of Number

One Hits, topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic.42

The founder of Dexy’s Midnight Runners, a second generation Irish man,

is originally from the neighbouring area of Wolverhampton. Kevin
Rowland took inspiration from his personal ancestry when writing songs
for the English soul band. He flagged up, for instance, the consequences
of Northern Ireland’s sectarian clearances of 1969. The image of a
homeless Catholic boy in Belfast creates the front cover of Dexy’s
Midnight Runners’ first album, Searching for the Young Soul Rebels,
released in July 1980.43

Rowland’s Irish singles, including “The Celtic Soul Brothers” from

1982, enjoyed mild successes in the UK pop chart.44 Fame in America
arrived in 1983 when their song “Come on Eileen” knocked Michael
Jackson off the number one spot. It is to this song Melhuish refers in his
assessment of the band achieving transatlantic top of the pops. This
American appetite for the sound of Ireland in England identifies
Birmingham as an origin of the nineties’ “Celtomania” that also became
manifest in the Hollywood directory. Trends for rewritten Irish music in
the popular music charts would be echoed, most prominently, in the
popular cinema soundtrack. American screen composers employed solo
pipes, fiddles, lilting soprano voices and lyrical stepwise melodies for their
scores, imbuing blockbusters like Legends of the Fall (1994), Titanic
(1997) or Lord of the Rings (2001-3) with an Irish identity, regardless of
the fact that there were few, if any, themes concerning Ireland in their
narratives. From the mid-1990s, the global spread of Irish music was
paralleled by the international phenomenon of the generic Irish-theme
based pub, customary for every trendy, developed city. At the same time,
the increasingly confident diaspora ensured Irish music was more eclectic
than ever before. By the end of the twentieth century, pop and rock groups
closer to home, such as The Pogues in London or Thin Lizzy in Dublin,
were looking away from Ireland to urban British centres for their
inspiration.

42
Martin Melhuish, Celtic Tides: Traditional Music in a New Age (Texas: Quarry
Press, 1998), p.30.
43
Dexy’s Midnight Runners, Searching for the Young Soul Rebels (EMI, 1980) [on
LP].
44
“The Celtic Soul Brothers” and “Come on Eileen” appear on Dexy’s Midnight
Runners second album, Too-Rye-Ay (Mercury, 1982) [on LP].
 The Trip to Birmingham 37

By the early years of the new millennium, a confidence in performing

musical Irishness fed back to Birmingham. The attitudes of Noel Hill and
other purists in Ireland were becoming irrelevant for a second and third
generation who expressed their newfound sense of ease with notions of
national identity in Birmingham and of cultural belonging to Ireland. In
previous years, the singer and songwriter Paul O’Brien had felt ashamed
when playing Irish gigs in England and having his Birmingham birthplace
discovered: “If I told people, they said I was ‘plastic’ so I used to lie
profusely and say I was from Ireland as I didn’t want to be insulted”.45
“Plastic” is an insult used most readily by the Irish born in Ireland against
the diaspora; those born outside Ireland and performing their ethnic
identity. Aidan Arrowsmith has narrowed the perception of “plasticity”
down specifically to the second-generation Irish who try to reclaim a
national history from which they are temporally and spatially distant.46
Their claim to an “authentic” Irishness is the cause of much contention
also, because “plastic paddies”, who assert an Irish ethnicity in Britain,
have been associated with sinister republican activities, with their
nostalgia discerned as misplaced and idealised. In 2008, the second-
generation Irishman O’Brien provided a positive response to such thinking
in music, releasing his album Plastic, the liner notes of which reveal his
revised attitude. O’Brien now celebrates the fact that “I have been called a
plastic paddy many many times […] I have really only just figured out that
it’s good to have dual cultureship”.47

Growing up in Birmingham, Paul O’Brien performed his Irishness in

music, singing the traditional songs he had learnt from Irish-born parents.
O’Brien would later form the band Juno, a regular headline act at the Red
Lion Folk Club in Kings Heath and at the Birmingham Irish Centre, but in
his autobiographical eponymous solo song “Plastic”, O’Brien reminds
hostile local audiences of times in the seventies and eighties, “When I sang
in Digbeth, you called me ‘Plastic”’. The lyrics make his situation explicit
and are complemented by the song’s instrumentation, a dual cultureship
arrangement, where the melody of the solo Irish flute and uilleann pipes
create sporadic duets with O’Brien’s Birmingham brogue. This is a

45
Andy Coleman, ‘Folk: Singer Paul O’Brien performs in Birmingham this
weekend’, Birmingham Mail, November 27 2009.
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+folk+singer+who+nearly+gave+it+all+up-
a0213045761 [accessed 13 February 2010].
46
Aidan Arrowsmith, ‘Plastic Paddy: Negotiating Identity in Second-Generation
‘Irish-English’ Writing’, Irish Studies Review, 8 (2000), pp.35-43 (p.36).
47
Paul O’Brien, Liner notes for Plastic.
38 Chapter One

definable, defendable Birmingham-Irish sound; a sound that ascertains

Birmingham as an area where temporal and spatial realities combine. Paul
O’Brien, of Birmingham, can use Irish music to tell a story of the 1970s.
The ethnomusicologist Mark Slobin has used an analogous spatial-
temporal analysis when discussing Jewish music as a people’s music
linked to place. In Fiddler on the Move, Slobin connects community
sound with geographical place, describing as a “chronotope” the centring
of Klezmer traditions from Eastern European in twentieth-century
American popular culture.48 The geographic features of Birmingham, in
accommodating music of Ireland, may similarly be described as
chronotopes in my investigation. A personal nostalgic narrative of
growing up as an Irish person in England, such as that expressed in pop
song by the recently “out-and-proud” Birmingham Irishman O’Brien,
illustrates how the relocation of music sustains this city’s migrants and
their descendants.

In general, studies of the Irish diaspora in Britain rarely do justice to

such an intimate and distinctive fusion of time, memory and space as that
expressed by O’Brien in song and by Slobin in his written communication
of the discipline. In the 1990s Graham Davis published The Irish in
Britain and Donald MacRaild published Irish Migrants in Modern Britain.
In so doing, Davis and MacRaild began a body of literature that provided
an alternative diasporic story to the much-celebrated one of Irish America.
They set a trend for historians to examine Irish migration to particular
regional parts of England—Liverpool and London naturally, but other
places too, including Birmingham.49 Local studies of, hitherto
underrepresented, areas in the discourse of Ireland’s migration include
Donald MacRaild’s sequel, Culture, Conflict and Migration: The Irish in
Victorian Cumbria, Steven Fielding’s book about the Irish Catholic
experience of Manchester in Class and Ethnicity, Roger Cooter’s account
of a uniquely-tolerant community in the North East, When Paddy Met
Geordie, and others by Frank Neal, W.J. Lowe and James Moran.50

48
Mark Slobin, Fiddler on the Move: Exploring the Klezmer World (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000).
49
Graham Davis, The Irish in Britain, 1815-1914 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan,
1991); Donald M. MacRaild, Irish Migrants in Modern Britain, 1750-1922
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999).
50
Donald M. MacRaild, Culture, Conflict and Migration: The Irish in Victorian
Cumbria (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998); Steven Fielding, Class
and Ethnicity (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1992); Roger Cooter, When
Paddy Met Geordie: The Irish in County Durham and Newcastle (Sunderland:
 The Trip to Birmingham 39

Although there are many helpful features in these studies, such

scholars tend to neglect the social and cultural individuality of the groups
they describe, including the invaluable processes of musical performance
and hybridization in a new location. When discussing their diasporic
subjects, writers characteristically pull out the main features of the
sequence as they might be interpreted by a person looking for the most
dramatic or monumental incidents. So, for an historian of the Irish in
Britain, the key episodes would probably include reference to the potato
famine, the Irish war of independence, the mass migrations of the mid-
twentieth century, the world wars, the Fenian and IRA campaigns, the
peace process of the 1990s, and the Celtic Tiger boom and bust. In
describing all of these in turn the historian attempts to reconstruct and
represent the past, conceptualising the experience by describing what has
happened and what the causes for (and causal links between) such events
might be.

More often than not, these publications are objective and pay no heed
to the particular judgment of those who have lived through the occasions
they describe. As Enda Delaney argues, when it comes to understanding
the history of Irish residents in Britain “relatively little is known about the
actual experience of these migrants”.51 The events listed above may not
feel as if they belong to Irish participants at all when portrayed in this
systemic manner. An individual migrant who came from Ireland to post-
war Birmingham may be discussed by a sociologist in the context of
historical patterns of migration, comparative economic growth rates in
Ireland and Britain during the 1950s, or the twentieth-century realignment
in political relations between the UK and the newly formed Republic.
Describing history in such a way tends to remove the incidents from the
community itself, where individual priorities might lie, instead, with
particular family circumstances, geographic connections or employment
needs. Indeed, the historian’s contextualising may make the migrant’s
personal narrative look comic, whilst a shifting, subjective cultural
memory, like that sung about in “Plastic”, can be seen to undermine an

University of Sunderland Press, 2005); Frank Neal, Sectarian Violence: The

Liverpool Experience, 1819-1914: An Aspect of Anglo-Irish History (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1988); W.J. Lowe, The Irish in Mid-Victorian
Lancashire: The Shaping of a Working-Class Community (New York: Lang,
1989); James Moran, Irish-Birmingham: A History (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 2010).
51
Delaney, Demography, State and Society, p.297.
40 Chapter One

historian’s true version; an affirmation of the “actual experience” that

happened at that time.

The meaning of migration is constantly changing and evolving for

those involved in the process. As a result, they appear low down on the
list of experts in the “hierarchy of knowledge” that Delaney believes to
provide the source for any late twentieth-century work on Irish
emigration.52 On the contrary, when approaching the story from a musical
perspective, participants, listeners and performers should constitute this
knowledge hierarchy. Music plays a central role in stabilising and locating
identities. In The Irishness of Irish Music, John O’Flynn recommends that
musicologists researching sounds in Ireland do so by uncovering,
promoting and relying on the “unspectacular music scenes […]
particularly those aspects pertaining to people’s everyday lives […]
because many musical-social practices are excluded from histories and
contemporary accounts”.53 O’Flynn invites those with an interest in Irish
music to divert from recognisable and stereotypical grand narratives of
Ireland and “to find out more about the musical practices of these and
other ‘hidden musicians’ (Finnegan, 1989) and their audiences”.54
O’Flynn’s call need not be limited to those researching Irish music in
Ireland of course. When those researching the diaspora also respond to
this idea, we present a fresh take on Delaney’s pyramid structure, in
playing the sounds of societies silenced by less personal studies of Irish
migration.

A migrant Irishman in fifties Birmingham may have felt that he had

fewer and fewer living relatives still based in Ireland; he may have found
himself forgetting the Irish language that once (if ever) he knew; he may
have found his children growing up with English rather than Irish accents.
For someone like this, the remembering, performing and passing on of
particular musical tunes would have been a way to appear Irish; to imagine
themselves and their community back in the homeland and to delineate a
kind of cultural distinctiveness for the migrant who often looked and
sounded indistinguishable from the native English resident of
Birmingham. The importance of this pursuit is summarised by Baz
Kershaw; in order “to collapse historical distance, to make the past

52
Enda Delaney, The Irish in Post-War Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007), p.46.
53
O’Flynn, The Irishness of Irish Music, p.142.
54
Ibid., p.201.
 The Trip to Birmingham 41

forcefully impinge upon the present”.55 Artists like Paul O’Brien and
Shane MacGowan perform their reminiscences in music. In Kershaw’s
terms, the performance of Irish music in Birmingham is vital because,
much like those digital connections of the eighties, it moves Ireland. It
brings Ireland closer to Birmingham, whilst the very fact that it is a
performance in Birmingham makes it different to reminiscences performed
in Ireland. The music reminds migrants of home but it is not home.

Recreating Place
When performed in Ireland, Irish music has sometimes had a rather
different effect. It has often emphasised a social antipathy towards, and
distancing from, England. One of the post-war migrants interviewed by
Sharon Lambert for her study of Irish women in Lancashire explains the
effect of learning distinctly anti-English songs at school during times of
recession in Ireland; “You were sorta taught to hate England and then sent
there”.56 On the ground, many Irish people benefited from Birmingham’s
persistent urbanisation, as they city itself prospered from a labour force
and musical culture brought over from Ireland. Nevertheless, this
industrial British centre shared little with the sentimental vision taught
through music in Irish schools of “home” as rural, picturesque and remote.
Birmingham could never be home by this reckoning. Because of this
difference, moving to Birmingham fed and fixed some of the same wistful
recollections in absentia, demonstrating O’Shea’s point that with
emigration ‘“music from home’ took on more potent and poignant
meaning”.57 The otherworldly Irish home was protracted in Birmingham
where urban school children could learn traditional songs about Ireland as
“exotic music”. As Irishness became part of the city’s audible identity,
exotic school songs became increasingly multicultural.

Even so, an idealised version of Ireland, similar to that painted by Irish

school songs, was promoted by the BBC in the 1940s. On Irish Half-
Hour, a show of traditional music and Celtic mythology, the Broadcasting
Corporation demonstrated their appreciation of Irish nationals who
remained in Britain and became involved in the war effort. That this
version of historical Ireland was popular amongst migrants living through
the instability of wartime is understandable because, as O’Shea explains, a

55
Kershaw, ‘The Death of Nostalgia: Performance, Memory and Genetics’, p.182.
56
Lambert, Irish Women in Lancashire, 1922-60: Their Story, p.88.
57
O’Shea, The Making of Irish Traditional Music, p.41.
42 Chapter One

national identity retaining its unique culture over centuries would be a

particularly “potent attraction for anyone who is unsettled in the present or
anxious about the future”.58 Furthermore, those communities who
continued to prioritise Irish rural life in their cultural displays would have
found that their social outlook would not necessarily have distinguished
them in Birmingham. Their ideas of home could be at home in this new
city because such romanticised impressions of Ireland were also peddled
amongst, and protected by, the British broadcast media.

An unsettled society during war is not the sole culpable factor to

consider of course. Hibernophilia had long been a feature of the British
psyche. Despite the population’s capacity for indifference or hostility
towards Irish inhabitants of inner cities, poets like Matthew Arnold,
Victorian cartoonists who drew female characters representing Ireland, or
those who played Moore’s Melodies in their English drawing rooms, all
lauded an imagined picture-perfect Ireland of beautiful scenery and
soulfulness that was an antithesis to nineteenth- and twentieth-century
British industrial life. The post-war generation in Ireland, on the other
hand, came to share Britain’s white middle-class aspirations. As late as
1982, when Pete St John penned “Dublin in the Rare Auld Time”, his
narrator bemoans the “grey unyielding concrete” taking over modern
Dublin City, but this merely followed the trend of British urban centres
and most obviously that “concrete jungle” Birmingham, whose subways,
ring-roads, office blocks and apartments had been a main source of
employment for Irish labourers since the 1950s.

The very concept of urbanism and homogeneity assisted an Irish

cultural display of difference in Birmingham from the fifties. New arrivals
from Ireland gained their sense of belonging by associating with close-knit
communities who recreated a contrasting rural culture, which could find
its space and take root in a city ripe for cultural absorption. Irish
musicians in Birmingham could also remain immune to detrimental
developments in 1950s Ireland where “the Irish musical tradition was of
little or no concern (indeed, an object of some contempt) to the urban
majority of the Irish people”.59 Much like those Dublin landmarks, certain
versions of Irish culture were relocated and developed in Birmingham
whilst becoming historic for Ireland. The pipes and flute that enhance
O’Brien’s contemporary pop narrative of the city, beginning in the 1960s

58
O’Shea, The Making of Irish Traditional Music, p.80.
59
Seán Ó Riada, Our Musical Heritage (Portlaoise: Fundúireacht an Riadaigh i
gcomhar Le Dolmen Press, 1982), p.9.
 The Trip to Birmingham 43

(“I was born in the city, the city of workers”), are entrenched in the Irish
rural house tradition that was unfashionable in Ireland at the time of his
youth. Similarly, amid the garish lorries, themed floats and flashing light
displays in Birmingham’s contemporary St Patrick’s Parade are hay-bale
transporters, donkeys, carts and various other sights designed to trigger a
memory of that agricultural way of life no resident of the city—and few in
Ireland today—can hold at first hand. Nor indeed can such a slow pace of
proceedings apply to the internet age in which this particular story ends,
where an Irish radio broadcast can be heard simultaneously in Dublin,
Dubai and Delhi.

By relocating familiar musical identities in the very different city of

Birmingham, the Irish migrants invented for themselves their scenic,
otherworldly native identity. Performing such a reconstruction of cultural
memory epitomises the ideas of Richard Schechner. Schechner provides
part of a solution to the problem of overlooked everyday histories in the
grand narrative with his influential essay “Restoration of Behaviour”, in
which he outlines how every performance event—which he defines in the
broadest possible terms—is comprised of “strips of behaviour”.60 Such
“strips of behaviour” are rehearsed and, after they have happened,
continue to exist only in recordings or memories. However, it may be that
people choose to restore such behaviours to what they regard as their
original established conventions. This is what characterises self-
consciously Irish musical performances that are given by those who think
of themselves as Irish, but were born, raised or live in Birmingham.
Moreover, by evoking the absent Ireland through musical activities, Irish
migrants have symbolically transformed the social space of this sprawling
English milieu; an affective relationship with the city that inaugurates
Avtar Brah’s appreciation of the diaspora’s “homing desire” in a new
location, as opposed to a desire for the homeland.61

Yet Schechner’s restoration terminology does imply a prior loss that is

not always accurate. Those first-generation Irish migrants in Birmingham
may simply have travelled with music, continuing with what they knew of
performances at home, in the new urban site of England. After all, Irish
traditional music, traceable to the rural house dance in Ireland, is
susceptible to improvisation and innovation in any location, as O’Shea
implies: “[Irish] musical practice is not homogenous: it changes in relation

60
Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology, p.35.
61
Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora, p.16.
44 Chapter One

to time, place, and social conditions”.62 One of the reasons for this is that
traditional musicians typically rely on an aural transmission in lieu of a
score. The relocation of tunes conflated Ireland’s regional and county
peculiarities of performance style, with melody lines connected to a
variable Irish language, rarely heard in Ireland, where a Donegal Irish
speaker would struggle to understand the Connaught or Munster dialect in
any case. Thus, the dialect of song lyrics as Gaeilge, or the location of an
ornament or rhythmic emphasis in instrumental style, is inevitably
malleable, particularly so in Birmingham where migrants and their
descendants have used music as a replacement for, rather than in
connection with, a distinctive spoken sound. Some forms of musical
behaviour are perpetuated nevertheless by diasporic communities
attempting to “restore” what they have witnessed in, or have been told
about, their homelands. These performances, like the originative
performances that are being restored, contain novelty and originality, each
being ephemeral and tied in space and time to a particular site of
presentation.

The restoration of Irish cultural ideas has not happened in Birmingham

at the same rate over the last six decades. After 1964 migrants from
Ireland could leave the ports of Holyhead and Liverpool for Birmingham
at a much faster rate when New Street Station reopened with a modern
electric train-line. Improving transport and communication links have
further decreased the geographical distance between Ireland and
Birmingham since then. At the same time, with global fashions and local
prosperity, the geographical spaces for Irish culture in Birmingham have
increased and served to collapse historical distance at various moments.
This temporal-spatial proportionality locates the city itself within the
spiritual realm of Parsifal, where, as Gurnemanz tells us, time actually
becomes space.63 Just as Wagner sought specific Celtic myths and legends
for creating the grail in this opera, so too, the Birmingham Irish
deliberately transform a cultural history of Ireland for their personal acts
of creativity. By attempting to restore Irish musical patterns that they may
have remembered from Ireland, or that may have been familiar ideas
broadcast in Britain, some of those living in Birmingham have been
creating something distinctly new in relation to the particular needs of the
city at various time periods. As Schechner puts it, “strips of behaviour can
be rearranged or reconstructed; they are independent of the causal systems

62
O’Shea, The Making of Irish Traditional Music, p.22.
63
In the opening Act of Scene 1, the character, Gurnemanz explains to a youth that
in his Grail “Zum Raum wird hier die Zeit”.
 The Trip to Birmingham 45

[...] that bought them into existence. They have life of their own”.64 The
Birmingham Irish achieve a manner of propagation through a series of
replications and imitations, creating an imitated soundworld that is
constantly reproducing itself (something akin to the meme complex of
Richard Dawkins65).

Constructing a national identity was particularly important for the Irish

in Britain because their legal status implied some semblance of automatic
assimilation with the native society. According to documents in the Public
Records Office, the Whitehall view in the mid-1950s was that “the Irish
are not—whether they like it or not—a different race from the ordinary
inhabitants of Great Britain”.66 The Irish in 1950s Birmingham were an
ethnic minority as far as schools, housing and social services were
concerned, but, with this ruling, the British government could justify a
reticence in making any further provisions. Despite the very assumption
upon which these documents are predicated—that they were not a distinct
race—the Irish in Birmingham and other cities were still somehow marked
out as different, often wanting to be so and using music to express this
otherness. The ambivalent, in-between space for the Irish in Britain is
invoked in Kathleen Paul’s categorising of “neither subjects nor aliens”,
based on the understanding that “aliens” would be a slur to the many Irish
who had served King and country in war or civil service, whereas
“subjects” of Britain would have no place at home, in an independent
Ireland post-1916.67

In her study of Milton Keynes, Ruth Finnegan, paying no discernible

heed to their performance histories, includes ceilidh bands and the “Erin
Singers” amongst the musical groups that for her form “part of modern
English culture”.68 Many of Birmingham’s Irish inhabitants appear
unaware that in performing musical Irishness they could, nonetheless, feed
“English” culture. The separate sites developed in the city imply that they
would have been discontent in doing so. The Irish Citizens’ League and

64
Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology, p.35.
65
Derived from the Greek “mimeme” (“that which is imitated”), Dawkins “meme”
refers to a unit of cultural transmission constantly reproducing itself. See Richard
Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976) p206.
66
Public Record Office, Kew; Cabinet Office 129/77, CP 102 report of UK
migrant workers, 3 August 1955, pp.1-2.
67
Kathleen Paul, Whitewashing Britain (London: Cornell University Press, 1997),
pp.90-110.
68
Finnegan, The Hidden Musicians, p.3.
46 Chapter One

Advisory Bureau and the Irish Information Centre had been set up in Moat
Row in the 1940s, whence the ensuing priority was for space to maintain
Irish distinction in music. There was huge support for the Irish social and
dancing clubs attached to Catholic parish churches in Birmingham. So too
the County Associations (begun by the Birmingham County Cavan
Association in 1958) were led by committees in which, as Delaney
discovered in his study of Irish migrants in Britain, there were “few
ostensibly expressing a desire to ‘become British’ and most retaining
strong if diverse Irish identities”.69 The Birmingham Irish Centre was
opened in 1968 to further define an Irish cultural portion of the city. This
centre was based explicitly on what had been achieved by the diaspora in
Liverpool, whose older Irish Centre, a Grade II listed Georgian building in
Mount Pleasant, was now attracting many customers from Ireland (and
proving extremely profitable) with evenings of Irish music, dance and
drama.70

The Irish in Birmingham, therefore, occupied a paradoxical position in

the fifties and sixties. At one time they could mix with a wide variety of
people from England and her former colonies, something which could give
them an air of cosmopolitan sophistication when they returned home (as
explored in Tom Murphy’s play The House). Yet at the same time, many
of these Irish people wanted to assert and maintain their own ethnic
distinctions in a comparable manner to those vibrant African-Caribbean
and Indian-Pakistani communities. The fact that those around them in
Birmingham had other cultural backgrounds, religious faiths and social
traditions, meant that it became increasingly important for some to
perform their own brand, Irishness. Music could bring Ireland closer, in
order to show that their Irish culture had not dissolved into a general
Britishness, and to protect an ethnic identity lacking a distinctive skin
colour or language.

Irish Music at Spaghetti Junction

During the second half of the twentieth century, Irish music in
Birmingham became similarly caught, between the restoration of an
imaginary Ireland and the reality of a multicultural nexus from South Asia

69
Delaney, The Irish in Post-War Britain, p.64.
70
John Daniels, ‘If Birmingham’s Irish Think Big’, in Joe McKenna, ‘The Irish in
Birmingham: A Scrapbook’. Birmingham, Birmingham Central Library,
Birmingham Collection, 21.7, fol.46.
 The Trip to Birmingham 47

to America. The Birmingham-born composer Andrew Downes and Irish

emigrants Mary and Joseph Regan provide two examples of this
multicultural construction, epitomising, nevertheless, the universal
relationship between history and memory, as was reflected in The
Dubliners’ 2010 St Patrick’s Day performance for Birmingham. In 1989,
Downes, who is from an Irish family, acknowledged the unique
construction of pluralistic relationships in Birmingham with a concert hall
piece commissioned to celebrate the centenary of his City. Downes wrote
the metaphorical Centenary Firedances, “by bringing together Afro-
Caribbean, Irish folk, Indian and rock music”.71 Centenary Firedances
promotes the musical influences shared within the communal site of
Birmingham and prepared the ground for Downes to present a solely Irish
identity in the region just over a decade later. Celtic Rhapsody was
premièred by the Midland Youth Orchestra in Birmingham
Conservatoire’s Adrian Boult Hall in 2003.72

This chapter has hitherto emphasised musical time, place, event and
process, framed within the study of ethnomusicology. An analytical
account of music (of Downes’ orchestral composition) at this point
supports the endeavour of writers such as Mina Yang or John Joyce, who
emphasise that no art, folk or traditional music scholar can remain immune
from developments in “other” musical enquiries.73 Moreover, when set in
the context of its first performance, Downes’ Celtic Rhapsody is a concert
hall work that symbolises Birmingham’s end-of-the-century multicultural
crossroads, following the trajectory begun by earlier Irish mass-migration.

Downes’ Celtic Rhapsody responds directly to the tropes of Irish

literature over three movements of music. As a complete work, it concurs
more with the ancient Greek reading of rhapsody, referring to the
repetition of an epic poem, rather than with the classical implication of a
rhapsody being a continuous composition based on popular national or

71
Andrew Downes, ‘Bringing Down the Barriers Pops the Elitist Bubble’,
FourFour Magazine, 18 (2007), p.4.
72
The Midland Youth Orchestra was renamed the CBSO Youth Orchestra in 2004.
73
Scholars such as Mina Yang or John Joyce apply to the Western Classical canon
the theories of hybridization and globalization arising from specifically
ethnomusicological debate. Mina Yang, ‘East Meets West in the Concert Hall:
Asians and Classical Music in the Century of Imperialism, Post-Colonialism, and
Multiculturalism’, Asian Music 38 (2007), pp.1-30: John Joyce, ‘The Globalization
of Music: Expanding Spheres of Influence’, The Global History Reader, eds., by
Bruce Mazlish and Akira Iriye (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp.222-231.
48 Chapter One

folk music. Downes does employ associated instruments—solo violin,

horn, flute and piccolo—at various stages, but, in essence, his incarnation
features very few definable folk-like motifs. Celtic Rhapsody sets three
Irish poems for symphony orchestra and solo soprano. Although the
poems share no author, the Greek correspondence comes from the fact that
each of the poems emphasises the same notion of a journey; quite
appropriate for Irish integration in Birmingham and for the creation of
Downes’ distinctive brand of musical Irishness within it. The anonymous
text of the first movement, “The Land Oversea”, taken from the Ossianic
legends, is a description by Niamh “of the Golden Hair” of her father’s
land, the words taking on a particular poignancy by virtue of the composer
having dedicated Celtic Rhapsody to his own blonde-haired daughter,
Paula, who sang soprano at its premiere.74 The boundlessness of Thomas
Moore’s “The Meeting of the Waters” and W.B. Yeats’ “Into the
Twilight” consolidate the shared sentiment in Downes’ work: Ireland is
beautiful, ethereal and feminine in Birmingham, personified by orchestral
music that requires the soprano to ascend to the pitch of a high C at one
stage.75

“The Land Oversea” is portrayed by the ascending opening cello motif,

with an effect much like the broken arpeggio strings depicting the rocking
boat in Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture (1830). Downes illustrates a
familiar situation for the Irish in Birmingham; “In my mind, I imagined in
the first song, a journey over the sea from one ‘Celtic’ coast to another”.76
The musical ebb and flow continues in the declamatory “Meeting of the
Waters”, where a rising cello quaver motif complements the singer’s
instruction to sound “floating”. Alternating quadruple and triple time
signatures and a recurring concluding motif perpetuate a feeling of
uncertainty and timelessness throughout the third movement. The
increasing dynamic of a repeating unison finale has the impact of moving
the Birmingham audience and performers closer to this “land of dreams”.
The sheer loudness makes physical the temporal and spatial relationship
for Irishness in the city, which collapses geographic and historic distances
from Ireland.

74
Downes’ younger daughter Anna led the Midland Youth Orchestra for this
performance.
75
Downes extracts the poem, “Into the Twilight”, but adopts Yeats’ collective
title, Celtic Twilight, for his final movement, because this is more “in keeping with
the overall title of Celtic Rhapsody”. Email correspondence with Andrew Downes,
24 May 2007.
76
Email correspondence with Andrew Downes, 24 May 2007.
 The Trip to Birmingham 49

Downes indicates a particular Birmingham Irish relationship in his

song cycle, countering Ireland’s simultaneous global identity in the other
genres of pop, rock, dance and film musics by this stage, with a
composition that returned to English art music the version of Celticism
introduced much earlier by Arnold Bax. In the 1920s, as Irish writers
James Joyce and Samuel Beckett looked east to European modernism,
Bax, “the Celtic voice of English music”, had turned his attention west to
Ireland itself, finding that for him musical progress lay with Irish literature
and particularly the writings of Yeats. Bax’s engagement with Ireland was
somewhat stymied for a variety of extra-musical reasons (as his
pseudonym, Dermot O’Byrne, indicates). His music did not quite find its
place in ether Irish or English cultural development at this stage.
However, with Celtic Rhapsody, Downes promotes the legacy of Bax and
of Irish musical expression in England. Even the cover picture on
Downes’ score is indicative of that County Donegal Sliabh Liag coastline,
so beloved by England’s earliest Celtic voice in music.77

With a composition that returned Birmingham’s young classical

musicians and concert audiences to the English art music trends of Ireland
in the 1920s, Downes appears to skip over the era of Birmingham Irish
music from the 1950s on which this book focuses. But Celtic Rhapsody
highlights the fact that, by 2003, there was no single, linear, coherent
sound for him to develop in Birmingham, but rather the multicultural
(multi-genre) construction of an Irish soundworld. Compiling distinct
geographic sites is one means by which to describe the music of
contemporary Irishness, given the variety of this audibility in and around
the city.

With this in mind, if we consider now the achievements of Mary and

Joe Regan, we see a longer tradition of Irishness being positioned in
Birmingham between different cultural currents, real and imagined. As
teenagers, Mary and Joe Regan travelled from Counties Cork and Mayo,
respectively. In Birmingham, they established the four most prominent
venues for Irish social activity in the early sixties, known collectively as
the “Regan Circuit”. In time, the Regans’ clubs would welcome
international celebrities including Stevie Wonder, The Animals and The
Beatles, but initially, the Gary Owen in Small Heath, the Ritz Ballroom in
Kings Heath, and two Plazas, in Handsworth and Old Hill, provided the

77
Andrew Downes, Celtic Rhapsody (Stourbridge: Lynwood Music, 2002). Harry
White discusses the narrative engagement of Arnold Bax further in The Keeper’s
Recital, p.120.
50 Chapter One

stage for local, American-inspired, Irish popular groups and showbands.

The Gary Owen shared the name of an Irish drinking song (one that
celebrates carousing and fighting). Various republican songs and the
Amhrán na bhFiann were habitual finales at all of the Regans’ venues and
further encouraged a purely Irish clientele. One regular attendee was John
Fitzgerald, a 1950s County Wexford emigrant who would later set up the
Birmingham Irish Centre music shop Minstrel Music. Fitzgerald was
employed by the Regans to book local and visiting Irish musicians for the
Gary Owen after appearing there with his own showband, the Misfitz.78

Fitzgerald was one in a network of Irish staff on whom Mary Regan

relied in Birmingham because, as the first woman to have had a milking
machine in Ireland, and one with experience of school teaching (including
a stint as Head of Girls’ PE in Warwickshire), she was often asked to
return to her farm in Cork and pass on essential knowledge and skills.
Mary epitomises the Birmingham Irish dichotomy of temporary living and
musical permanence, remaining a Birmingham nightclub proprietor in
absentia: “‘Ma’ Regan took care of the business side of things, leaving Joe
to run the venues and act as compere”.79 Worth noting too is that the
permanent soundworld of Mary, through her ballrooms, can be read as
audible representation for the many Irish females in Birmingham,
considering, as the traditional Irish musician Paddy Moloney has
surmised: “the roots of an awful lot of rock ‘n’ roll […] for all intents and
purposes started as a mother singing to her child”.80

Adam Krims has prioritised a “relation between the music we listen to

and how the music helps to emulate the kinds of people we become and
the kind of world we will live in”.81 Krims’ point is illustrated by
exploring the fact that, in Birmingham, American music, such as the rock
‘n’ roll on offer at the Regans’ clubs, often maintained an Irish distinction
because the emergent diaspora there wished to emulate the world of
America where Irish communities had already grown enormously in social
mobility and political power. This rock ‘n’ roll became an identity for the

78
Conversation with John Fitzgerald, January 2008.
79
Bev Bevan, ‘The Night we Opened for The Beatles – and McCartney Said I was
Better than Ringo’, Sunday Mercury, August 15 2008
<http://blogs.sundaymercury.net/bev-bevan/2008/08/the-night-we-opened-for-the-
be.html> [accessed 4 July 2009].
80
Melhuish, Celtic Tides, p.79.
81
Krims, Music and Urban Geography, p.130.
 The Trip to Birmingham 51

“new” country of Irish settlement, England. In his album liner notes for
The Pogues, Gavin Martin describes the lead singer:

[Shane] MacGowan who had spent his formative years both in Ireland and
England sought to blend his twin passions—the rare longing and rebellious
taunts of his Irish folk roots and the wired energy and fiery attack of high
energy rock n roll.82

Local Irishman Frank Murphy claims that migrants travelling to

Birmingham “lived in an Irish cultural bubble […] our music was 1960s
Irish ballads and country and western”.83 Murphy’s allusion to our music,
country and western, introduces a new dimension to the Birmingham Irish
application of Kershaw’s collapse of distance. The country and western
genre, derived from an American melting-pot of assimilations, includes
musical influences brought to the Southern States by a combination of
British and Irish arrivals from the nineteenth century. Murphy, therefore,
claims “our” Irish music in Birmingham against a backdrop of other
diasporas rather than of Ireland.

That this is the case is understandable. After all, the success of the
Irish in America was publicly celebrated just as the Irish began to make
their mark on Birmingham in the mid-twentieth century. The election of
John F. Kennedy, whose Irish lineage was well-known, meant that the
emergent diaspora in places like Birmingham could feel that “one of our
own” was at the top, in the White House. They could use genres of
American music to express a new confident Irishness abroad as a display
of difference in a British city. Country and western concerts were
commonplace at the Birmingham Irish Centre (not to mention a safer bet
than Irish traditional music in the 1970s and 1980s) and the Regans’ social
clubs made the sound local and locatable. American-style rock ‘n’ roll
and jazz music defined escalating Irishness in Birmingham, and, over
time, this Irish sound came to be equated with the city’s sound. As the
music journalist Rob Partridge wrote, in 1974, “Birmingham is a strong
working class community producing a culture which has found
contemporary substance in high energy rock ‘n’ roll”.84

82
See Martin liner notes for The Very Best of the Pogues.
83
Chinn, Birmingham Irish, p.103.
84
Rob Partridge, ‘Brum Beat: New Musical Express 1974’, The Move Online
<http://www.themoveonline.com/archive_os.html> [accessed 30 September 2008].
52 Chapter One

Murphy’s reference to a musical bubble appropriately sums up the

somewhat contradictory position of the Irish in Birmingham, as do the two
musical genres he cites. Ballad music was promoted amongst Britain’s
diaspora by Irish groups, such as The Dubliners, during the 1960s, but that
particular word, ballad, raises broader cultural overtones. A good deal of
nineteenth-century Irish poetry has a ballad metre and rhyme. Yeats
himself substantiated the ballad tradition in literature, alongside his
prominent dependence on the iambic pentameter and refrain of English
Romantic ballads. Indeed Downes contends with one such intriguing
ballad metre and rhyme in the third movement of his orchestral work,
Celtic Rhapsody. In applying Schechner’s message of cultural loss as an
umbrella for this study, it is also appropriate to identify, as Seamus Deane
has done, that the Irish ballad tradition was a common feature of the
poems written under pseudonyms for The Nation;85 the implication here
being a loss of the authors’ real names. In addition, the early narratives of
Ireland’s mythic hero Fionn Mac Cumhaill and the Fianna are also
thought to have included ballads that were lost to the large body of verses
and prose in the twelfth century.

Here then, with a new immigration movement to mid-twentieth century

Birmingham, was the resurrection in music of an Irish identity historically
rooted in Ireland, but disappearing from it in many cultural senses.
Furthermore, any understanding of the ballad that expressed an undeniably
pure, authentic Irishness may have had specific fervour in a central
English context, considering Francis O’Neill’s bemoaning: “The music of
Ireland is all that her oppressors have left her […] the ancient melodies
[…] afford us one of the most unerring criterions by which we can judge
of the natural temperament and characteristic feelings of its people”.86 As
the Regans’ empire shows, throughout the second half of the twentieth
century, Irish music in Birmingham could be a complicated blend of the
skills, material and cultural possessions of Irish migrants (as passed on via
the road and sea networks), the global influence of music from America
and elsewhere (as passed on via television and radio) and the urge to
create a distinctive Irish culture (arising from the need to feel separate
from other cultures in the surrounding urban area).

85
Seamus Deane, ‘Poetry and Song 1800-1890’, in The Field Day Anthology of
Irish Writing, 3 volumes, eds. by Seamus Deane et al, (Derry: Field Day, 1991-
2002), II, pp.1-114 (p.2).
86
Francis O’Neill, Irish Folk Music: A Fascinating Hobby (East Ardsley: EP
Publishing, 1973), p.8.
 The Trip to Birmingham 53

Few, if any, of the Birmingham Town Hall “Time to Remember”

concertgoers on St Patrick’s Night in 2010 would have been aware that
they were continuing a tradition that far outlasted the mere forty-eight
years of Dubliners’ performances in the city. The very act of celebrating
St Patrick’s anniversary on a regular basis in the Birmingham Town Hall
began soon after the completion of the original New Street Station in the
1860s when it served earlier travellers to the city, including those who had
left Ireland as a result of famine. Yet some of those who saw The
Dubliners in March 2010 might remember seeing another Irish-themed
music group, the Celtic Women, perform in the same venue three years
previously and draw links between the two. Older members of that
audience might remember Irish president Éamon de Valera’s visit to the
Town Hall in the 1950s. Still other fans might note the formality of the
modern Birmingham Town Hall (refurbished at great expense at the turn
of the millennium) and might contrast their systematic behaviour there
with more raucous performances that The Dubliners have given elsewhere.
In either case, the memory of one might cause the memory of the other to
change and evolve, causing personal and communal historical distances to
shift and alter. An archive is built by such individual responses because
the performance events do not exist in isolation in Birmingham. One
event may—either in advance or in retrospect—greatly change or affect
the reception, meaning and significance of another in different ways for
diverse audiences.

Our remembered knowledge of a live performance is always partial. If

I think back to that recent Dubliners’ concert, I cannot now know for sure
which of the notes the banjo player, Barney McKenna, misplayed on his
instrument. I cannot remember if the group tuned their strings on stage
and I cannot know exactly which audience members could hear and focus
upon which parts of the music. My memories are shaped in addition by
various cultural forces, such as the books I have read since, the
programmes I have seen on television, radio discussions I have heard and
so on. The Dubliners’ memories were rich with nostalgia for the audience
in the Birmingham Town Hall. Perhaps the historian’s attempt to look
objectively is misguided because history is always manipulated by cultural
memory: the “facts” of history are mostly static evidence, such as
documents and records, but the creative, meaningful community act lies in
the interpretation and imagination of these. It is all the more important to
maintain a distinction between the outwardly certain events of history and
the restoration and collapse of historical distance because of the transience
of memory.
54 Chapter One

In his introduction to the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Seamus

Deane describes how historians “of a limited philosophical resource still
long to answer the question, ‘What really happened then?’”, whereas,
given the many possible different representations, more subtle readers
might “ask the longer, less abrasive, question: ‘[h]ow, in the light of what
is happening now, can we re-present what was, then and since, believed to
have been the significance of what ‘really’ happened?’”87 Deane implies
that, for those interested in Ireland’s cultural expression, history can only
truly exist in its modified relation to present-day concerns. With the
awareness that modern Birmingham accommodates a lively, distinctive
and very public Irish identity, in the following chapter we regress to a time
when Irish music “began” to exist there in the 1950s. When the Irish
musical traditions re-presented by migrants were returned to their private
domestic realm, but in an urban city. By restoring this Irish history in
music, we continue a narrative that ascertains what “really” happened to
the sound of Birmingham and how it has significance to what is happening
in Birmingham now.

87
Seamus Deane, ‘General Introduction’, in The Field Day Anthology of Irish
Writing, 3 volumes, eds. by Seamus Deane et al (Derry: Field Day, 1991-2002), I,
pp.xix-xxvi (p.xxi).
 CHAPTER TWO

IN HANDSWORTH STANDS A HOUSE:

LILY LAWRIE AND COMHALTAS

The Irish music scene in Birmingham got underway in 1962 when Lilly and
Father Sean McTiernan got together and founded Comhaltas.1

When Adam Krims promoted the relationship between choices of

music and the creation of society, his inspiration was the diaspora in
contemporary America. Krims’ account offsets the transience of human
being and the continual flow of global discourse with a clarity of
chronology. He pinpoints 1996 as the definitive end of “an increasing
sense of constraint on some urban subjects”.2 That Krims can mark the
end of “constraint” to so specific a year sounds implausible, certainly at-
odds to a musicological language of movable, temporal, spatial realities and
persistent calibrations. Yet for some urban subjects in Birmingham, 1996
was indeed a significant liberation date. The reintroduction of the St
Patrick’s Parade in March of that year implied an end to cultural constraint
and created an annual celebration of the city, set to rival London’s Notting
Hill Carnival.3 The St Patrick’s Parade demonstrated an increasing sense
of space for Birmingham’s Irish diaspora at what was a particularly
important time to reinstate public Irishness, just as an historic site for the
community was set to close. In July 1996 the Birmingham Town Hall
underwent a £35 million redevelopment because of concerns over its
structural stability, remaining shut to the public until 2007.4 On
reopening, the prestigious arena now looked almost unrecognisable

1
Susan Lynch, ‘Comhaltas Loses One of its Founder Members’, Harp, October
2005, p.4.
2
Krims, Music and Urban Geography, p.13.
3
An annual carnival, organised primarily by members of the West Indian
communities, has taken place on the streets of Notting Hill since the 1960s and
regularly attracts one million spectators.
4
Rob Pickard, Funding the Architectural Heritage: A Guide to Policies and
Examples (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 2009), p.2012.
56 Chapter Two

compared to its down-at-heel incarnation in the 1980s and 1990s,

introducing Birmingham’s second world-class concert venue alongside
neighbouring Symphony Hall.

The new-look Town Hall was inaugurated with a two-week music

festival in October 2007, entitled “Celebrating the Past, Pioneering the
Future”, which featured performances by the City of Birmingham
Symphony Orchestra and local children’s choirs. The opening concert
series included A Feast of Irish Folk; an evening I attended (one that,
ultimately, determined the topic of this book), which comprised displays
from the best of Birmingham’s Irish musicians and dancers including the
South Birmingham Comhaltas, the Kenny School of Irish Dancing, Mick
Hipkiss and the traditional band Drowsy Maggie, Tommy Dempsey, and
Kevin Crawford with his professional outfit Lúnasa.5 As the event wore
on, performances became increasingly participatory and informal. There
were huge cheers from the, by now warmed-up, audience when the
Northern Irish BBC Radio WM presenter Bob Brolly took to the stage in
the second half to ask, “Is anyone here from Ireland?” The clamorous
response encouraged Brolly to continue with his demographic exploration,
shouting out specific counties and towns in Ireland and stirring up friendly
rivalries amongst the crowd. Whether intentionally or not, Brolly silenced
Birmingham Town Hall before introducing the next act with one final
question, “And is anyone here English?”

This particular concert had been advertised in newspapers, webpages

and sites renowned for attracting an Irish contingent in and around
Birmingham. But the history of Irish and English intermingling in the city
scarcely allows for such a simple binary division as Brolly presented. By
2007, many original post-war migrants had married non-Irish Brummies;
had raised children, grandchildren even, in Birmingham. The very
distinctive regional spoken accents I discerned amongst the audience
convinced me that a sizeable proportion watching A Feast of Irish Folk, if
not born in, must have, at least, spent the majority of their lives in England
not in Ireland. Perhaps the feast of traditional instrumental dance
melodies, airs, ballads and folksong being played and sung on stage had
set up a more informal session style of participation, associated most

5
Lúnasa, Irish for August, is derived from the word for the ancient Irish harvest
festival Lughnasadh. Irish playwright Brian Friel revisits the festival in his play
Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), which describes Irish nostalgia and history based on
the central motif of music and dance. A film adaptation directed by Pat O’Connor
was released in 1998.
 In Handsworth Stands a House: Lily Lawrie and Comhaltas 57

readily with Ireland, to be contrasted with the more staid actions of those
attending, say, the concerts of the CBSO, and encouraged the audience to
proclaim an Irish rather than an English heritage. After all, by Krims’
reckoning, this creation of unconstrained Ireland, rather than constrained
England, in the Birmingham Town Hall, would have been a direct
response to the music the audience heard from the stage.

Such stereotyped reciprocal public displays of Irish culture are not, in

fact, indigenous to Ireland however. They have developed as a result of
the diaspora finding England and reached the music scene in Ireland
through a workforce to-ing and fro-ing across the Irish Sea following the
Second World War. In the urban centres of England, Irish labourers
typically lodged communally with landlords who discouraged the use of
their private house for anything other than sleeping. As a result, the public
house became a popular site for relaxing together with music.
Entertainment to pass the evening could be provided in these places by
groups of instrumentalists playing fast traditional dance music alongside
solo singers of slow laments and socialist songs, in front of—and roused
by—a casual, talkative and transitory audience. Nuala O’Connor explains
that in 1947 the “first pub session, as we now know it, took place not in
Ireland at all but in The Devonshire Arms in London’s Camden Town”.6
Only afterwards did musicians back in Ireland benefit, both technically
and economically, from this foreign construction of communal music
performed antiphonally in public spaces to varying levels of attentiveness.

At the behest of the Catholic Church in Ireland, the government had

dented open performances of music by passing the Public Dance Hall Act
in 1935. The Act eradicated outdoor dancing altogether and limited indoor
dancing to licensed halls whose owners paid taxes on the admission price.7
It is no wonder the performance practices of the diaspora were leapt upon
because, as Dublin singer Ronnie Drew recalled, the only option outside
the home for his band in the early fifties was street busking because there
were “none of the singer pubs that Mick McCarthy and all that, came back
from England and set up”.8 Until the introduction of “singer pubs”, a

6
Nuala O’Connor, ‘Ireland: Dancing at the Virtual Crossroads’, in World Music
The Rough Guide: Africa, Europe and the Middle East, eds. by Mark Ellingham,
Orla Duane and Vanessa Dowell (London: Rough Guides, 1999), pp.170-188
(p.172).
7
Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan, The Anthology of Ireland (New York:
Berg, 2006), p.97.
8
The Late Late Show Tribute to The Dubliners (RTÉ, 1988) [on VCR].
58 Chapter Two

revivalist group such as Drew’s may have been left out on the streets
because, since the 1950s, Irish traditional music in Ireland was promoted
under the control of a nationalistic organisation in Dublin whose formal
rules and regulations prohibited such a casual mode of performance.
Unlike those rather unceremonious proceedings in 2007, where
Birmingham Town Hall came to channel the supping solidarity of a
modern pub session, Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann was committed to
traditional Irish music appreciated by a discerning audience in a hushed
concert hall. Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann sought to preserve Ireland’s
musical identity with strictly-regulated competitions, fleadhanna, for
soloists and bands and, in the process of establishing these, became
something of an Irish music police.

Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann was founded in January 1951 by

members of the Thomas Street Pipers’ Club in Dublin and solo musicians
from County Westmeath. Since the turn of the century, the Gaelic League
had campaigned to reinstate the Irish language in schools and the Gaelic
Athletics Association had promoted Gaelic football, hurling and camogie,
but by the 1950s, there was still no national organisation solely validating
Ireland’s “own” music. Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann arose from fear that
traditional Irish instruments and repertoires were unknown and
endangered, as a new generation resorted to emigration, departing with
and from their inherited culture. Those at the inaugural meeting of
Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann decided that an annual competition, Fleadh
Cheoil (“feast of music”, the name must have inspired the title of the
Birmingham Town Hall display), would legitimise the formal concert
platform for traditional music and move Ireland’s musicians from the
private kitchens to which they had been confined by the Dance Hall Ban,
into more public “social and intellectual circles”.9 As a by-product, by
offering options other than that recent revolution—and largely all-male—
singer pub, Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann would play an important part in
opening performance sites for Irish traditional music to women and
children.

Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann expanded because of government

sponsorship in the 1960s and remains Ireland’s largest body for protecting
traditional music, through a combination of “nationalist politics, music

9
Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, ‘History’ <http://comhaltas.ie/about/history>
[accessed 21 August 2010].
 In Handsworth Stands a House: Lily Lawrie and Comhaltas 59

competitions, centralized bureaucracy, and grassroots activism”.10 Its

headquarters are still in Dublin, now at the purpose-built Cultúrlann na
hÉireann in Monkstown, but Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann has become an
international movement with over ten thousand members organised into in
excess of four hundred local branches worldwide. Branches of Comhaltas
Ceoltóirí Éireann are started by a group of at least five volunteers
applying to the central executive committee, Ardchomhairle, in order to be
ratified. This hierarchical pyramid structure mirrors the organisation’s
competitions, where musicians qualify from various regional rounds
before progressing to the All-Ireland Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann finals.
Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann was hardly established as a diasporic
outreach organisation, but regulations defined by the Thomas Street Pipers
regarding national repertoire, instruments and venues assisted those caught
up in a wave of mass emigration from the fifties who would attempt to
collapse their distance from Ireland—to restore their native behaviour with
an outwardly agreed, recognisable sound of Irishness away from home.

Soon after Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann emerged, post-war Birmingham

could easily meet the five member minimum required for a branch. Irish
music had been fostered in the city by a new migrant community
throughout the fifties. Traditional musicians were already forming their
own “unofficial” church céilí bands to accompany dances at the parishes
of St Catherine’s and St Anne’s. By 1961, one of the earliest branches of
Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann outside Ireland, the Birmingham Comhaltas,
was established. Among the most famous and regular musicians in the
Birmingham Comhaltas were Josie McDermott, Seamus Connolly, Paul
Brock, Brendan Mulvihill, Seamus Shannon and Catherine McEvoy.
During the sixties, some of these more prominent members of the
Birmingham Comhaltas formed the new Birmingham Céilí Band, which
toured the UK, Ireland and beyond to advertise the musical talent of this
rapidly-expanding diaspora.

This chapter focuses primarily on the domestic site for the Birmingham
Comhaltas. A minority of musicians protected the Irish identity in 1960s
Birmingham, thus allowing for the Irish identity of contemporary
Birmingham to materialize, ultimately with the parade of 1996. In this
initial case study the role of Lily Lawrie is elevated. One of the founders
and most influential members of the Birmingham Comhaltas, Lawrie

10
Rachel C. Fleming, ‘Resisting Cultural Standardization: Comhaltas Ceoltóirí
Éireann and the Revitalization of Traditional Music in Ireland’, Journal of
Folklore Research, 41 (2004), pp.227-257 (p.228).
60 Chapter Two

challenged traditional gender and musical forms through her work with the
organisation. She introduced competitive elements set by Comhaltas
Ceoltóirí Éireann to the practice of Irish music in Birmingham and
allowed female traditional musicians a performance place that they may
have been denied elsewhere in the city. Despite Lawrie’s modernisation,
the enthusiasm of the Catholic Church for her activities gives a kind of
social conservatism to these gatherings. Lawrie eschewed her own Holy
Orders specifically because her fiddle was prohibited in the convent she
visited in Ireland, but in Birmingham she worked alongside priests to
create a hospitable musical arena for the sudden influx of new arrivals
from her native country.

Irish music was restored to migrants in Birmingham by the

Birmingham Comhaltas, which, by its nature, was something of an
anomaly within the existing Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann body. The
branch worked closely to the musical constitution as laid out by
Ardchomhairle, but it did not—could not—share the original purpose of
Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, to draw isolated rural musicians out to
public spaces. On the contrary, Lily Lawrie transformed the public space
of her husband’s doctor’s surgery into a domestic music base from which
she instigated and fostered a distinct rural Irish ethnicity in a particularly
pluralistic area of urban Birmingham. From the initial boundaries of a
single house in Handsworth, Birmingham could come to accommodate a
city-wide Irish music movement that would have decreased all sense of
constraint on the local diaspora by the late 1990s.

Music in the Home

When addressing an audience of Irish traditional musicians in
Birmingham in 1993, Pat Sweeney, then Chairman of the Comhaltas
Ceoltóirí Éireann Council in Great Britain, argued that the organisation
had maintained Ireland’s cultural and political autonomy after the
“hardships of famine and foreign rule”.11 By speaking at the annual dinner
dance of the South Birmingham Comhaltas, however, Sweeney evinced
the fact that Ireland’s cultural independence was complemented by a
complex interrelationship with the Irish who had migrated overseas,
influenced, in some cases, by famine and foreign rule. Indeed, those
running Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann from Ireland have often prioritised

11
This event took place on the 30 January 1993. See Vincent Jordan, ‘Carmel a
Star with Birmingham’, Treoir, 25 (1993), p.14.
 In Handsworth Stands a House: Lily Lawrie and Comhaltas 61

this international interrelationship. After performing at a function in

Cashel, County Tipperary, in 1972, the Chairman of University College
Dublin’s governing body told members of the Birmingham Comhaltas:

Yours is the true image of Ireland—not the image of the drunken Irish or
the brawling Irish. Thousands of Irishmen and women, who have left their
country through no fault of their own, have helped to enrich the countries
of the world and have used their talents unsparingly in the lands of their
adoption.12

In 1974 an IRA bombing campaign on the British mainland made the

political status of an autonomous Ireland a highly-charged public issue in
Birmingham. Interesting, then, that in the same year, Comhaltas Ceoltóirí
Éireann published an article by Seán O’Baoill that undermined the
concept of an authentic Irish Ireland by acknowledging the constant
interchange between English and Irish traditions and songs since the Battle
of Kinsale in 1601.13 More recently, at the start of recession in Ireland in
2008, the Irish government pledged money to the Comhaltas Ceoltóirí
Éireann development programme. This was focused not on Ireland but on
the diaspora, “in response to the needs and aspirations of Comhaltas in 15
Countries on 4 Continents”.14

Chronologically, Britain was the first of these fifteen countries.

Closely following Glasgow, Liverpool and London, Birmingham was the
fourth city through which Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann established itself
on the island.15 The Birmingham Comhaltas was based at the house Dun
Mhuire on Brecon Road in Handsworth, or, as the local and visiting
musicians knew it, at the home of the Lawrie family. Dun Mhuire
attracted players living in Birmingham and those travelling with music
from Ireland, using the city as a convenient thoroughfare. The County
Sligo flautist Josie McDermott learnt tunes from the Lawries’ daughter
Kathleen, for example, finding inspiration during one of his many visits
from Ireland for the reel “The Trip to Birmingham”, which amplified the
city’s voice in traditional repertoire; whilst in the 1970s the All-Britain

12
Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, ‘Cashel’s Welcome for Birmingham’, Treoir, 4
(1972), p.11.
13
Seán O’Baoill, ‘Traditional Singing in English – The Ulster Dimension’, Treoir,
6 (1974), p.8.
14
Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Eireann, ‘Development Programme in Full Flight: 200
Projects and 16 Cultural Centres’, Treoir, 40 (2008), p.3.
15
The first branch of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann in the UK was established in
Glasgow in January 1957.
62 Chapter Two

fiddle champion Brendan Mulvihill left New York for Birmingham,

“where he played in ceilidh bands and with the many Irish musicians who
had settled in the English Midlands”.16 In 2005 the Irish Post newspaper
still remembered Dun Mhuire as “the beacon of all things relating to Irish
traditional music, song and dance”.17

Lily Lawrie (née Elizabeth Cullen) from Cartron, Knockvicar (near

Boyle in County Roscommon) arrived in Birmingham before the mass
wave of post-war migration to the area. Born in 1915, she followed her
sister Kathleen to Halesowen in the 1930s before training to become a
nurse in Warwick. Lily’s medical career in Birmingham spanned some
fifty years during which time she met the doctor Robert Lawrie, whom she
married in 1946. Her service to Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann was almost
as long as that to the hospitals in Birmingham. From 1962, she was the
“centre of gravity” for musicians, having established the Birmingham
Comhaltas in what was then a fledgling Irish music scene in the city.18

Robert Lawrie made no claim to an Irish genealogy, but born in

Manchester to Scottish parents, and marrying an Irish woman with whom
he had four Birmingham-born children, he could certainly identify with
the sense of displacement felt by the first- and second-generation Irish
migrants arriving at his house to understand—to restore—their identity
through musical performance. Lawrie had previously enlisted as a doctor
in the British army, but, such was his unanimity with the city’s migrant
Irish community, that he was elected to be the first chairman of the émigré
Birmingham County Roscommon Association. A tongue-in-cheek article
written for the international Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann publication,
Treoir, declared that “perhaps we should say [Robert] was an Englishman
for he has long been converted!”, before asserting the acquired Irish
credentials by writing about his wife “Elizabeth’s fiddle playing which
swept her husband into the world of Irish traditional music”.19 The Lawrie
household thus provided a forum for debate about the fluctuating notions
of migration, nationality and national allegiance, with Elizabeth herself
preferring “Lily” to her actual Christian name on the grounds that

16
‘Brendan Mulvihill’ <http://www.brendanmulvihill.com/> [accessed 5 November
2008].
17
Brendan Farrell, ‘Irish music mourns loss of Comhaltas stalwart’, Irish Post,
September 7 2005, p.14.
18
Andrew Kuntz, ‘The Fiddler’s Companion: Kathleen Lawrie’s Wedding’
<www.ibiblio.org/fiddles/KA.htm> [accessed 28 November 2007].
19
Comhaltas Ceoltóiri Éireann, ‘Birmingham Céilí House’, Treoir, 11 (1979), p.6.
 In Handsworth Stands a House: Lily Lawrie and Comhaltas 63

Elizabeth sounded too English for someone born in Roscommon and so

attracted to traditional Irish culture.20

During the day, the family home, Dun Mhuire was transformed from a
domestic site. In actual fact, it was one of the most public spaces in the
area, doubling as Robert Lawrie’s medical practice with a spacious
waiting room that could accommodate up to thirty patients. After hours,
with the waiting room restored to a family lounge, Lily Lawrie welcomed
many more people seeking solace.21 The open communal area remained,
not for those impaired of health so much as for those impaired of home.
For an Irish minority group in the city Lily provided all the familiar tenets
of a private rural house in Ireland. In the evening, Irish traditional music
became the medicine prescribed at the English doctor’s surgery and Lily
often neglected her fiddle in order to fulfil the role of bean an tí; busy
being hostess, “serving homemade cakes, sandwiches and tea during
sessions”.22 Thus, the legacy of this site, as the Birmingham Irish
journalist Brendan Farrell remembered, is not the public function of a
clinic, but rather, Dun Mhuire, the domestic “house destined to become a
cradle for Irish traditional music, song and dance”.23

The rural house incarnation of the Brecon Road surgery was assured by
Lily Lawrie’s nurturing of family, such that, more often than not, people
coming to Dun Mhuire were either from Ireland or had palpable Irish
roots. English clientele attracted to a hippy, alternative or Celtic culture
tended to congregate instead in more public pubs or social clubs, such as
the Jug O’ Punch, in the city centre. Until the late nineties, musicians
attended Dun Mhuire for weekly instrumental sessions on Mondays; step
dancers turned up for Sean Bradley’s Comhaltas Céilí classes on Tuesdays
and music lessons, meetings and further performances took place every
Sunday. Dun Mhuire also hosted esteemed attendees of the annual Fleadh
Cheoil na Breataine (the All-Britain qualifying round of the Fleadh Cheoil
music competition)24 and visiting Irish dignitaries, but, in essence, anyone

20
Farrell, ‘Irish music mourns loss of Comhaltas stalwart’, p.14.
21
Irish music enthusiasts had previously congregated in Dr Lawrie’s waiting room
at the family house in Tintern Road, Perry Bar.
22
Conversation with Kathleen Lawrie, March 2009.
23
Farrell, ‘Irish music mourns loss of Comhaltas stalwart’, p.14.
24
In the Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann competition structure, Britain is equated to
an Irish Province. Winners of the Fleadh Cheoil na Breataine title progress to the
national Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann competing against those successful from each
province of Ireland.
64 Chapter Two

who wanted to engage with Irish music could do so there. Subscriptions

to the Birmingham Comhaltas originally cost just a shilling a year and,
whenever possible, instruments were lent to those unable to buy their own.

Many of Lily Lawrie’s instruments were borrowed by the

Birmingham-born children of first generation Irish migrants, who arrived
at Dun Mhuire every Friday afternoon for instrumental lessons and a
Junior Céilí Band rehearsal.25 This next generation of Irish traditional
musicians in Birmingham would, in time, instigate the journey of Irish
music from the city’s private to the public sphere, as demonstrated in
1996. The junior and youth activities in Birmingham also dovetailed with
an increasingly professional traditional music education in Ireland. The
immediate impact of Irish government sponsorship for Comhaltas
Ceoltóirí Éireann in the late sixties was their priority for children’s
musical tuition. Soon afterwards, All-Ireland competitions had to be
modified from the original two categories, demarcating senior and junior
championships, to specific age-group classes that could accommodate the
growing number of young performers. Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann
introduced a music diploma in the 1980s and founded graded exams in the
1990s, designed to further improve standards of teaching. Simultaneously,
traditional music became “supported by a voluntary education infrastructure,
mainly through the extensive national network of CCÉ branches”.26

Almost all of those younger Irish musicians playing with the Lawries
in the 1960s were Birmingham born. Most continue to perform or teach
traditional music with the organisation. As Brad Hurley explains, Lily’s
“weekly sessions became a legend in the area and from these social
evenings sprang the future talents of Comhaltas in Britain today”.27 The
Lawries’ own children, Roberta, Kathleen and Margaret, led lessons on tin
whistle, accordion and fiddle, respectively. It was at Dun Mhuire that the
famous flautist Catherine McEvoy began her career at the age of twelve
when she borrowed a flute from Kathleen. Within six months McEvoy
had won the international Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann championship.
Undoubtedly this connection to Irish music that McEvoy (who is

25
Junior McGuinness, Danny Boyle, Catherine Hennessy, and brothers Kevin and
Kieran Hickey were also members of the original Junior Céilí Band.
26
‘CCÉ’ is a common abbreviation for Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Eireann. See
O’Flynn, The Irishness of Irish Music, p.53.
27
Brad Hurley, ‘An Interview with Catherine McEvoy’, A Guide to the Irish Flute
<http://www.firescribble.net/flute/mcevoy.html> [accessed 2 September 2009].
 In Handsworth Stands a House: Lily Lawrie and Comhaltas 65

Birmingham-born and second-generation Irish) found in Handsworth

persuaded her to relocate to Ireland in 1977, where she lives still.

Another student of the Lawries—and an original member of the Junior

Céilí Band with his brother Chris—is Vince Jordan, who currently leads
the South Birmingham Comhaltas. In turn, the children of Margaret
Lawrie have learnt traditional music from Vince’s children. Learning and
trading techniques and repertoire in such a way, within communal and
family gatherings at Dun Mhuire, protected the oral and aural musical
transmissions rooted in Ireland’s agricultural history. The upkeep of this
tradition by the Birmingham Comhaltas was not typical of Irish
communities in England however. In his study of London, Reg Hall
charts the decline of rural Irish music during the twentieth century and
blames a new Irish population and the natural ageing of the previous one.28
Hall’s findings clarify why the Birmingham Comhaltas has received much
more recognition from Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann authorities in Dublin
than branches in London have done.

Vince Jordan’s Birmingham-born daughter Katie explains that

“traditional Irish music has given me the chance to express my Irish roots
and to be proud of who I am and where I have come from […] It’s a major
part of my past, present and future”.29 Her three-fold illustration implies
the exchange of a consistent Birmingham Comhaltas model between new
generations of Birmingham’s Irish diaspora. This understanding fits the
broader theoretical framework for equating music with societies, as
provided by Tina Ramnarine. Ramnarine introduces the temporal concept
of “musical calibrations”, where a society continually develops through a
musical design that remains steady. Much like the opening concert series
at the Birmingham Town Hall, this analysis is “about understanding the
past but also about shaping the future”.30 The individual narrative of the
accomplished third-generation Irish musician Katie Jordan suggests that
the embedded music of the Birmingham Comhaltas inhabits a similarly
active social space. The evolving diaspora in Birmingham can continue to

28
Hall, Irish Music and Dance in London, 1870-1970, p.375.
29
Chinn, Birmingham Irish, p.179.
30
Ramnarine responds to Ato Queyson’s invitation to “read for the social” in order
to understand the fluidity of diasporic boundaries, and argues that within
ethnomusicological and political consciences we can also write for the social. See
Tina Ramnarine, ‘Musical Performance in the Diaspora: Introduction’,
Ethnomusicology Forum, 16 (2007), pp.1-17.
66 Chapter Two

collapse historical distance from “home” by performing traditional music

in the manner of Lily Lawrie, born and raised in rural Ireland.

Kathleen Lawrie credits younger performers, such as Katie Jordan, for

distinguishing Birmingham at national and international fleadhanna,
performing traditional music to a high standard she proclaims never to
have known prior to this era. Performance standards were measurably
lower before the proliferation of local Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann
branches outside Ireland. At the age of fifteen, Kathleen was one of the
first two junior traditional musicians from Britain to compete at the finals
of the main Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann competition, but claims to have
known only “one jig and half a march. We used to play all night. You’d
soon pick it up”.31 From these inauspicious beginnings, Birmingham’s
branch promoted superior Irish music, such that by 1970, Comhaltas
Ceoltóirí Éireann authorities confirmed, “Birmingham [musicians] are
certainly pulling their weight in the cause of an Irish Ireland in England”.32
Following the start of the Troubles in Northern Ireland the previous year,
this statement has an unmistakable political edge—an edge that aided the
decline in public Birmingham Comhaltas activities following the
widespread revulsion at the attack on Birmingham in 1974.

One major effect of this decline was that, having never ceased
referencing Ireland as “home”, Lily Lawrie and her family were among
those migrants who left Birmingham during the seventies, swayed by
political, social and economic upheavals. Lily had returned to Ireland
every summer since leaving home. From the 1950s her family had spent
their holidays playing music down the boreens with traditional musicians
from the Sligo and Roscommon border area, including Josie McDermott.
However, the reality of permanent living in a remote region in the West of
Ireland in the early seventies was curiously unfamiliar. This contemporary
Roscommon was not the same county Lily Lawrie had left in the thirties.
Most conspicuous was the sudden disappearance of evening music
sessions; those distinctly Irish events, recreated at Dun Mhuire, that had
brought the Lawrie family back to Ireland every year, but had now been
replaced by evening sessions of television-watching.

31
Conversation with Kathleen Lawrie, March 2009.
32
Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, ‘An Irish Ireland in Britain’, Treoir, 2 (1970), p.9.
 In Handsworth Stands a House: Lily Lawrie and Comhaltas 67

The English screenwriter Terence Davies tells us, “we leave the place
we love, then spend a lifetime trying to regain it”.33 Lily Lawrie could not
return to the Ireland she had loved and left because over forty years had
passed and it no longer existed. Instead, she had regained Roscommon
through music in Birmingham. In Lily’s absence—when the family
moved for a time back to Ireland—some of the cultural expressions,
disturbed by an anti-Irish sentiment in the seventies, had been relocated in
Birmingham by Vince Jordan and other second generation musicians who
had grown up in the Irish Ireland of the original Dun Mhuire. They
formed Birmingham’s second Comhaltas Céoltóirí Éireann branch, the
South Birmingham Comhaltas, between 1968 and 1972, utilising the
parish hall of the English Martyrs in Sparkhill. The Lawrie family
returned to their familiar rural Irish scene of Brecon Road in Handsworth
later that decade, where it was business as usual. One Treoir journalist,
reporting on the Birmingham Comhaltas’ twenty-first birthday dinner
dance in 1983, stated, at Dun Mhuire “a key would never be needed, the
Lawries have an open door”.34 The notion of an open door connects Dun
Mhuire to that community in Roscommon the Lawries sought to regain.
In Handsworth, Irish migrants could experience their common assumption,
that the doors of rural Ireland remained open to those who had left home,
“temporarily”, to drive cosmopolitan Birmingham.

On returning from Ireland in the late seventies, the Lawries’ door was
kept open until the early nineties, after which Birmingham Comhaltas
activities enjoyed a short-lived relocation to the newly-named Dun
Mhuire; the home of Kathleen and her husband Tommy Boyle in Orchard
Road, Erdington. The passing of Robert Lawrie and of Lily’s brothers,
Jack and Kevin Cullen, within the following year, called time on these
meetings and on the Birmingham Comhaltas. Since then, the younger
South Birmingham Comhaltas, incorporating original Birmingham
Comhaltas members, has flown the flag solo for Comhaltas Ceoltóirí
Éireann representation in the City of Birmingham. Family connections
continue through this branch, although, since Irish has become a public
identity for Birmingham, the South Birmingham Comhaltas has become
more universal, advertising formal instrumental lessons for complete

33
Terence Davies speaks these words at the start of his film Of Time and the City,
released in association with the BBC in 2008, in which he discusses the influence
of Liverpool on its residents.
34
Barbara Callaghan, ‘Birmingham Comes of Age’, Treoir, 15 (1983), pp.11-13
(p.11).
68 Chapter Two

beginners on Tuesday nights at their primary base, the Birmingham Irish

Centre.35 Lily Lawrie died in 2005.

Inventing Ireland
As Declan Kiberd points out, particular notions of Ireland and of
Irishness have often been invented by the migrant in England.36 Yeats’
“The Lake Isle of Innisfree”, for instance, might appear to be a paean to an
unmediated sense of rural Irish beauty, but he wrote the poem as therapy
for homesickness, having been reminded of his childhood town, (and
proclaimed “spiritual home”) Sligo, by a water-feature in a shop window
near his London residence.37 Similarly, Lily Lawrie had established a
nostalgic notion of Irishness through a mode of domestic music that was
different from the Ireland she encountered on her return in the seventies.
In Birmingham, Lily could (re)create a version of Irish performance that
accorded with her version of home, but looked increasingly dissimilar to
the reality of present day Ireland. An account in the Irish Post highlights
the chronotope concept, the distances of time and geography Lily was able
to decrease in Birmingham, by restoring her own ideas of Ireland with
music:

Back home in Roscommon the door had always been open and there had
been seisiúns of music, dancing and storytelling […] The door of the
Brecon Road house was, similarly, always open and late night music
seisiúns often took place in the large living room.38

Not everyone was enticed by Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann. Some

performers of traditional music feared introducing strict performance
regulations (soloists and bands must play certain melodies a certain
number of times in a certain combination for fleadhanna) would result in
the disappearance of regional music styles.39 The creation of a pseudo-

35
The South Birmingham Comhaltas remained at English Martyrs Parish Hall until
1974. They moved to John Mitchells Social Club, Sparkhill, and operated from
Yardleys School, Tyseley during the 1980s. They eventually settled in the
Birmingham Irish Club at the end of the 1990s.
36
Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995).
37
Alexander Norman Jeffares, A New Commentary on the Poems of W.B. Yeats
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968), p.29.
38
Farrell, ‘Irish music mourns loss of Comhaltas stalwart’, p.14.
39
Instrumental polkas, mazurkas and barn-dances popular in County Donegal are
overlooked by Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann for example. Such rules on repertoire
 In Handsworth Stands a House: Lily Lawrie and Comhaltas 69

Roscommon by the Birmingham Comhaltas contravenes such mutterings.

The Birmingham Comhaltas did abide by the Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann
standard— regarding the number of players, instruments, melodies and so
on as agreed by authorities in Dublin—but, even so, the music had a
definable Irish county sound. Journalist Barbara Callaghan confirmed the
recognisable West Ireland of Handsworth in her report on the branch’s
twenty-first anniversary, in which she describes hearing the rolling
staccato typical of County Roscommon music.40 There are inevitable
amalgams and exceptions, but in general, the Roscommon style of playing
is more ornamented, with triple tonguing or bowing and shorter phrase-
lengths. These mark its distinction from the Galway style, which has
smoother, longer melody lines, or the Leitrim style, which tends to be less
ornamented.

That Callaghan observes Roscommon as a pervasive style, characteristic

of Dun Mhuire is explicable. Renowned Roscommon flute-players, such
as Tom McHale, Frank Jordan and Frank Carty, did move to Birmingham
and joined the Birmingham Comhaltas. Catherine McEvoy justifies her
professional position as a leading exponent of the Roscommon flute style
in Ireland because of these associations: “I naturally developed the
Roscommon/Sligo style from playing so much in that area [Birmingham]
when I was young”.41 Yet, although the Birmingham Comhaltas could
manifest some associated features, the music was not identical to that
being performed in Roscommon. Visits by the Lawries to musicians in
Roscommon and the return visits of these musicians to Handsworth
maintained the link, but there was, of course, an essential invented nature
of Irishness in any Birmingham performance. The music of the
Birmingham Comhaltas embraced the social patterns of rural Ireland, but
its site was an urban British centre.

Music has an inexorably transient nature. Interesting, then, that, based

on writings about traditional music, Helen O’Shea considers a natural
preservation of regional styles away from the geographic source because
“the music ‘itself’ retains original social meaning, spiritual power and

make it easier for judges to moderate adjudications and for performers to present a
unified national heritage in music.
40
Callaghan, ‘Birmingham Comes of Age’, p.12.
41
Catherine McEvoy is listed as a “great Sligo/Roscommon flute player” in a list
of recommended traditional musicians. See Hurley, ‘An Interview with Catherine
McEvoy’ and ‘Recommended Flute Players’, A Guide to the Irish Flute.
70 Chapter Two

identification”.42 In light of O’Shea’s explanation, we may read the music

of the Birmingham Comhaltas, more broadly, as an accurate metaphor for
Birmingham’s Irish society. A very real community of first generation
Irish migrants from agricultural working traditions had been resident in the
city since the early 1800s (albeit usually seasonal workers enjoying a
temporary stay until the phenomena of the 1950s). Most of these men
hailed from Roscommon and the neighbouring counties of Connaught on
the western shore, to which some did not return, often settling in the
English Midlands, raising families close to where they had been employed
in field work as young men. The music of the Birmingham Comhaltas
collapsed historical distance by reflecting both this local story of
Birmingham (and Roscommon) and the contemporary reality of the “new”
mid-twentieth century diaspora, from which there remained “so many
musicians originating from Roscommon at the Saturday night session in
Dun Mhuire that every tune with an unknown title became ‘The
Roscommon Reel’”.43

Woman of the House

After her husband’s final appointment of the day, Lily Lawrie restored
his surgery to its private domestic arena for the evening. She also, at
times, dispensed with the public function of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann.
There was no hint of the organisation’s formulaic rules and restrictions at a
grand weekend festival of traditional music Lily organised at St Francis’
Hall in Handsworth during the sixties. Indeed there was no adjudication
component to these performances whatsoever and this allowed for the
participation of musicians playing at Dun Mhuire every Monday night, but
deterred from official Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann events because of
strict limits on numbers of participants and certain successes at qualifying
rounds. Musicians visited this weekend from across Britain and Ireland,
ensuring that Lily’s gala found fame. Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann
modified their stance in the aftermath to protect a similar informal
performance space. Organisers of the Fleadh Cheoil now promote the
spontaneous concerts, parades and sessions as being of equal importance
to the week’s rigorous competitions. The Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann
website clarifies, “While competition is an important element of the
Fleadh, the event is a multi-faceted shop window for Irish culture”.44

42
O’Shea, The Making of Irish Traditional Music, pp.58-9.
43
Callaghan, ‘Birmingham Comes of Age’, Treoir, p.12.
44
Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, ‘Competitions’
 In Handsworth Stands a House: Lily Lawrie and Comhaltas 71

Behind closed doors, after hours in the Lawries’ home, the Birmingham
Comhaltas could dismiss the shop window display of Irish culture,
prioritising the sounds of music rather than the sights of Irishness. With
the aural transferral of melodies between generations of the same families,
musicians in Handsworth replicated the ways of rural Ireland, where the
very existence of music was, according to Noel Hill, because of “father
passing to son, passing to son”.45 Rather than Hill’s patriarchal line,
however, traditional Irish music in Birmingham was protected, initially, by
mother passing to daughter. Kathleen and her twin sister Margaret were
among the earliest female champions of Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann
(winning the title with piano accordion four times and once for ballad
singing, respectively). Other women played a pivotal role in
Birmingham’s Irish music. Josie McDermott was often accompanied on
his trips to Birmingham by the traditional flute-player Peg McGrath.
Catherine McEvoy would later remember her introduction at Dun Mhuire
to the instrument through which she made her name; “Peg was the first
woman I ever saw playing the flute”.46

The eminence of female musicians in Birmingham was unusual not

only within traditional music circles in Ireland, but also within the global
Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann community, shown, not least, by the fact that
Lily and Kathleen Lawrie were the only women invited to play in the
Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann Céilí Band at the New York World’s Fair in
1965. The Birmingham Comhaltas lessened another historical distance in
this respect. The singer and songwriter Mairéid Sullivan has argued that
Ireland’s Celtic culture was always an historic “freedom domain for
women”.47 Sullivan refers, specifically, to the ancient pre-Christian Celtic
history, in which the tribal caste system placed women on a par with men;
preaching religion, leading armies and succeeding as heirs.48 The
disappearance of this distinct structure is blamed on Saxon invasions of
Ireland and has been referenced in Irish song. In “Great Gaels of Ireland”,
for instance, the contemporary Dublin singer Damien Dempsey celebrates

<http://comhaltas.ie/events/competitions> [accessed 22 August 2010].

45
Noel Hill contributed to BP Fallon’s interview with The Pogues, broadcast by
RTÉ on September 21 1985. See
<www.pogues.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=9639> [accessed 4 May 2010].
46
Hurley, ‘An Interview with Catherine McEvoy’, A Guide to the Irish Flute.
47
Melhuish, Celtic Tides, p.43.
48
See Margaret Odrowaz-Sypniewska, ‘The British Isles: Their Genealogy,
History and Heraldry’ <http://www.angelfire.com/mi4/polcrt/Celtic.html>
[accessed 4 November 2010].
72 Chapter Two

an extinct Irish society where “women were leaders / Won battles, gave
orders”.49 By achieving notable successes on the concert stage, with Irish
music learnt in the feminine realm of the home, Kathleen and Margaret
Lawrie reinstated this historic cultural domain to Ireland in Birmingham.
In addition, Lily Lawrie promoted a wider culture at Dun Mhuire by
organising Irish dancing and language lessons (taught through common
prayers) alongside her renowned traditional music sessions.

Lily Lawrie restored a domain of freedom that she could have had no
first-hand knowledge of; a feminine identity to rural music that had
become outmoded before she ever left Ireland. Lily’s father, himself a
renowned musician, endorsed Noel Hill’s pattern at home in Boyle, by
sharing his expertise only with sons Jack and Kevin. Jack and Kevin
would later follow their sister to England and play in the Birmingham
Comhaltas she had established. The proliferation of female musicians was
consistent in Handsworth. The Dun Mhuire community fostered Jack’s
Birmingham-born daughter, Noreen Cullen, who found fame playing
fiddle with Riverdance: The Show in the 1990s. In an earlier era in rural
Ireland however, Noreen’s aunt had had little option than to sneak out to
the cowshed with a fiddle and practice in secret—an experience that
supports Jennifer O’Connor’s argument that it was not only a drinking
lifestyle that discouraged women from performing traditional music, but
also a distinct lack of musical training.50 Away from this bias in
Birmingham, Lily’s determination increased. According to her daughter
Kathleen, she “might not have been a natural fiddle player but worked
hard to become a traditional Irish musician of notable prowess”.51

The female leadership of traditional music at Dun Mhuire was

noteworthy, but, in this respect, the Birmingham Comhaltas complemented
the official goals of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann in Ireland. By creating
formal public performance situations in schools and concerts halls,
Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann has encouraged an increasing number of
female traditional musicians since the 1950s. Their sessions separate
music from the pub scene (although the primary intention here was to
allow children a space to perform under instruction), which remain
something of a masculine space with male musicians usually leading the

49
Dempsey’s “The Great Gaels of Ireland” appears on his album Seize the Day
(Sony, 2003) [on CD].
50
O’Connor, ‘Women in Nineteenth Century Music Scene’, Nineteenth Century
Music Conference, University College Dublin, June 2008.
51
Lynch, ‘Comhaltas Loses One of its Founder Members’, p.4.
 In Handsworth Stands a House: Lily Lawrie and Comhaltas 73

troupe.52 Protecting “female-friendly” stages is also appropriate for

affiliates of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann because, although the product of
a private men’s piping club in Dublin, the organisation took the Gaelic
League’s Feis Lár na hÉireann as a model for their own Fleadh Cheoil.
This Feis, held annually in Mullingar, was the brainchild of two Irish
women at the turn of the twentieth century, who hoped to renew
nationalistic fervour by improving the standards of Irish culture amongst
all performers regardless of gender. Generally-speaking, however,
Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann presents something of an anomaly when it
comes to unveiling the gendered “other” in this manner in Irish traditional
performance.

In 1951, the Thomas Street Pipers pledged their commitment to

restoring to the canon the uilleann pipes and the harp, both of which had
fallen out of favour in Ireland during the nineteenth century because of
their popularity in the parlours of the English gentry. O’Shea has claimed
that the pipes were popular with the male upper class and the harp was its
female equivalent.53 There was, in fact, a strong male tradition of Irish
harping up to the early nineteenth century, but, as harp specialist Carl
Swenson explains, “more and more women became professional harpists
[and] the image of the harp as a ‘female’ instrument took over”.54

While the pipes enjoy prominence in Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann

sessions, its native sister instrument is often too cumbersome for group
performances and not always suited to the mandatory vigorous dance
repertoire—a repertoire that itself promotes a certain audible masculinity
to Irish culture. Competitions for the harp are included in the Fleadh
Cheoil, but since pub sessions became popular and acceptable arenas for
Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann in the latter half of the twentieth century, the
uilleann pipes’ female sibling has maintained more of a symbolic, shop
window, presence in Irish culture, prominently positioned on the
Republic’s passports or the livery of Ryanair and Guinness. In which
case, if the harp is acceptably female, then she extends Lucy Green’s

52
O’Shea discusses the male leadership of traditional music sessions and the
gendered discourse of Ireland’s nationality in her chapter ‘Lovely Girls and Good
Men: Women and the Fraternity of Irish Music’, in O’Shea, The Making of Irish
Traditional Music, pp.105-18.
53
O’Shea, The Making of Irish Traditional Music, p.17.
54
Carl Swanson, ‘Wonderful Work Sam’
<http://www.harpcolumn.com/blogs/one-entry?entry_id=50189> [accessed 27
November 2010].
74 Chapter Two

argument that, in the sounding art of all musics, women are primarily
appreciated for their visual “bodily display”.55

Lily Lawrie released the female freedom domain from its confinement.
All the same, the Irish enthusiast in twentieth-century Birmingham would
have heard the ancient Irish harp mainly in the context of high-profile all-
male ballad revival groups, such as The Dubliners, rather than any formal
Birmingham Comhaltas performance. The Dubliners demonstrate the
innovations of the seventeenth-century blind male harper Turloch
O’Carolan most famously with his composition “Carolan’s Concerto”,
arranged for their fiddle, banjo and guitars. Incidentally, when events
began to wind down at Dun Mhuire in the nineties, The Dubliners’
banjoist Barney McKenna bought the narrative of Ireland’s domestic
music full circle, with a summary also relevant to Lily Lawrie’s Irish
restoration in Birmingham. During a concert in 1991, as an Irish identity
in music slowly encroached on Birmingham’s public realm, McKenna
introduced the reel “The Maid Behind the Bar”, replacing our modern
concept of the Irish-themed public bar with that of the kitchen bar, saying
“we’ll go right back to where it all started. Not in the pub, or the great
arena, or the hall, but back in the old house”.56

Gendering of the harp by revivalists in the twentieth century echoes

those of the piano in the previous century. Richard Leppert claims that,
from the nineteenth-century, the piano had an “extramusical” image in the
home, as the “visual-sonoric simulacrum of family, wife, and mother”.57
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno make the English Midlands explicit
in their gendered reading, where the piano serves a political purpose for
middle-class households during the Industrial Revolution, “what remained
of the fans, songs, and dances of Roman slave girls was finally whittled
down in Birmingham to the pianoforte”.58 Birmingham was a new
progressive centre where the steel wire for modern pianos was produced,
but the piano has its own independent Irish narrative. In the 1970s, the
Irish male pianist Micheál Ó Súilleabháin would pioneer his classical style
of performing Irish traditional music and from the 1980s the all-female

55
Lucy Green, Music, Gender, Education (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997), p.24.
56
The Dubliners Live (Ritz, 1991) [on VCR].
57
Richard Leppert, ‘Sexual Identity, Death, and the Female Piano’, Nineteenth-
Century Music, 16 (1992), pp.105-128 (p.105).
58
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialetic of Enlightenment, trans. by
John Cumming (London: Allen Lane, 1973), p.249.
 In Handsworth Stands a House: Lily Lawrie and Comhaltas 75

Irish-American group, Cherish the Ladies, would claim the piano as a

melody instrument for jigs, reels and hornpipes.59

Yet before these innovations, under the direction of Comhaltas

Ceoltóirí Éireann authorities, the Birmingham Comhaltas embraced the
concert piano only for “vamped accompaniment” to Irish music, which
reflected the trends of ragtime. This use has fuelled much debate amongst
traditional musicians in Ireland since the sixties. Seán Ó Riada described
piano accompaniment to traditional fiddle melodies as “a scar, a blight, on
the face of Irish music”.60 Piano vamping was also behind Seamus
Tansey’s assault on Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann in 1996: “You can’t
impose jazz chords, therefore, the essence of Africa, on to the melodic
structures of Irish traditional music and still retain its true message, its true
meaning”.61 Fuelling these annoyances may have been the need to protect
the tough national character of Irish music; regular on-beat bass, off-beat
“jazz” piano chords might soften, feminise, the aggression of fast
monophonic reels. Ó Riada was certainly wary of the gendered perceptions
of Irish music, complaining that the:

Present-day harp technique, with its soft, rather blurred sound, has given
rise to rather feminine drooping musical figures, while the older traditional
sharp-toned technique gave rise to a vigorous masculine music.62

59
Cherish the Ladies resemble a Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann branch but promote
folk songs as well as instrumental music arranged for extended piano solos. Their
leader Joannie Madden has a high ranking in the Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann
organisation, and taught tin whistle and performed at the Céili Mor in their
prestigious North American convention in 2008. The Birmingham flautist Kevin
Crawford also taught and performed at this event.
60
Ó Riada, Our Musical Heritage, p.58. Ó Riada was also asserting his role as
guardian of Irish musical orthodoxy at this time after uilleann piper Tomás Ó
Canainn’s expressed his reluctance to work with someone so involved with
musical groups in England.
61
Seamus Tansey, ‘Irish Traditional Music – The Melody of Ireland’s Soul: It’s
[sic] Evolution from the Environment, Land and People’, in Crosbhealach an
Cheoil: The Crossroads Conference eds., Fintan Vallely, Hammy Hamilton,
Eithne Vallely and Liz Doherty (Dublin: Whinstone Music, 1999), pp.211-213
(p.212). Seamus Tansey, a traditional flute-player from County Sligo, is a
renowned critic of innovations in Irish traditional music, the “essence”, he feels, of
Ireland’s physical and social environment. He has also criticised the close alliance
between Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Eireann and the Fianna Fáil political party.
62
Ó Riada, Our Musical Heritage, p.79.
76 Chapter Two

Given its reputation with literate urban women in Birmingham, the

piano provided middle-class respectability to the Birmingham Comhaltas;
one which Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann was aiming to achieve throughout
all its branches, with formal concerts, examinations, harps and pipes and
standardised repertoire for Irish traditional music. Lily Lawrie
supplemented Kathleen and Margaret’s Irish fiddle, flute and accordion
expertise with classical piano tuition, but the Birmingham Comhaltas
inverted the instrument’s stereotype. The Irish sound of Birmingham
rewrote Horkheimer and Adorno’s classical piano reading for the region.
The piano was Robert Lawrie’s instrument in the Birmingham Comhaltas,
on which he also taught tonal keyboard harmony.

Tansey’s complaint about piano vamping expresses his fear that the
piano makes Irish music a multicultural, music of the world. On the
contrary, O’Shea has explained how jazz chords automatically align with
native Irish instruments, given the “blues-like melismatic wailing of the
pipes (also imitated on fiddle and flute)”.63 O’Shea undermines Tansey by
likening the various ornaments and embellishments of jazz specifically to
those found in Irish traditional music. Characterising “jazz chords” as the
“essence of Africa”, as Tansey does, is, in any case, problematic, given the
development of this musical genre amongst migrant communities in
America, notwithstanding the ethical arguments surrounding ownership
and commodification of musics. Besides which, in his report, Tansey
describes Irish traditional music as the essence of Ireland. If we continue
with his thinking, then the community “essence” of Africa should also lie
in indigenous traditional music, rather than in jazz musics developed by
the diaspora.

With this understanding, we can contest Tansey’s argument further,

since some genres of African traditional music share much with genres of
Irish traditional music. The tenets, as far as the scholar Kofi Agawu
describes them—namely anhemitonic pentatonic scales, monophonic
textures and cyclical structures, with widely ranging registers and
expressive upper mordents—are also features of the traditional Irish music
introduced by Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann and adhered to by the
successful Birmingham Comhaltas.64 African traditional music and
language have a similarly close connection as they do in Irish culture:
instrumental melodies are largely based on the tonal patterns of text and

63
O’Shea, The Making of Irish Traditional Music, p.30.
64
Kofi V. Agawu, Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries,
Positions (London: Routledge, 2003), p.140.
 In Handsworth Stands a House: Lily Lawrie and Comhaltas 77

the range of the voice, and the aural and oral transference of tradition is
imperative. Furthermore, performances by contemporary Irish bands such
as the Afro-Celt Soundsystem, Kíla, Salsa Celtica and The Chieftains
prove a practical alliance in music between Irish and African traditional
modes, tonalities and rituals.65

Tansey’s and O’Shea’s contestations with an African essence are

particularly interesting for a social analysis of the Birmingham Comhaltas
however. If some heard an Irish-African affinity in the piano style,
traditions and repertoire of those subscribing to Comhaltas Ceoltóirí
Éireann, it was a pioneering musical metaphor for the immediate area of
the Birmingham branch. Outside London, Birmingham has the largest
community of African and Caribbean migrants in the UK, many of whom
arrived simultaneously with Irish labourers in the fifties, forming the
largest non-white population in the city from this time. Dun Mhuire
placed Handsworth at the centre of Irish traditional music in Birmingham
at a time when its resident Irish community were conspicuously absent
from the struggles of this other prominent diaspora. Most dramatic were
the Handsworth race riots of 1985, sparked by the arrest of an African
Caribbean man in the nearby Lozells district, which saw “Free South
Africa” scrawled on walls and buildings across Birmingham city centre.

Richard Weights suggests that during the Handsworth Riots the Irish in
Birmingham “were guilty of some of the worst racism themselves”.66
African-intoned Irish music played in Dun Mhuire, foretold the recreation
of a comparatively peaceful multicultural society here from the 1990s,
whereas Weights’ surmising recreates in social action the musical
concerns about a distinctive Irish identity. Those who expressed rhetorical
worries about the authenticity of Irish music sanctioned by Comhaltas
Ceoltóirí Éireann were (and are) perhaps anxious about a deeper set of
concerns; that in branches away from Ireland, the Irish would simply be
ignored as a white English subset (it is worth noting that the Centre for

65
The Afro-Celt Sound System mixes modern dance rhythms, hip-hop, West
African traditions and Irish melodies and instruments, giving a prominent role for
the bodhrán; Kíla also combine Irish language songs with Japanese musical
traditions; whereas Salsa Celtica is a combined force of Irish and South American
musicians. The Chieftains coupled their brand of Irish traditional music with
reggae, jazz, pop, folk and others on their duets album The Wide World Over
(RCA, 2003) [on CD].
66
Richard Weight, Patriots: National Identity in Britain 1940-2000 (London: Pan,
2003), p.145.
78 Chapter Two

Cultural Studies at Birmingham University effectively wrote the Irish out

of their narrative of the city67), or else targeted for racism and harassment
like other racial groups (the “no blacks, no dogs, no Irish” signs are the
best known examples here68). Tansey’s difficulty with the piano on
account of its inappropriate ethnic implications for Ireland gains a certain
piquancy in relation to the Birmingham Comhaltas, who advanced an Irish
identity in a potentially volatile urban area. Irish traditional musicians
could represent the multicultural locale of Dun Mhuire in Irishness, whilst
adhering to the regulations set by Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann authorities
in Dublin.

Attracted by its female leadership and instrumentalists, the majority

listening to music sessions at Dun Mhuire were, nevertheless, first
generation Irish men. The imbalance is explained by their largely different
living situations in Birmingham compared to Irish women. Evening
attendance at the Lawries’ decreased during summer months when these
labouring men would work later on outdoor building sites. At the same
time, a proliferation of young Irish men at Brecon Road encouraged the
participation of female musicians. In short, here was a safe place for
young people to meet and socialise. As the journalist Susan Lynch
reported “There was a great community of single Irish people living in
flats in Handsworth and Fr Downey would convince them to come”.69
Members of the Catholic hierarchy, such as the Birmingham parish priest
Fr Downey, approved of this harmless mingling over music in the
Lawries’ home, which contrasted with the dangers and provocations that
lay in wait within England’s music clubs and dance halls.

67
In 1978, the Centre’s director Stuart Hall published his social study Policing the
Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London: Macmillan, 1978),
inspired by a crime in Handsworth in which three boys mugged a man, and yet
Hall—whilst discussing the racial identity of the attackers at length—ignores the
Irish heritage of those involved.
68
In addition, Birmingham Young Conservatives highlighted the social problems
caused by the Irish in 1956 and called for a control over their arrivals. Irish arrests
and searches were stepped up from 1975 and magistrates for the trial of the
Birmingham pub bombings were drafted in from neighbouring Coventry and
Warwickshire because those in Birmingham refused to deal with “the Irish”. Even
in 1993, O’Connor described: “The statistics still show a disproportionately high
propensity of Irish people in Britain to be admitted to mental hospitals, to be
involved in crime, to be homeless and dependent on social welfare”. See
O’Connor, Bringing it All Back Home, p.158.
69
Lynch, ‘Comhaltas Loses One of its Founder Members’, p.4.
 In Handsworth Stands a House: Lily Lawrie and Comhaltas 79

Downey was convinced that Lily Lawrie’s Irish Ireland in Birmingham

would enjoy longevity if members of the Birmingham Comhaltas
intermarried. To encourage this, he built on Lily’s activities, holding
modest social dances at St Anne’s Parish Hall, before establishing a
regular large céilí at St Francis’ Hall in Handsworth every Sunday night
following Mass, which also raised funds for the parish. One successful
outcome, between Kathleen Lawrie and Birmingham Comhaltas drummer
Tommy Boyle from County Fermanagh, compelled Josie McDermott to
write the reel, “Kathleen Lawrie’s Wedding”. This piece was not played
at her wedding. Indeed years passed before Kathleen realised the name of
the melody she was now playing with the Birmingham Comhaltas, but
McDermott’s title suggested that traditional musicians had introduced the
rural Irish ritual of match-making to urban Britain. It is fitting that Marcas
Ó Murchú released the first professional recording of “Kathleen Lawrie’s
Wedding” on his album Ó Bhéal go Béal as a tribute to the Birmingham
Comhaltas favourite McDermott, who passed away in 1992 and for whom
he had great affection.70 Like Catherine McEvoy, Ó Murchú, who is
originally from Belfast, became “a master of the rolling Sligo-Leitrim-
Roscommon style of flute-playing”, under McDermott’s influence.71 As
such, Ó Murchú’s recording of “Kathleen Lawrie’s Wedding” exhibits,
quite appropriately, the rolling ornamentation and breathy phrasing,
emblematic of the Roscommon style of Birmingham.

As a teenager in the 1930s Elizabeth Kelly remembers match-makers

attempting to prevent her from leaving County Cork for Birmingham by
introducing local single men with the maxim, “Marriage comes first, love
will follow”.72 Downey’s approach, with musical evenings at St Anne’s
and St Francis’ mimicked those of rural Ireland where “each marriage was
preceded by a multitude of dances”.73 Birmingham’s cupids were perhaps
more subtle but no less persuasive than those making matches in 1930s
Cork. The fact that Kathleen Lawrie eventually settled in Birmingham
must have been a great relief to Lily, who had asked for her return from a

70
Marcus Ó Murchú, Ó Bhéal go Béal (Cló Iar-Chonnachta, 1997) [on CD]. Ó
Murchú performs on a C flute although McDermott penned his reel in D major.
71
Copperplate Distribution, ‘Marcas Ó Murchú, Turas Ceoil’
<http://www.copperplatemailorder.com/cicd163html> [accessed November 18
2010].
72
Conversation with Elizabeth Kelly, August 2009.
73
Brody, Inishkillane, p.24.
80 Chapter Two

teaching post in Dublin in the late seventies because the Birmingham

Comhaltas suffered without her skill at leading sets on the accordion.74

Lily was a devout Catholic. Nevertheless, she prevented church

control of Irish music in Birmingham by creating her rural Roscommon
identity in the surgery of a doctor, a non-religious figure of authority for
the community. Lily did use her good standing to encourage priests to
open their parish halls as a complementary, mutually supportive context
for performing Irish traditional music however. These halls could serve a
slightly different function to Dun Mhuire and transitioned Irish traditional
music into a more public city space. Downey was one of a number of Irish
Catholic priests who supported the work of the Birmingham Comhaltas.
Some even offered their own musical talents. Fr Larry Brazil competed in
the Fleadh Nua with the Birmingham Comhaltas’ “Birmingham
Scoraíocht” in the 1960s, while Canon Sean McTiernan from County
Leitrim, who had assisted Lily Lawrie in founding the Birmingham
Comhaltas, played fiddle with the group during his time at the parish of St
Theresa’s in Perry Barr.

Under the influence of other enthusiastic priests, most notably Fr

Joseph Taffe, the Birmingham Comhaltas embraced the idea of Wren
collections, fundraising displays of music, dance and storytelling held
across Ireland in the days following Christmas. The tradition of the Wren
Boys originated in County Cork where a group of peasants entering
“matured manhood” would kill a wren bird and parade it round the streets
on St Stephen’s Day as a metaphor for the death of winter.75 Celebrations

74
Whilst living in Dublin, Kathleen played fiddle every night in Comhaltas
Ceoltóirí Éireann sessions across Ireland and was reluctant to return to
Birmingham at her mother’s behest in the 1970s, not only because of the anti-Irish
sentiment in England at that time, but also because of the high esteem she received
in Dublin where, because of her musical training with the Birmingham Comhaltas,
she was allowed to teach despite lacking a requisite command of the Irish
language.
75
For a fuller account of this history see Jane Lyons, ‘The Wren Boys (Part I)’,
From Ireland: Irish Genealogy and Family History <http://www.from-
ireland.net/custom/The-Wren-Boys-(Part-I)> [accessed 11 April 2011]. The ritual
killing of a wren on St Stephen’s Day has also been explained as a Christian
tradition because of legends that the wren led soldiers to Jesus in Gethsemane and
alerted guards to St Stephen escaping from prison. These tales provided popular
justification for the early missionaries’ ban on the bird that was held sacred by the
Druids. See Joan Schraith Cole, ‘The Wren’
<http://www.autunmalwind.com/joan/wren.htm> [accessed 11 April 2011].
 In Handsworth Stands a House: Lily Lawrie and Comhaltas 81

have since dispensed with the killing of a wren and instead children dress
up in straw clothes with painted faces, singing and dancing to collect
money for charity. These activities, often performed by second-generation
Irish children in fancy dress, were popular in Birmingham and regularly
brought in around £700 at a time in the sixties and seventies, when it was a
dying tradition in Ireland and such a novelty that Jacki O’Connor could
isolate a region when asking, “What better way to end this concert than
present a tradition [that of the Wren Boys] being kept alive in West
Limerick?”76 In recreating this rural Irish tradition at Brecon Road, the
Wren Boys of Birmingham also restored the original notion of the “céilí”,
as a rural house gathering that encompassed singing, dancing, instrumental
music and story-telling where “gossip on matters of local interest help to
put in the night”.77 The original four-fold composition of a céilí provides
another international link. This number of portions to performing
Irishness in England parallels the four pillars of hip-hop— which has
similar aural displays (MCing, DJing) and visual elements (dancing,
graffiti)—as developed by the African diaspora in America.

The multifaceted display by Birmingham’s Wren Boys was supported

by an eminence of dance in the Birmingham Comhaltas. Under the
guidance of the Catholic Church this dancing took the “safe” form of
traditional Irish dancing, as danced in Ireland, which discouraged physical
contact. Lily Lawrie evidently knew the basics. In the Lawries’ private
family photo album (kindly loaned by Tommy and Kathleen Boyle during
the course of my writing) beneath a picture of Lily dancing the Siege of
Ennis routine with one of the Birmingham Comhaltas official dancers at a
parish hall céilí, is written, “Lily’s favourite dancing partner was Fr
Seamus Quinn”. Perhaps Quinn was reviving another old Irish tradition in
Birmingham: Priests had policed rural house dances in Ireland since the
1920s, prior to the passing of the Dance Hall Act. Colin Irwin presents the
specific example of the Ballinakill Céilí Band, which was:

formed in the late 1920s by Father Tom Larkin, a fiddle player who tried to
offset the popularity of the immoral ‘jazz dancing’ going on behind closed
doors by encouraging musicians to play at public ceilis where the dancers

76
Jacki O’Connor, ‘The Best of the West’, Treoir, 40 (2008), p.19.
77
Breandán Breathnach, Folk Music and Dances of Ireland (Dublin: Talbot Press,
1971), p.47.
82 Chapter Two

didn’t tend to rub up against each other in that way and which were
considered much healthier all round.78

That a céilí band developed in Ballinakill under the premise of

patrolling dances suggests that, for the Catholic Church in Ireland, a
concern for the infiltration of Irish dance was inseparable from a concern
for the infiltration of Irish music with that of other ethnic cultures.
Ireland’s claim on the resultant music was scarcely strong however. The
céilí bands permitted by Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann at fleadhanna
include loud instruments, such as accordion, drums and piano, introduced
in the big city dance halls of the Irish diasporas. The céilí bands attract the
biggest audiences in the fleadhanna and, during the fifties, “generated
some of the excitement and partisanship of All-Ireland football and hurling
finals”.79 Regardless of these All-Ireland nationalistic displays, Kevin
McManus explains, the “prototype for what became the céilí band first
emerged amongst the Irish emigrant groups in England and America”.80
Musical scholar Ó Riada certainly saw no place for this instrumental set-
up in the story of music from Ireland, referring, in 1962, to céilí groups’
irrelevant “rhythmic but meaningless noise with as much relationship to
music as the buzzing of a bluebottle in an upturned jamjar”.81

The Legacy of the Birmingham Comhaltas

The Birmingham Comhaltas enjoyed an illustrious afterlife in the
nineties because its most able musicians had created the Birmingham Céilí
Band, which existed until 1999 and was deemed “one of the most talented
in Britain and Ireland”.82 The Birmingham Céilí Band became something
of the publicity wing of the Birmingham Comhaltas, with success at
competitions, international tours and radio performances that introduced
the Irish music of Birmingham throughout the city, the country and
beyond. By the time the first national newspaper for the Irish community
in Britain, the Irish Post, was launched in 1970, it was already evident in
circles beyond Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann that “Mrs Lawrie and her

78
Colin Irwin, In Search of the Craic: One Man’s Pub Crawl Through Irish Music
(London: Andre Deutsch Ltd., 2004), p.135.
79
Ciarán Carson, Irish Traditional Music, p.52.
80
Kevin McManus, Céilís, Jigs and Ballads: Irish Music in Liverpool (Liverpool:
University of Liverpool, 1994), p.14.
81
Ó Riada was speaking about céilí bands on a radio broadcast in Ireland. See
Ciarán Carson, Irish Traditional Music (Belfast: Appletree Press, 1986), p.53.
82
Farrell, ‘Irish music mourns loss of Comhaltas stalwart’, p.14.
 In Handsworth Stands a House: Lily Lawrie and Comhaltas 83

committee have a Ceili Band, second to none”.83 With an equal number of

male and female musicians (in its original line-up at least), the
Birmingham Céilí Band was an accurate microcosm of a Birmingham-
Irish community enhanced in the fifties and sixties by the arrival of men
and women in comparable numbers. In 1999, when Director General
Senator Labhras Ó Murchi awarded Lily Lawrie a Comhaltas Ceoltóirí
Éireann lifetime achievement award, Kathleen drew out the famous green
uniforms of the Birmingham Céilí Band to remind everyone that this was
“still regarded as the best such group Britain has ever seen”.84

The South Birmingham Comhaltas continues to promote Birmingham’s

Irish sound with céilí bands. Members formed the Clann na hÉireann
Céilí Band, to perform at the tenth anniversary of the Cambridge
Comhaltas in 2002, whilst in August 2007, the Reel Note Céilí Band,
formed by Vince Jordan and three of his children, including Katie, took
Birmingham’s Irish music on a tour of France before returning to support a
local project.85 Back home the Reel Note Céilí Band supports the
campaign to save the Spotted Dog, a public house in Alcester Street,
Digbeth, described as Birmingham’s “premier Irish music venue”.86 This
pub holds the biggest and most regular Irish traditional music session in
the city every fortnight (organising evenings of Irish films or literary
events on alternate weeks). Previous and current Birmingham Comhaltas
members lead the sets, suggesting that the gulf promoted by Comhaltas
Ceoltóirí Éireann, between the informal pub and the formal concert stage,
as arenas for traditional music, has disappeared in Birmingham.

Following the efforts of the Reel Note Céilí Band to ensure session
music continued there, the Spotted Dog proprietors vented their own anger
at planned noise restrictions on their activities during Birmingham’s St
Patrick’s Parade in 2008. Their bid was successful. Musicians may have
abandoned the “female” space of the domestic interior associated with Lily
Lawrie, but the fact that Birmingham’s pubs have become less gendered
sites since the sixties ensures that a nigh on equal mix of musicians

83
‘With the Irish in Birmingham’, Irish Post, February 13 1970, p.3.
84
Farrell, ‘Irish music mourns loss of Comhaltas stalwart’, p.14. The original
members of the Birmingham Céilí Band were Kathleen Lawrie, Veronica
Kennedy, Noreen Flanagan, Lily Lawrie, Frank Jordan, Frank Flanagan, John
Glavin, and Sean McTiernan.
85
For a full report of this celebration see Vincent Jordan, ‘South Birmingham
Celebration’, Treoir, 26 (1994), p.23.
86
Vince Jordan, ‘Normandy Landing’, Treoir, 40 (2008), p.46.
84 Chapter Two

continues to perform. Since the Spotted Dog petition, supplementary

meetings have begun at the nearby Big Bulls Head every Thursday and at
the Prince of Wales in Moseley on Tuesdays.

Those associated with Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann in Birmingham

who also play in the Spotted Dog, the Big Bulls Head or the Prince of
Wales, are authorised because Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann authorities
have changed their tune and now claim a shared history. Despite original
contentions, Irish-themed pubs, they believe, are in fact beneficial to
Ireland. Pubs evince a flourishing national music scene, recreating
globally “the haunting sounds that were once the preserve of the rural
country kitchen”;87 the insinuation being that, as it was Comhaltas
Ceoltóirí Éireann who sought to move rural kitchen musicians to public
spaces in the first place—the purpose of the organisation starting in the
1950s—the pub session must, therefore, have grown out of their success.

Birmingham Comhaltas can support this doctored narrative because,

while fostering domestic music, Lily Lawrie oversaw an Irish music
transition beyond her home, through judicious sessions in the sixties and
seventies, not only at church parish halls, but also in the Prince of Wales
and other pubs, such as the Wellington on the Bristol Road, where
amenable, familiar Irish landlords ensured young musicians had a safe
space to perform. This chronology was reversed by the younger Lichfield
Comhaltas in North Birmingham however. Musicians playing Irish
traditional music in Lichfield signed up to the rules of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí
Éireann in 2002, but had been meeting to play informal session music at
the local Horse and Jockey pub since the previous decade. The Lichfield
Comhaltas consists, almost entirely, of English musicians introduced to
the rural instrumental music of Ireland not by Comhaltas Ceoltóirí
Éireann but by this accessible informal pub display in urban Birmingham.
After playing at the Horse and Jockey every Monday night, they later
chose to subscribe to the official organisation based in Ireland.

The Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann hierarchy in Ireland presents

contradictions. It now endorses global pub music, yet continues to
promote distinct formal concert events; “the most unique of all Irish music
festivals is the annual Fleadh Cheoil organized by the CCÉ”.88 It defends
the aural transmission of melodies, but recently launched an online

87
Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, ‘History’.
88
O’Flynn, The Irishness of Irish Music, p.50.
 In Handsworth Stands a House: Lily Lawrie and Comhaltas 85

programme, AbcNavigator, to distribute printable sheet music and, having

standardised regional variations with strict rules regarding repertoire and
performance, it released a DVD of distinctive County Cavan music at the
Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann in 2010. Such confusion at least substantiates
an interest in Irish musical traditions, in line with those Thomas Street
Pipers who founded the organisation. It is, as Rachel Fleming explains,
the case that quarrels within Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann policy and
“tensions between different groups struggling with this paradox appear to
have aided the survival and vitality of the music itself”.89

Birmingham Comhaltas expounds other inconsistencies; by mimicking

an individual county style, yet honouring Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann
music regulations, or by preserving a rural male tradition through largely
urban female leadership. This branch also presents issues specific to a
political context in Birmingham. For example, Lily Lawrie, along with
Irish musicians Fr Mack and P.J. McGuinness, ran annual sell-out concerts
of traditional Irish music at Birmingham Town Hall until the pub
bombings in 1974, whereupon they were cancelled immediately. English-
born Ted Litchfield, who has no inherited roots in Ireland but joined the
Birmingham Comhaltas after meeting his wife Sarah from Buncrana,
County Donegal, recalls using his membership card as identification at a
football match in Birmingham in the eighties, when “Suspicion
strengthened at the sight of the Gaelic secretary’s name and telephone
number”.90 In such a hostile atmosphere it would perhaps have been
unsurprising if the group had folded, but the Birmingham Comhaltas
continued to thrive and protect a nostalgic Irish identity, confirming that
“paradoxically, emigration, that supposed destroyer of traditional, rural
Ireland, has strengthened rather than eroded the music”.91

The original location of the Birmingham branch makes an interesting

urban space for rural Irish music. Dun Mhuire hastened the integration of
Irish culture into the city. Correspondingly, there was little cause for
concern for Irish residents during the racial tensions in Handsworth of the
1980s. The Birmingham Comhaltas created an Irish traditional music
stronghold in the West Midlands (a Coventry branch followed their lead in

89
Fleming, ‘Resisting Cultural Standardization: Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann and
the Revitalization of Traditional Music in Ireland’, p.227.
90
Callaghan, ‘Birmingham Comes of Age’, p.12.
91
Graeme Smith, ‘My Love is in America: Migration and Irish Music’, in The
Creative Migrant, ed. by Patrick O’Sullivan (London: Leicester University Press,
1994), pp.221-236 (p.221).
86 Chapter Two

1971 and Leamington Spa was accepted in 1989) by standing out as the
barometer in this global music network. In 1969, the Comhaltas Ceoltóirí
Éireann Council for Britain met in Birmingham to discuss plans for a
Leeds branch of the organisation and, in a particularly galvanising Treoir
article from 1970, the writer declared, “I felt, therefore, that the best
solution was to select an active branch and project it as an example”,92
choosing the Birmingham Comhaltas and listing all its activities over the
past twelve months. These included fleadhanna in Ireland and the UK,
BBC and RTÉ recordings, and various céilís and fundraisers.

The branch’s direct offspring, the South Birmingham Comhaltas,

continues to make the Irish colouring of Birmingham felt through céilí
bands and church personnel. The internationally-successful Sruleen Ceilí
Band, formed by members of the South Birmingham Comhaltas, was
named after a priest from the parish of Sruleen in Dublin who supported
traditional musicians when living in Birmingham. This partnership for
Irish music and religious identity in Birmingham had been initiated by
bean an tí, Lily Lawrie, who, according to her daughter Kathleen, “never
wanted any acclaim for it, she just loved people”.93 Lily Lawrie fell short
in just this one ambition, to avoid acclaim. Her desire was thwarted by
many—not least the Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann National President Jim
Teevan, who said, in 2005, that Lily’s “great passion for Irish traditional
music, love of Ireland and those early days at the Lawrie home in Brecon
Road sowed the seeds of the harvest from which Comhaltas today is
reaping the benefits”.94

In this way the rural Irish music style in decline from the 1930s in
Ireland was brought over to Birmingham by an amateur musician and
protected by her new family. It flourished under the rules of the
Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann and the mores of the location, setting and
social environment prevalent in the society of Irish Birmingham, such that
by the 1960s, as Sean Lynch surmises, the Irish music scene in the city
was now “underway”. Lynch’s language implies movement to follow,
through which Lily Lawrie and her legacy increasingly expanded the Irish
sound of Birmingham. Lawrie’s musical endeavours have given rise to the
successful South Birmingham Comhaltas branch in Birmingham, the
lessons, activities and summer schools at the Birmingham Irish Centre,

92
Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, ‘An Irish Ireland in Britain’, p.9.
93
Lynch, ‘Comhaltas Loses One of its Founder Members’, p.4.
94
Farrell, ‘Irish music mourns loss of Comhaltas stalwart’, p.14.
 In Handsworth Stands a House: Lily Lawrie and Comhaltas 87

and the famed successes of young Birmingham musicians so crucial for

the continuation of this audible Irish journey.
 CHAPTER THREE

KELLY THE BOY FROM KINGS HEATH:

THE FOLK AND THE CRITICS

Kelly was converted to communism and folk music in Birmingham, where

he’d taken night classes run by Marxist classics professor George
Thomson.1

If today the achievements of Lily Lawrie are scarcely known outside

Irish traditional music circles in Birmingham, a singer whose work is far
more recognisable in popular culture is the Dublin balladeer Luke Kelly
(1940-1984). Recordings of Kelly’s music can be found in high-street
record shops across Europe and America, his name adorns Dublin sites
including the Irish Traditional Music Centre and the Luke Kelly Bridge
(previously the Ballybough Bridge); An Post designed a postage stamp
featuring Luke Kelly’s face in 2006 and he continues to function as a
central part of the tourist trail promoted by Fáilte Ireland. Visitors to
Dublin are encouraged to sit in the pub where Kelly once sang, to buy the
latest reissued copies of his recordings in the Celtic Note music store and,
since 2004, the city council has planned a commemorative bronze statue.
Kelly, then, is hardly an unknown figure, but the pivotal part played by the
city of Birmingham in moulding his musical aesthetic and technique has
been largely forgotten.

Luke Kelly is best remembered as the lead singer of The Dubliners.

By 1962 those Irish singer pubs from England had found their place in
Ireland’s capital. During this year, Kelly formed his music group with
Ciarán Bourke, Ronnie Drew and Barney McKenna in one such pub,
O’Donohue’s, in Dublin city centre. By the mid-1960s, the band had
gained a large mainstream following in Ireland and Britain, something
caused, in part, by their ability to move the sound and atmosphere of the
Irish shebeen (an illicit bar selling alcohol without a licence) into the other

1
Ben Harker, Class Act: The Cultural and Political Life of Ewan MacColl
(London: Pluto Press, 2007), p.186.
90 Chapter Three

spaces and locations in which they performed; a pursuit quite different to

that of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, which was to defend formal sites for
Irish music. The Dubliners upheld the sociality of the pub session from
which they originated. They promote a unity between stage and stalls in
their live performances, eschewing the concert hall protocol of Comhaltas
Ceoltóirí Éireann, and, typically, encouraging audience participation and
song requests.

Since 1962, The Dubliners have made numerous visits to Birmingham,

assured of consistently-high ticket sales and an enthusiastic reception. In
truth, the Birmingham audience could become slightly too animated at
times. In a performance at the Birmingham Town Hall in 1976, Luke
Kelly was preparing himself to sing Phil Coulter’s “The Town I Loved So
Well”, a sombre song describing the recent political violence in Derry.
Kelly may well have thought that in Birmingham—a city affected by this
violence in a most horrific episode just two years before—the song would
have a particular resonance and should be heard in thoughtful silence. By
1976, however, such was the reputation of The Dubliners for lively pub-
style performances and raucous banter that one Town Hall audience
member completely misjudged the mood. He started hollering at the
stage, singing an impromptu song and applauding the band, before an
exasperated Kelly shouted a demand for stewards to “eject that man”
before the show continued.2

To be fair to the ejected man, it would be easy for the neophyte to

misunderstand the codes of a Luke Kelly performance. Kelly embodied a
number of contradictions. He was the boisterous and lively singer of
songs about drink and the craic; but he was also an activist who wished
some of his songs to convey a fierce social commitment—a commitment
to the political left that he had assumed as a young migrant worker on the
building sites of Birmingham. Kelly was the archetypal Irish singer whose
work (as today’s Dublin tourist trail apparently confirms) grew out of a
vibrant tradition of Irish pub music; yet he was also schooled in a very
English tradition of singing, having adopted decorous performance traits
and developed his art in Birmingham, where he was one of the “many
younger singers […] persuaded by the MacColl/Seeger analysis that the
performance of folk music was a serious matter demanding respectful
analysis and careful development”.3

2
Conversation with audience member, March 2009.
3
Harker, Class Act, p.184.
 Kelly the Boy from Kings Heath: The Folk and the Critics 91

The audience for a concert by The Dubliners with Luke Kelly would
have to be prepared to whoop along with spirited songs of national pride
such as the “Irish Rover”, and to give a more restrained reception at other
moments of the programme, when the singer presented his more
perturbing, socially-aware messages in music. One such number, the
“Peat Bog Soldiers”, was written in the Börgermoor Nazi concentration
camp by Communist detainees, and would later become a Spanish civil
war song.4 Kelly associated with Spanish students when living with a
Dublin Communist family in Birmingham. This no doubt heightened his
empathy with the song’s narrative. In such instances we can see that,
whilst introducing an Irish and political perspective to a Birmingham
audience, Kelly would modify the lessons he had learned there to restore a
new Irish sound in Ireland and beyond. When the remaining members of
The Dubliners gathered to commemorate Kelly at Birmingham Town Hall
on St Patrick’s Day 2010, they incorporated the same reverence that he
had always insisted on for poignant moments of the set. The lights were
dimmed and music was halted at two points during the evening to allow
the audience an intimacy with Kelly. These quiet reflections also
recreated the atmosphere of the formal folk clubs Kelly used to frequent in
Birmingham, where the spoken word on socialist matters was as vital as
their distillation in song.

On St Patrick’s Night 2010, after the band had thanked those members
of Kelly’s Birmingham family who sat in the audience, a picture of
Kelly’s grave at Glasnevin Cemetery was projected on stage and fiddle-
player John Sheahan recited his spoken composition “Luke’s Gravestone”.
Later, while an early black and white image of his youthful, beardless face
was projected on the back wall, the group played a sound recording of
Kelly reading his own poem “For What Died the Sons of Róisín”, a piece
which attests the development of those incipient political ideas Kelly
brought to and from Birmingham as a young man. Kelly wrote “For What
Died the Songs of Róisín” at the end of the 1960s to bemoan the reverse
trend of migration into Ireland at this time. His complaint was not those
returning post-war Irish migrants such as the Lawries (indeed Kelly was
part of this group) but rather the individuals now profiting from the cheap

4
Börgermoor was a camp for political opponents of the Third Reich. The lyrics of
the “Peat Bog Soldiers” were written by the miner Johann Esser and the actor
Wolfgang Langhoff, set to music by fellow intern Rudi Goguel and later adapted
by Hanns Eisler and Ernest Busch. For a fuller account of this history, see ‘Music
and the Holocaust’, <http://holocaustmusic.ort.org/places/camps/music-early-
camps/moorsoldatenlied/> [accessed 3 May 2011].
92 Chapter Three

sale of Irish property in Europe: “Will German, French or Dutch / Inscribe

the Epitaph of Emmett / When we've sold enough of Ireland / To be but
strangers in it”.5 Kelly was hardly averse to migration. His mother had
moved to Dublin from Scotland and he himself had experienced the
benefits of multiculturalism in Birmingham. Instead, with this piece, he
castigated his contemporary Irish residents whose ancestors had died for
an independent Ireland and whose mercenary attitude undermined this
martyrdom—a personal greed that would culminate in the Celtic Tiger
boom and bust of the nineties to the present.

By focusing on Luke Kelly’s comprehensive engagement with

Birmingham during the fifties and sixties, this chapter reveals a branch of
now recognisable “Irish music” that can be traced back to central England.
Kelly moved to Birmingham as a teenager in the mid-fifties.
Performances with the Birmingham Clarion Singers and his Marxist study
with the local university professor, George Thomson, allowed him to
develop a musical style and socialist zeal that would inform the music he
would promote as a professional. Kelly went back to Dublin to form his
band in 1962, but returned to England in 1964. After settling permanently
in Dublin in 1965, he visited his friends, colleagues and an increasing
number of fans in Birmingham on a regular basis, until his untimely death
in 1984 as the result of a brain tumour.

Kelly first arrived in 1950s Birmingham to work as a builder on the

region’s many construction sites. The journey that he made from Dublin
was hardly a unique one at this time. Young single Dubliners were
particularly attracted to Birmingham in the mid-twentieth century because
of recruitment drives targeted on their city by the department for public
transport and the National Health Service. Birmingham was an attractive
modern British centre, as Des Geraghty explains: “In the 1950s […]
London was not yet the customary destination for Dublin emigrants. At
that time Dubliners tended to gravitate toward the British midlands to
work on the large industrial sites”.6 Migration from Dublin has affected
the soundscape as well as the landscape of Birmingham (the latter as
précised in Chapter One). Dublin’s “Jack of All Trades” received a
Birmingham reworking;7 the Dublin-based group, The Wolfe Tones,

5
The Irishman Robert Emmet was hanged, drawn and quartered for his role in the
nationalist cause in the nineteenth century.
6
Des Geraghty, Luke Kelly: A Memoir (Dublin: Basement Press, 1994), p.40.
7
“Jack of All Trades” first appeared as a Dublin street ballad in Colm
O’Lochlain’s collection. The Dubliners recorded the “Dublin Jack of All Trades”
 Kelly the Boy from Kings Heath: The Folk and the Critics 93

dedicate a verse to Birmingham in their song “My Heart is in Ireland”8 and

that bemoaning narrator in St John’s lament for “Dublin in the Rare Auld
Times”—made much of by The Dubliners on St Patrick’s Night 2010—
corroborates the common route from Ireland “off to Birmingham” in the
mid-twentieth century.

Kelly’s personal musical and political formation are locatable to

specific city sites, namely the folk clubs of the area, the seminar rooms of
Birmingham University and the domestic lodging house in King’s Heath,
in which he lived with a politicised Irish family. One prominent venue
outside the West Midlands—Ewan MacColl’s house in Beckenham—
impacted by events in Birmingham, also shaped Kelly’s singing voice. In
maintaining spaces for Irish music, Birmingham played a key role in
helping the young Luke Kelly to develop his musical and political
expertise, two qualities that for him would remain deeply interlinked.

The Birmingham Folk

“Folk clubs” in 1950s Birmingham were not, in fact, for the general
folk. Each served a specific purpose. Some grew out of the skiffle craze,
for example, while others promoted new compositions and experimental
techniques for performance. The young Luke Kelly would have found
that, in Birmingham, amateur folk singers also tended towards these
different venues depending on their nationality. Irish and English
musicians appeared in their own distinct sites (although the success of
Arnold Wesker’s Centre 42 organisation, uniting Birmingham’s English,
Irish, Scottish and Welsh socialists through artistic pursuits, must be
stated9). The separation of singers in Birmingham was far from acrimonious.

for their album The Dubliner’s Dublin (1988). “Birmingham Jack of All Trades”
was popular with The Ian Campbell Folk Group in the 1960s and appears on The
Farriers and Kempton album Brummagem Ballads (Broadside, 2003) [on CD]. An
early copy of the lyrics, printed by William Wright of Moor Street and Smithfield,
Birmingham, is held in the Madden Ballads Collection (Reel 11, Frame 7403) at
Cambridge University Library.
8
The third verse of the Wolfe Tones’ “My Heart is in Ireland” is: “Then I went
through the Midlands, through each city and town / I found there were Irish in each
place I roamed / And I drank and I sang at a pub they called the Crown / With the
Birmingham Irish we sang songs of home”. The song appears on The Wolfe
Tones, Greatest Hits (Celtic Collections, 2001) [on CD].
9
According to the correspondence of Charles Parker, the goal of Centre 42 was “to
put the artist back in touch with the people”. Birmingham: Birmingham Central
94 Chapter Three

Pam Bishop, founding member of the Peanuts Folk Club, which enjoyed
popularity with English folk musicians, has asserted that, “We would have
been delighted to have Irish people in our club singing songs”.10

Accordingly, some singers from Ireland, such as Jackie Daly and Mick
Hipkiss, did appear at Peanuts, but the club remained an overwhelmingly
English-music venue. Music can scarcely be contained in buildings and
peoples of course, and the inevitable, broad influences on “English music”
followed mass migration from Ireland nevertheless. The noted singer and
song collector Albert Lloyd implies as much in his album notes for the
English folk revivalist Shirley Collins, “It’s an Irish song, of course”.11
But, in general, Irish musicians headed for alternative arenas in
Birmingham. Aside from Irish-owned pubs, these included the
Communist Star Club on Essex Street, the Birmingham Irish Centre in
Digbeth and the Skillet Pot in Snow Hill.

The folk music revival promoted by Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger and
others in the UK popularised Irish folksongs—as well as those from
Scotland, Wales and regions of England—but their folk clubs permitted
only performers who sang songs from their home country; the simplistic
appeal of the “Ourselves Alone” slogan, which would be adopted by Kelly
and promoted in Ireland and Britain by the message of his “For What Died
the Róisín”.12 In 1950s Birmingham, however, such strict censures
perhaps triggered the separation between Irish and English music centres.
The English folk movement involved a higher degree of formality than
many Irish musical performances. At Birmingham’s Grey Cock Folk

Library, Charles Parker Archive: Centre 42 Policy Articles of Associated

Correspondence. CPA MS4000/1/8/7/1, p.1. A comprehensive description of the
work of Wesker’s Centre 42 in Birmingham can be found in Paul Long, Only in
the Common People: The Aesthetics of Class in post-War Britain (Newcastle:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008); Chapter 5 ‘Aggressive Romanticism: The
Cultural Project of Centre 42’, pp.175-214.
10
In conversation with Pam Bishop. The Peanuts Folk Club was located above the
lounge of the Crown Pub on Corporation Street. Theatre auditoriums were too big
for the folk revivalists’ weekly sessions of music and political discussion and
upstairs rooms of pubs became popular arenas after Ewan MacColl and Malcolm
Nixon began the Ballads and Blues Club in 1957 above the Princess Louise pub in
High Holborn.
11
A.L. Lloyd refers to the “Banks of the Bann” on the album Shirley Collins and
the Albion Country Band, No Roses (Pegasus, 1971) [on LP]. This track adapts,
“Slane”, an Irish melody that I discuss further in the following chapter.
12
The republican political party Sinn Féin is often translated as “ourselves alone”.
 Kelly the Boy from Kings Heath: The Folk and the Critics 95

Club, which came to replace Peanuts as the primary Marxist venue in the
city, evenings of musical performances involved a Master of Ceremonies
and a concert programme planned by a committee of specialists at least
three months in advance.

This intensity would have felt unfamiliar to some Irish musicians

accustomed to a tradition rooted in the rural family house dance and (when
outside the jurisdiction of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann) increasingly at
home in the impromptu session of the pub rather than the prescribed
concert hall.13 The poet Michael Cody gives an implicit criticism of
English folk revivalists when he praises County Clare in Ireland; “a place
where real musicians played music which was a living thing and not
something dead for centuries and artificially resurrected by scholarly types
who met in very self-conscious folk clubs at weekends”.14 Cody
undoubtedly had one scholarly type in mind when raising this comparison.
As Ben Harker tells us of Ewan MacColl, “his academic career was one of
resounding underachievement”.15 With his erudite reading groups and
intense, lengthy tutorials on music analysis, MacColl would seek to
compensate for this scholarly underachievement throughout his entire
adult life. The would-be scholar was frustrated in attempts to instigate his
self-conscious order of procedure at a music concert in Dublin in 1964
however. At St Stephen’s Green Cinema he had to admonish the
vociferous crowd.16

English folk practitioners, engaged in the conspicuous recovery of lost

repertoires and traditions, often operated something of the historically
informed performance approach. Musical displays could easily become a
predominantly middle-class, pseudo-academic activity, with musicians
attempting to master unfamiliar materials in an atmosphere that demanded
a hushed sense of appreciation from the audience. The English singers

13
Despite this, a number of songs were introduced to the Grey Cock Folk Club in
the 1960s by Cecelia Costello (nee Kelly), who was born in Birmingham but also
“absolutely Irish”, according to Pam Bishop, with parents from Galway and
Roscommon. Costello’s influence continues through the contemporary work of
her grandson Patrick Costello, who currently operates the Bromsgrove Folk Club.
14
P.J. Curtis, Notes From the Heart: A Celebration of Traditional Irish Music
(Dublin: Torc, 1994), p.153.
15
Harker, Class Act, p.12.
16
Luke Kelly was the opening act at this show. See Donald Dorcey, ‘Good Show –
but what an audience’, Evening Press (Dublin), 21st November 1964, in Harker,
Class Act, p.180.
96 Chapter Three

wanted to make sure everyone else came to value their old folk tunes
again, but knew that, for the time being, only the cognoscenti were in the
front line. Such tweedy, bespectacled gatherings looked rather different
from the Irish equivalent. If the English version needed an elite group of
musical scholars to restore and perform native folk musics, the Irish
version needed no such prefects for a community art that had not become
submerged by the mid-twentieth century.

English socialist singers on Birmingham’s folk circuit admit to being

envious of what they saw as the innate oral tradition of Irish counterparts
when theirs was, at this stage, essentially, a reliance on Penguin manuals
and melody transcriptions that would unearth forgotten repertoire. Lloyd
describes the reappearance of modal scales and pentatonism, four line
strophes and ABBA patterns in English folksong during the sixties, as a
“new wave of traditional song merged with the existing pit-village
repertory [which] helped to restore some of its folk-ish character just as
that character had begun to fade”.17 Irish music also tends towards
diatonic modes and four line strophes. New wave English folksong could
maintain its distinctiveness with the common ABBA melodic form
however, because, invariably, Irish traditional melodies have either an
AABA structure (in songs such as “The Bold Fenian Men” and “Rosin the
Bow” for example18), or an AABB structure (as typified by McDermott’s
reel “Kathleen Lawrie’s Wedding”).

Lloyd was keen to extend this peculiarity beyond compositional

structure to melodic range, explaining, in his sixties’ manual, Folk Song in
England, how some songs spanning over an octave may be “borrowings
from Ireland where melodies easily run to luxuriance”.19 To achieve such
luxuriance, in the opinion of the English singer and songwriter Ralph
McTell, Irish singers have developed a unique technique: “somewhere
above the roof of the mouth and back of the nose, there’s […] some sort of
cavity that creates a sound that I hear a little bit in Bono’s voice and it’s
better learned in Luke’s [Kelly] case”.20 Dublin musician Paddy Riley
clarifies that he and contemporaries from Ireland do indeed sing “through

17
Lloyd, Folk Song in England, p.333.
18
The lyrics and transcribed melody lines for both of these appear in Pat Conway,
Soodlum’s Selection of Irish Ballads (Dublin: Soodlum Music, 1981), p.32; p.37.
19
Lloyd, Folk Song in England, p.35.
20
Ralph McTell speaks on Luke Kelly The Performer (Celtic Airs, 2006) [on
DVD].
 Kelly the Boy from Kings Heath: The Folk and the Critics 97

the nose” in order to protect the throat.21 Discrete folk clubs in Birmingham
may have been necessary to foster the particularities of this specific Irish
sound. Moreover, they could accommodate the different understanding of
that very word “folk” for Irish and English singers. As Helen O’Shea
explains, “the term was rarely used in Ireland except with reference to the
urban ‘folk clubs’ of the 1960s, influenced by a mid-twentieth-century
English folk revival”.22 Many traditional instrumentalists and singers in
Ireland take umbrage when described with what they see as that most
derogatory label, a folk musician.

There was, then, a different set of expectations around the political role
that folk music could play. For English folk music revivalists, the musical
form often had a direct connection with Marxist politics. It was almost the
case that, if a musical vanguard could lead the masses towards a deeper
appreciation of the right kind of music, then a political vanguard could
lead the masses towards a deeper appreciation of the right kind of political
action. The Communist Star Club protected Irish community arts but there
had been no serious attempt at communist or leftwing solutions to
problems in Ireland since James Connolly had allowed the socialism of the
Irish Citizen Army to be subsumed by the nationalist cause during the
1916 Easter Rising. It was difficult for the Irish in Britain to apply
equivalent English class thinking, although Helen O’Shea has implicated
the reawakening of Irish music in Ireland with the broader context of
British politics; “In Ireland, the revival of traditional music, like other
revivals of the European ‘folk’ music, was largely an urban, middle-class
reassertion of national cultural values”.23

In Birmingham the stage was certainly set for the involvement of

someone like Luke Kelly. By the 1950s, Irish migrants to the city were
becoming increasingly aware of leftwing politics because of their social
position. The Birmingham Connolly Association restored the patriotism
of James Connolly, promoting Marxism and attracting the newly-arrived
Irish youth in Birmingham by combining “traditional Irish republicanism
with socialism to appeal to a working-class constituency”.24 Members of

21
Paddy Riley explains Luke Kelly as the primary exponent of this technique on
Luke Kelly The Performer.
22
O’Shea, The Making of Irish Traditional Music, p.167.
23
Ibid., p.167.
24
Delaney, The Irish in Post-War Britain, p.188. The Connolly Association drew
on the Marxist teachings of James Connolly and promoted anti-partition amongst
98 Chapter Three

the association were very active, meeting emigrants from Ireland at their
first opportunity, as they disembarked the trains at New Street Station;
organised weekly get-togethers and set up stalls outside churches and on
trains to sell the party newspaper, the Irish Democrat. It was apt that a
main venue for Irish music in Birmingham, besides the Communist Star
Club, was the Midland Red Social Club (the name inspired by the bus
company), which provided a home for the Birmingham County Tyrone
Association.

Accordingly, from the mid-twentieth century, as pub singing was

becoming a new Irish urban display, the diaspora in Britain wrote a body
of humorous songs with serious socialist messages, creating a voice quite
separate to the rural and sean nós traditions in Ireland;25 and also at odds
to the sentimental balladry promoted by diasporas in America through
artists such as Bing Crosby and The Clancy Brothers. Songs like Pat
Cooksey’s “Sicknote”, Ewan MacColl’s “Hot Asphalt” and Dominic
Behan’s “McAlpine’s Fusiliers” created the musical soundtrack to Dónall
MacAmhlaigh’s seminal Dialann Deoraí, a memoir about the life of Irish
working men in regions of England.26 The Irish in Britain at this time
tended to fight shy of engaging with British political movements in a
direct way (something noted with frustration by some politicians and
newspapers27) but these witty songs indicate that migrants were at least
aware of the unfortunate social conditions of some of the Irish folk in
England and of the important community role music could play for them.

the Irish in Britain. Opposition by the Catholic Church in Birmingham prevented

its expansion into mainstream politics.
25
Sean-nós songs are typically sung solo in the Irish language and are highly
ornamented.
26
Dialann Deoraí (Dublin: An Clóchomhar, 1960) was a compilation of articles
describing MacAmhlaigh’s own experiences in London and Northampton, written
for an Irish language newspaper in his native County Galway. MacAmhlaigh
celebrates Irish construction workers in post-War Britain mindful of their isolation
and bitterness. Valentin Iremonger produced the English translation, An Irish
Navvy: The Diary of an Exile (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1964).
27
At an address to the University of Ireland Club in London in 1966, Fianna Fáil
politician Donogh O’Malley, blamed the marginal role Irish expatriates played in
politics for having achieved only a “limited degree of integration” See Delaney,
The Irish in Post-War Britain, p.180. The Irish Post also encouraged Irish people
in Britain to “flex some formidable political muscle”, stating in its first edition,
“Birmingham should be an Irish vote stronghold”. See Brendan MacLua, ‘The
Irish in Britain are not Using their Political Strength’, Irish Post, Friday February
13, 1970, pp.1-2.
 Kelly the Boy from Kings Heath: The Folk and the Critics 99

In Birmingham, singing had been the primary way of promoting

socialist ideas since the leftwing Clarion newspaper ceased publication in
1931. Luke Kelly introduced something of this approach to Irish culture,
aided by the English folk venues, repertoire and performer priorities
within Birmingham. Like many others from Dublin, Kelly was attracted
to the city by employment in the fifties, but he did not benefit too much
from the wealth of industrial opportunities presented. Kelly was sacked
from a building site in the neighbouring area of Wolverhampton in 1958
for demanding higher pay. This apparently-impertinent ask was an early
example of what would become Kelly’s prodigious defence of workers’
rights. His next step was to abandon a short-lived career in manual labour
and turn instead to socialist singing, through which he made the discovery
that “My interest in folk music grew parallel to my interest in politics”.28

Kelly met Cooksey, MacColl and Behan, in England.29 With a

distinctive Dublin voice, he reinforced the Irish musical satire of their
lyrics and ensured their songs did not dissolve into a general British folk
identity, despite having grown from personal experiences in England. By
performing these songs in Dublin, making them an important part of the
repertoire associated with The Dubliners, Kelly guaranteed that their
socialist messages, distilled in Britain, became an audible identity for
Ireland. His unique position would inspire the Irish writer Fintan
O’Toole’s posthumous assessment that what mattered was not so much
what Kelly sang but “the way he translated this attitude into sound”.30

28
Geraghty, Luke Kelly: A Memoir, p.40.
29
Luke Kelly met Pat Cooksey (from Limerick) at Ewan MacColl’s Singers Club
before introducing him to Irish music in Coventry. Kelly met brothers Dominic
and Brendan Behan (from Dublin) in London. With The Dubliners, Kelly
performed in Brendan Behan’s play Richard Cork’s Leg in Ireland during the
1970s. See ‘Pat Cooksey: Biography’
<http://www.patcooksey.com/biography.html> [accessed 14 January 2010]; and
‘Ballad singer Luke Kelly, a member of the internationally acclaimed Dubliners
died in a Dublin hospital on Jan 30’, Irish Echo, February 11 1984, Nick Guida,
‘It’s the Dubliners: Luke Kelly’ <http://itsthedubliners.com> [accessed 14 January
2010].
30
Fintan O’Toole, Liner Notes for The Best of Luke Kelly (Celtic Airs, 2002) [on
CD].
100 Chapter Three

A Clarion Call from Birmingham University

An important influence on the political thinking of the young Luke
Kelly was the Birmingham University classics professor George Thomson.
Thomson was born in London and acknowledged no obvious Irish
genealogy, but he was a Hibernophile and may have felt instantly open to
a friendship with the Dubliner, having himself enjoyed residency in the
Irish capital while studying at Trinity College. Furthermore, prior to
accepting his post at Birmingham University, Thomson was professor of
Greek at Galway University and had become fluent in the Irish language
when living for a time on the Blasket Islands in County Kerry, often using
the Irish translation of his name, Seoirse Mac Tomáis, from this point
onwards. Thomson joined the Communist Party in 1936, upon moving to
Birmingham, the city in which he would remain, dedicating his life to the
wellbeing of its working class.31 Thomson died in Birmingham in 1987.
A recent biography by Maggie Burns unites the prominent places in which
he left his legacy, George Thomson in Birmingham and the Blaskets.32

Thomson utilised his position at Birmingham University to run a

Marxist discussion group and evening classes in its seminar rooms. This
was in keeping with the ideology from which the university’s cutting edge
Centre for Contemporary Studies developed after 1964.33 During the
fifties Luke Kelly became a regular attendee at Thomson’s study group,
convinced that “there was far more to performing a folksong than learning
the words and tune. Vocal technique was important; so was emotional and
intellectual identification with the material”.34 Other supporters included
members of the Birmingham Clarion Singers, a workers’ choir led by
Thomson’s wife, Katherine, to which Kelly also belonged.

31
Graham Stevenson, ‘George Thomson’
<http://www.grahamstevenson.me.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=articl
e&id=576:george-thompson-&catid=20:t&Itemid=128> [accessed 16 April 2011]
32
Maggie Burns, George Thomson in Birmingham and the Blaskets (Birmingham:
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, 2011).
33
This Centre introduced the new field of cultural studies, whose scholars tackled
ideas introduced by Adorno and the Frankfurt School with a leftwing British focus.
It later became the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, and then the
Department of Cultural Studies and Sociology. The Department closed in 2002 as
part of restructuring at Birmingham University, a move which brought international
protests and criticisms.
34
Harker, Class Act, p.189.
 Kelly the Boy from Kings Heath: The Folk and the Critics 101

To mark their twenty-first anniversary in autumn 1961, the Birmingham

Clarion Singers, including Luke Kelly (celebrating his own twenty one
years), performed an adaptation of the American television screen writer,
Millard Lampell, and composer Earl Robinson’s Lonesome Train, a folk
cantata about Abraham Lincoln. Adam Krims’ investigation of
contemporary African-American societies in hip-hop music implies the
continued relevance of a folk piece like Lonesome Train for reading social
structures and status in pluralistic city soundscapes. Krims highlights the
images of train travel in the music video for “Geto Fantasy”, by Texan
rappers, the Geto Boys, because he believes railway lines can be a physical
demonstration of the divided urban environment, where some minority
groups are inevitably confined to the “wrong side” of the tracks.35

The significance of rail for America is, of course, not solely as social
metaphor for twentieth century hip-hop. This mode of transport has a
longer historical context for Irish emigration. The construction of
railroads during the previous century, as Nuala O’Connor explains,
“spawned a new lore of songs, stories and tunes which, in time, became a
definitive part of American folk culture”.36 How American this folk
culture actually is is debatable, given the large proportion of railroad
labour that came from Ireland. Luke Kelly, with The Dubliners,
popularised “Poor Paddy Works on the Railway” (the title was shortened
to “Paddy on the Railway” in their version). This is one of the earliest
railroad songs, written before the famine exodus, with lyrics that refer to
the thousands of Irishmen already working in America to construct grand
railroads.

Lonesome Train is one of the products of this “American” folk culture.

The story features a train bringing social freedom for workers. This
sentiment also had a particular resonance in 1960s Birmingham; a
landlocked city where migrant labouring communities (most notably the
Irish at this time) arrived on trains terminating at New Street Station
seeking—and achieving—social mobility. The Dubliners’ close friends in
Birmingham, The Ian Campbell Folk Group, would confirm the relevance
of the railway for shaping their urban city, by recording “The Fireman’s
Song” in the late sixties, explaining, in their album liner notes, that the
composer “has spent his life working on the railway and now gives artistic

35
Krims, Music and Urban Geography, p.13.
36
O’Connor, Bringing it Back Home, p.50.
102 Chapter Three

expression to the life of the loco-man”.37 The narrator of “The Fireman’s

Song”, a subservient employee who stokes the fireboxes on steamers,
celebrates the imperceptible power of the common man: “the driver thinks
he runs the show, but if I’m not there the train won’t go”.

The BBC Midlands employee Charles Parker directed Lonesome Train

with the Birmingham Clarion Singers. Parker customised the production
for Birmingham by combining the original American cantata with a
modern dance drama, set for a chorus, three solo singers, a balladeer and a
narrator. Parker struggled to define the separate roles of his spoken
narrator and singing balladeer, writing in a prompt book, “the first
problem is presented by the splitting of ‘narrator’ and ‘ballad singer’”.
His resolution was, largely identical instructions for both actors in the
production notes, and an additional closing sentiment for the narrator:
“The part must be read with simplicity, simple warmth and simple
indignation”.38 This instruction led to Parker casting Kelly as the narrator
(settling on Ian Campbell as the balladeer), a part which involved his
declaration; “When men are brothers and men are free, the killing will end.
The war will cease. When free men have a free men’s peace”. 39 Parker
demanded of his narrator that “the story and message of the piece,
conveyed in the words, must be considered the most important thing to be
put across to the audience”.40 Although his was not a singing part, Kelly
embraced this performance priority and would recycle the cantata’s
sentiments in spoken asides to The Dubliners’ songs—most obviously
“Free the People”: “What does it profit him the right to be born if he
suffers the loss of liberty?”41

The orchestration for Lonesome Train befits its American narrative.

Priority is given to bluegrass fiddle and banjo, which are locatable to

37
Liner notes on Ian Campbell and the Ian Campbell Folk Group with Dave
Swarbrick (Music for Pleasure, 1969) [on LP].
38
Birmingham: Birmingham Central Library, Charles Parker Archive,
MS4000/6/1/27/1/C, ‘Lonesome Train’ (The Leaveners) Prompt Copy, Production
Notes’.
39
Birmingham: Birmingham Central Library, Charles Parker Archive,
MS4000/2/91, ‘The Lonesome Train (The Leaveners) Prompt Copy’.
40
Birmingham: Birmingham Central Library, Charles Parker Archive,
MS4000/6/1/27/1/C, ‘Lonesome Train’ (The Leaveners) Prompt Copy, Production
Notes’.
41
Phil Coulter wrote “Free the People”, which appears as the opening track on The
Dubliners’ studio album (also produced by Coulter) Double Dubliners (EMI,
1972) [on LP].
 Kelly the Boy from Kings Heath: The Folk and the Critics 103

nineteenth-century American minstrels and the music of the Appalachian

region. The emotion of the railway workers’ story was significant for the
socialists (and for the topography) of Birmingham, but such American
instrumentation, and particularly the five-string banjo, quite purposefully
“sounded exotic in mid-1950s Britain”.42 The four-string tenor banjo was
a common melody instrument in Irish traditional music, but, after
appearing in Lonesome Train, Kelly made the five-string banjo famous.
He would later benefit from contact with the American socialist musician
Peggy Seeger who played this type of banjo in the folk clubs of England.
It was an unusual instrument such that, in their short summary of Kelly’s
time in the English Midlands, the online Irish music specialists
RamblingHouse explain, “Luke bought his first banjo, a five-string, started
a lifelong habit of consummate reading and even took up golf—on one of
Birmingham’s municipal courses”.43 For Kelly the five-string banjo was
also an arresting visual prop. As a professional with The Dubliners, Kelly
often used it as a shovel when he sang “Paddy on the Railway”, for
example, and it made for a ready rifle in his performances of the “Monto”.

Kelly made the sound of the five-string banjo famous through

arpeggiated accompaniments to songs such as MacColl’s “Schooldays
Over”, “The Night Visiting Song”, or Patrick Kavanagh’s “Raglan Road”.44
It was by playing the banjo that Kelly achieved further prominence on the
local music scene. Those in the parish of St Augustine’s, Handsworth
remember Luke and his brother, Paddy, performing on the banjo in their
church hall during the sixties. Ralph McTell also recounts; “The first time
I ever saw Luke, I’d been taken along by a friend to see a banjo-player:
Luke with his long-necked five string banjo”.45 Kelly’s use of the banjo
created tensions with other performers of Irish music in Ireland. In 1966,
Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann officer Mackie Rooney attacked the Irish
national media, in an article for the Ulster Fleadh Cheoil programme, for
ignoring the legitimate use of the banjo as a melody instrument for jigs
and reels in favour of the “off-note of banjo-strumming, bearded

42
Harker, Class Act, p.116.
43
‘RamblingHouse: Luke Kelly’ <http://homepages.iol.ie/~ronolan/luke_kelly>
[accessed 30 September 2008].
44
“Schooldays Over” appears on The Dubliners, Luke’s Legacy (Chime, 1989) [on
CD]. “The Night Visiting Song” and “Raglan Road” appear on Luke Kelly, The
Best of Luke Kelly.
45
Ralph McTell speaks on Luke Kelly the Performer.
104 Chapter Three

exuberance”.46 Despite Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann disapproval of

bearded banjo-strummers, Kelly’s display on the five-string—and its
combination with further experimentations by The Dubliners’ fiddle,
whistle and guitar (another controversial inclusion for some traditional
musicians)—set a precedent for other popular Irish groups to follow.

Through the Birmingham Clarion Singers, Kelly met a fellow

Dubliner, Mollie Mulready. As was common practice for Irish homeowners
in central Birmingham, Mollie offered lodgings to her countryman. From
1961, Kelly lived at the Mulreadys’ house on May Lane in Kings Heath,
after having supposedly been evicted by his previous Dublin landlady in
Birmingham on account of relentless singing that disturbed her domestic
peace. This story may have been apocryphal, but what gives it the ring of
truth is Ewan MacColl’s criticism when tutoring Kelly shortly afterwards
that he was “singing too much” and making his voice tired.47

The entire Mulready family was actively engaged with music. Mollie
Mulready’s sister-in-law, Kathleen Moynihan, had founded the Comhaltas
Ceoltóirí Éireann branch in Mullingar and her brother Ned Stapleton was
the traditional flautist from whom Kelly learnt “The Rocky Road to
Dublin”—a song that would bring much success and would become the
“signature tune” of The Dubliners.48 Kelly also shared the Mulready home
with students from the Spanish Basque country who were receiving
language tuition from Mollie’s husband Sean. Kelly remained sensitive to
national liberation struggles beyond Ireland and this house-share must
have influenced The Dubliners’ later repertoire, which included not only
the “Peat Bog Soldiers”, but also “Ojos Negros” and “Viva la Quinte
Brigada”.49 Empathy was an easy virtue for Kelly. As his bandmate John
Sheahan stated, “he [Luke] was never short of causes, but very worthy
ones I must say”.50 According to the Mulready’s son, Sean junior:

46
Michael McDowell, ‘Monaghan Troubadour & Mountainy Man’, Treoir, 40
(2008), pp.25-27 (p.26).
47
Birmingham: Birmingham Central Library, Charles Parker Archive: Critics
Group Folk Song Course 1964, Tape 27, 3/1164: CD, MS 4000 5/4/2/37D.
48
Nathan Joseph refers to “The Rocky Road to Dublin” as such in his sleeve notes
for The Dubliners in Session (Hallmark Records, 1970) [on LP].
49
“Ojos Negros” was recorded on The Dubliners, Revolution (EMI, 1970). “Viva
la Quinte Brigada” is on the album 40 Years (Baycourt, 2002).
50
John Sheahan speaks on Luke Kelly The Performer.
 Kelly the Boy from Kings Heath: The Folk and the Critics 105

In many of the google pages it states that my father Sean was a major
influence on Luke but it was my mother Mollie who was closer to Luke.
For many years after he went back to Dublin whenever he visited
Birmingham—Luke called to see my mother—my father wasn’t mad about
that as the two of them got stuck into a fair few drinks.51

Kelly did not let the voices of Brendan Behan and Pat Cooksey
disappear within an English music scene. Neither did he let Mollie
Mulready’s experiences become lost on the Irish stage. Perhaps Kelly’s
affinity with socialist women like Mollie and Katherine Thompson can, at
least in part, be held to account for the large number of ostensibly
“women’s songs” that The Dubliners would go on to have successes with:
“The Humour is on Me Now”, “Don’t Get Married Girls”, “Liverpool
Lou”, or “Maids When You’re Young Never Wed An Old Man”, to name
but a few. It is Kelly who, after spending time discussing socialism with
men and women in Birmingham, went on to provide the female
perspective within an apparently masculine genre of pub balladry.

The Mulreadys’ migration tale was not the typical one of leaving
Ireland for better job prospects. Mollie’s husband, Sean Mulready, had
held a respectable position in Dublin; a teacher of English, Irish and
Mathematics until a hate campaign by the Catholic Standard newspaper
drove him away, a “dangerous radical”, to Birmingham in 1958.
Supporting a Roman Catholic hierarchy in Ireland, the paper was keen to
keep any leftwing policies at bay and frequently condemned the Connolly
Association as a “Communist front organisation”.52 Sean Mulready
continued teaching in Birmingham, in a secondary modern school,
spreading an Irish audibility by specialising in English as a second
language. This brought him into contact with many migrant families,
including those from the Gaeltacht (Irish speaking areas), learning, as a
result, Irish-intoned English in Birmingham. Mulready also became part
of the set of intellectuals and students associated with George Thomson at
Birmingham University. He was an important member of the local
Birmingham co-operative movement and of the national Communist Party
of Great Britain.

Hence, music practice and political discussion went hand in hand in

May Lane. Kelly ended up joining the Young Communist League in

51
Written correspondence with Sean Mulready.
52
John Archer Jackson, The Irish in Britain (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1963), p.126.
106 Chapter Three

Birmingham, something which the Mulreadys thoroughly endorsed,

although it would later cause problems. When The Dubliners were
applying for American visas for a tour in 1968, a grim-faced official
produced a photo of a teenage Kelly selling the League’s newspaper, The
Daily Worker, in Birmingham. It is likely that his nervousness about this
incident accounts for the strangely clean-cut and “Oirish” version of Kelly,
who famously appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show during the tour singing
“Muirsheen Durkin”, an optimistic, apolitical song about migration.53

Kelly’s intellectually-stimulating time in the Mulready household

clearly helped to form many of his later interests. In Birmingham he “was
encouraged to sing, sing, sing by Mollie and to read, read, read by Sean”.54
Both of these hobbies came to define him. As bandmate Barney McKenna
recalled, “Luke was always reading. He’d read brown paper”.55 Indeed
Kelly named the band “The Dubliners” because of his familiarity with
James Joyce’s illustrious collection of short stories. Emphasising his own
literary prowess perhaps also served to embarrass the critic who had
misprinted the band’s previous title, the Ronnie Drew Ballad Group, as the
“Ronnie Drew Ballet Group”. After having branded the band, Kelly
continued with his own “reading for the social” away from Dublin.

From Birmingham to Beckenham and Back Again

In the early sixties, Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl set up a music
group at their home in Beckenham, London. A select conclave of socialist
singers would gather to perform and appraise each other. MacColl had
learnt the importance of self-criticism and regular performance in America
during the early thirties (when in correspondence with the Worker’s
Laboratory Theatre in New York). Later, in England, he applied this
practice to the folk music revival. Consequently the meetings became
known as the “Critics’ Group”. Some of these sessions were recorded by
Charles Parker, whose surviving tapes are currently held in his Archive at
Birmingham Central Library.

From the start, Luke Kelly was a key member of these gatherings,
which owed much to the Birmingham musical and political scene.

53
Ronnie Drew includes this anecdote in notes accompanying the CD, The Best of
Luke Kelly.
54
Geraghty, Luke Kelly A Memoir, p.48.
55
Barney McKenna speaks on Luke Kelly The Performer.
 Kelly the Boy from Kings Heath: The Folk and the Critics 107

MacColl was a keen advocate of Professor George Thomson. A decade

earlier, in 1952, MacColl had promoted a folksong revival, for which he
adopted the techniques of socialist theatre, in a lecture “Towards People’s
Theatre”. His argument was derived from Thomson’s Marxist
interpretation of ancient Greek theatre that presented the idea that music,
poetry and dancing was drawn from “the rhythmical movement of human
bodies engaged in collective labour”.56 The classics scholar was a driving
force behind MacColl’s regular visits to Birmingham and it meant a great
deal to him that “professors such as […] George Thomson valued his
work”.57 MacColl adopted Thomson’s Marxist teaching model by running
a political reading group alongside singing sessions. In turn, the Critics’
Group model became popular in Britain’s Second City. Those running
Birmingham’s Peanuts and Grey Cock Folk Club followed MacColl’s
format, attending study weekends and song-writing sessions with him and
Seeger among others.

Kelly had become known to singers involved in the Critics’ Group

because of his popularity in Birmingham, where he had already performed
at a number of local venues, including the Jug O’ Punch folk club, which
was not known as a particularly Irish space. This was clearly a time for
Kelly to experiment with his voice. In an isolated recording of four
traditional Irish songs—“Walking in the Dew”, “Dark is the Colour of My
True Love’s Hair”, “The Kerry Recruit” and “The Galway Races”—made
by Parker in Birmingham during the fifties, Kelly manifests some fairly
uniform mordents that are quite different to the erratic improvisations,
characteristic of his performances in the sixties and beyond.58 It was with
this later style that members of the Critics’ Group were familiar, criticising
Kelly’s performance, in 1964 for his “thrusting” voice, and his staccato
melodies.59

Kelly had left Birmingham by 1964, when MacColl and Seeger invited
him to deliver nine songs for the Critics’ Group. Parker’s recording of this
session reveals the way that Kelly’s awareness of socialist politics and
music from Birmingham had developed with his famous band in Ireland

56
Harker, Class Act, p.106.
57
Ibid., p.224.
58
Birmingham: Birmingham Central Library, Charles Parker Archive MS 4000:
Critics Group Folk Song Course 1964, Tape 27, 3/11/64: CD, 5/4/2/37C.
59
Birmingham: Birmingham Central Library, Charles Parker Archive MS 4000:
Critics Group Folk Song Course 1964, Tape Transcripts: Ewan MacColl Folksong
Course, Tape 25, Part 2, 3/11/64: 1/8/9/1/1, p.485.
108 Chapter Three

and continued to influence his choice of song and the context for their
performance.60 This unaccompanied, private recital presents an unusually
taciturn Kelly. Seven of the nine songs would appear on his posthumous
solo album, Thank You For the Days (1999). Five of these—“Come My
Little Son”, “The Kerry Recruit”, “McAlpine’s Fusiliers”, “The Hot
Asphalt” and “The Rocky Road to Dublin”—became successful hits for The
Dubliners.61

Despite Kelly’s now professional status, in his appraisal of the recital

in 1964, MacColl berates the singer for “going back into that tendency of
shouting the top notes”.62 MacColl advises Kelly to sing more laconically
by softening vibrato and limiting its use to just one consonant and when
emphasising a place name. Kelly appears to have taken this on board in
his career, considering songs such as “The Holy Ground” (where he
emphasises the first syllable of “Holy”), “The Jail of Cluan Meala” (where
he sings “jail” as two syllables and stresses the first), or “The Auld
Triangle” (where the first syllable in “Royal Canal” is prominent).63
Incidentally, in a capella performances of the latter song with The
Dubliners, Kelly would typically pay tribute to his English singing tutor,
cupping his ear in what was MacColl’s signature position. This image of
the Dubliner would become a lasting memory for mourners after reporters
wrote of Earl Gill and his band playing “The Auld Triangle” as Kelly’s
coffin was carried from the church at the end of his funeral in 1984.

60
The Charles Parker Archive catalogue dates the tape featuring Kelly’s
performance as the 9th November 1964, although Charles Parker can be heard
declaring the date as the 3rd December at the beginning of the recording.
61
Thank You For the Days was released in conjunction with the film-documentary
Luke produced by Noel Pearson and Sinead O’Brien (Ferndale Films, 1999). “The
Deserter” and “Dark-Eyed Sailor” are the only songs Kelly performs in this
Critics’ Groups session that do not feature on the album. “The Rocky Road to
Dublin” first appears on The Dubliners’ self-titled album from 1964
(Transatlantic); “The Kerry Recruit” was performed on their live album, In
Concert (Transatlantic Records, 1965), and “McAlpine’s Fusiliers” and the “Hot
Asphalt” feature on Finnegan Wakes (Transatlantic Records, 1966). “Come My
Little Son” appears as “My Little Son” on Drinkin’ and Courtin’ (Major Minor,
1968) [on LP].
62
Birmingham: Birmingham Central Library, Charles Parker Archive MS 4000:
Critics Group Folk Song Course 1964, Tape Transcripts: Ewan MacColl Folksong
Course, Tape 25, Part 2, 3/11/64: 1/8/9/1/1, p.485.
63
All three songs appear on the album, Luke Kelly, The Best of Luke Kelly.
 Kelly the Boy from Kings Heath: The Folk and the Critics 109

On the other hand, in that 1964 Critics’ Group recording, another of

the singers (Gordon McCulloch) praises Kelly’s performance specifically
because of its good consonants and diction. He does however suggest a
re-think of the programme order, given that Kelly’s first song, “The
Deserter”, is a fairly sombre number with which to open. Kelly defends
his choice by reasoning that he always starts with a slow song in order to
calm the nerves that leave him gasping and exhausted. His version of
“The Rocky Road to Dublin” is criticised by the others for being too
breathless and a temporary lapse of memory in “The Kerry Recruit”
exhibits this nervousness.

Furthermore, the song order allows Kelly to draw on those theatrical

skills developed with the Clarion Singers, in order to create a particular
narrative of Ireland through spoken links in the programme. Kelly initially
introduces an era of Irish revolution with “The Deserter”, justifying its
inclusion on the grounds that “it is very interesting for me because I think
it has an element of Black and Tanism in it”;64 defends those in Ireland
attacked for taking the “King’s shilling” as part of his introduction to “The
Kerry Recruit”; and presents migration to urban Britain as a solution
before singing “McAlpine’s Fusiliers”, saying “industrialisation in fact
didn’t come from Ireland, in fact has just barely begun in Ireland and so
Paddy went looking for industrialisation”.65 Kelly took similar care at
other moments in this performance. He explained that the “Dark Eyed
Sailor” was from Colm O’Lochlan’s collection of street ballads, adding
that “I think in fact it’s an English import; very well assimilated English
import anyway”. He did not need to finish the sentence to explain the
relevance of MacColl’s composition “Come My Little Son” to the
situation of Ireland, which becomes obvious before he trails off, “I think

64
Birmingham: Birmingham Central Library, Charles Parker Archive MS 4000:
Critics’ Group Folk Song Course 1964, Tape Transcripts Ewan MacColl Folksong
Course, Tape 25, Part 2, 3/11/64: CD, 5/4/2/37 p.486.
65
Birmingham: Birmingham Central Library, Charles Parker Archive MS4000:
Critics’ Group Folk Song Course 1964, Tape 25, Part 2 3/11/64. In his
introduction to “The Kerry Recruit” Luke Kelly describes “a similar song to ‘Mrs
McGrath’ and ‘Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye’; a sort of tragi-comic song”. Perhaps
aware of Parker’s Critics’ Group recordings of Kelly, A.L. Lloyd would make an
identical connection in his seminal Folk Song in England: “For biting comment on
military matters, one must look to Ireland and such splendid compositions as
‘Johnny I hardly knew ye’, ‘Mrs McGrath’, ‘The Kerry Recruit’”. See Lloyd, Folk
Song in England, p.235.
110 Chapter Three

the song explains everything an immigrant with a family to support back

home…”.66

In this academic environment, Kelly is repeatedly forced into mitigating

his repertoire on purely national grounds. During the Critics’ Group’s
post-performance discussion some even begin to discuss whether an Irish
singer should use certain words or not in their everyday language, such as
that brought to the stage by Kelly as a significant part of his sung
performance. Scottish singer Barry Campbell and English singer Sandra
Kerr tell him that it is inappropriate and “a little bit embarrassing” for an
Irish singer to be using the name “Paddy”.67 Kelly’s brother Paddy lived
in Birmingham until recently. His range of musical influences came from
there and from Dublin, so the thought of self-censoring in this way must
have felt a little odd. Kelly’s response is muted, save from explaining,
“This is the first time I’ve sung McAlpine’s Fusiliers” and graciously
accepting “the criticisms were all salient”.68 “Paddy” was only contentious
in an English context in any case. Migrants coming to manual
employment in 1960s Birmingham, such as Gerry Underwood from
County Sligo, were bemused rather than offended by its use as a
generalisation, or as a possible insult, for an Irish person.

Thus, Kelly’s musical and political influences derived from specific

Birmingham or Birmingham-inspired locations, many of which had strong
Irish associations, including the Mulreadys’ home, the University of
Birmingham seminar room, and the Beckenham house of the Critics’
Group. Yet that Critics’ Group often seemed obsessed by a rather
reductive view that Irish people should sing Irish songs (and English
people English songs, Scottish people Scottish songs and so on). This was
certainly Ewan MacColl’s opinion, as, in a separate session, he quizzed

66
“Come My Little Son” was written by Ewan MacColl for the BBC radio balled
Song of the Road (1959). Charles Parker Archive MS 4000: Critics Group Folk
Song Course 1964, Tape Transcripts Ewan MacColl Folksong Course, Tape 26,
3/1//62: 5/4/2/37, p.492 and p.490.
67
Charles Parker Archive MS 4000: Critics Group Folk Song Course 1964, Tape
Transcripts: Ewan MacColl Folksong Course, Tape 25, Part 2, 3/11/64: 1/8/9/1/1,
p.496.
68
Birmingham: Birmingham Central Library, Charles Parker Archive MS4000:
Critics’ Group Folk Song Course 1964, Tape 25, Part 2 3/11/64.
 Kelly the Boy from Kings Heath: The Folk and the Critics 111

Kelly on whether one of the tunes he had performed was in fact American
rather than Irish, as the singer had claimed.69

Kelly owed his early style and repertoire to Birmingham so it would

have been an absurdity to insist upon him delivering exclusively pure Irish
material. Whilst he would go on to rehabilitate the discredited word
“Paddy” with The Dubliners—most famously in their introduction to
“McAlpine’s Fusiliers”: “They’ll say ‘Good on you Paddy’, with your
boat fare in your hand”—it seemed a conscious rejection of the Critics’
Group’s salient comments. The band’s ironic retrieval of an “offensive”
term for Irish people gave rise to that insult “Plastic Paddy”, used by those
in Ireland against the diaspora, to which Paul O’Brien responds in song.
Over time, in the knowledge that, despite their original intentions, many
post-war migrants never returned to Ireland but created a permanent public
Irish sound in urban places such as Birmingham, The Dubliners presented
a more relevant tongue-in-cheek preface to “McAlpine’s Fusiliers”. This
explained how employers in Britain “sent for some of our fellas to rebuild
essential services: houses, roads, bridges, the odd pub, in order to make
England a fit place for Irish people to live”.70 As early as the 1950s,
Kelly’s singing style and political notions demonstrated this hybridity. It
is perhaps most surprising that, in pushing the strict rules of the English
folk music movement, the members of the Critics’ Group—which fostered
something of this—failed to endorse the range and breadth of Kelly’s
appropriations.

69
MacColl said this in June 1964 after Kelly claimed to be singing a song from the
south west of Ireland. Birmingham: Birmingham Central Library, Charles Parker
Archive MS 4000: Critics Group Folk Song Course 1964, Tape 27, 3/1164: CD
MS 4000 5/4/2/37D: and Charles Parker Archive MS 4000: Critics’ Group Folk
Song Course 1964, Tape Transcripts: Ewan MacColl Folksong Course, Tape 14,
2/6/64: 1/8/9/1/1, p.804.
70
The Dubliners 40 Years Live at the Gaiety (Celtic Collections, 2003) [on VCR].
An Irish political voice also became more noticeable. Clan na h-Éireann was a
strong movement from the late 1960s under the direction of Dan Murphy from
County Kerry (the name of which inspired the céilí band mentioned in chapter
two). Tom McDowell simultaneously chaired a Committee of the Campaign for
Social Justice in Northern Ireland. More recently, in 2007 second-generation Irish,
former MP, Clare Short presented an exhibition of Irish contributions to the city at
the Custard Factory in Digbeth.
112 Chapter Three

Your epitaph—a simple claim, between the two great

mysteries, your place, your name71
With contributions from the Mulreadys, the Thomsons and the thriving
Connolly Association, Birmingham’s socialist movement was moulded by
its Irish residents. Consecutively, the city fashioned its own famous Irish
resident, Luke Kelly. Birmingham allowed Kelly to develop the political
awareness and presentation style that informed the music through which
he would make his name. Kelly found his inclusion in the folk music
revival in Ireland from these socialist circles. Yet he was no archetype of
the Irish “folk” in Birmingham. Those engaged in political activity in the
city were a small minority of the total number of migrants from Ireland
during the 1950s. Most Irishmen and Irishwomen completely avoided any
such involvements because, as Enda Delaney rationalises, “if you intended
going home in the near future, why bother to waste valuable time
becoming involved in organizations based in Britain, when you could be
working overtime instead”.72 Moreover, the ideas of socialism were
reintroduced with specific and dangerous connotations in the Troubles of
the late sixties and seventies when the IRA co-opted the rhetoric of the left
in order to gain support in the Republic. That Kelly’s leanings were
socialist further isolated him from his countrymen, as, according to Anne
O’Grady, in the 1950s, such a political outlook presented “an ideology that
was still alien to the minds of Irish men and women”.73

Kelly’s pursuits were incongruous even within the local Birmingham

cohort. Pam Bishop believes one of the unique things about the folk
movement in Birmingham was that singers were primarily attracted by
Marxist discussion groups on music and politics. Sung performances were
actually a smaller part of the meetings. Paul Brady suggests quite the
opposite for Kelly, that he simply tolerated the political element of
proceedings for the sake of music; “Luke was happy in a sense personally
within the political camp because a lot of his friends were there; a lot of
the singers that impressed him”.74 A satisfying appraisal comes, therefore,
from no single source, but from instead considering Fintan O’Toole’s
retrospective reading of Kelly’s audible identity, alongside Ewan MacColl’s
contemporary performance advice in the Critics’ Group. O’Toole

71
From John Sheahan, ‘Luke’s Gravestone’, Liner Notes, The Best of Luke Kelly.
72
Delaney, The Irish In Post-War Britain, p.189.
73
Anne O’Grady, Irish Migration to London in the 1940s and 50s (London: PNL
Press, 1988), p.16.
74
Paul Brady speaks on Luke Kelly The Performer.
 Kelly the Boy from Kings Heath: The Folk and the Critics 113

describes a voice that transcends hypothetical “strange” and “ordinary”

worlds. Kelly combined these two worlds, with defining impacts from
that strange and unfamiliar, adopted site, Birmingham, and strong roots in
the music, culture and history of familiar, (for him) “ordinary”, Dublin.
Like O’Toole, MacColl acknowledged the multifaceted interpretations
manifest in Kelly’s character, singing and performance style. Rather than
the connection to place, MacColl connects personal emotional and
expressive ranges. In one of the Critics’ Group sessions, for example, he
recommended:

What I think you have got to learn to do is you’ve got to learn to handle the
sense of dramatic inside yourself but to handle it in a whole host of
different ways so that you can communicate the sense of pride, alright, you
can do this. You know, sod you all, kind of thing—you can do this in
certain of your songs very well. But as well as being able to communicate
this, you’ve got to be able to communicate the sense of very deep
compassion, of tenderness and all these other things.75

At the same time, Kelly’s association with Ian Campbell in

Birmingham’s clubs and the Critics’ Group meetings communicated an
unmistakable Irish alignment with the region’s folk music scene.
Originally appearing as the Clarion Skiffle Group, the professional Ian
Campbell Folk Group popularised Birmingham’s folk music on a national
level from the sixties. Kelly recorded several tracks with their guitarist
Dave Phillips, whom he considered another of his closest friends in
Birmingham. Two of these songs, “The Wild Mountain Thyme” and “The
Gentlemen Soldier”, appear on The Dubliners’ live album Irish Folk
Night.76 In turn (and notwithstanding the advice he received at the Critics’
Group sessions to fit the lyrics of the then unfamiliar “McAlpine’s
Fusiliers” to “the more apt tune” of “Kelly the Boy from Killan”77), Kelly
broadened the repertoire of folk music in England, judging by blank lines
and spelling errors in the Critics’ Group tape transcripts, which record his
Irish songs as “The Carrier Recruit” and “The Rocky Road to Donegal”,
rather than “The Kerry Recruit” and “The Rocky Road to Dublin”.

75
Birmingham: Birmingham Central Library, Charles Parker Archive MS 4000:
Critics Group Folk Song Course 1964, Tape Transcripts ‘Ewan MacColl Folksong
Course, 2/6/64; 1/8/9/1/3, p.808.
76
The Dubliners, Irish Folk Night (Decca, 1964) [on LP].
77
Birmingham: Birmingham Central Library, Charles Parker Archive MS 4000:
Critics’ Group Folk Song Course 1964, Tape Transcripts ‘Ewan MacColl Folksong
Course, Tape 25, Part 2, 3/11/64; 5/4/2/37, p.494; and Tape 26, 3/1//62; 5/4/2/37,
p.494.
114 Chapter Three

Following Kelly’s performances in the Critics’ Group session,

Campbell’s band recorded an unaccompanied, harmonised version of “The
Kerry Recruit”, and used the melody to which Kelly sang “The Hot
Asphalt” for their own song, “Here Come the Navvies”.78 Influenced by
Kelly’s adoption of the “exotic” instrument, Campbell’s group even
included a five-string banjo player, Andy Smith, who was asked to join in
1969, after appearing in the Jug O’ Punch folk club in Digbeth.

Campbell maintained space for a singing colleague from Dublin. After

Kelly relocated home to Ireland, he invited Tommy Dempsey—who had
left Dublin as a fifteen year old in the fifties and permanently settled in
Birmingham five years later—to a music session at the Big Bulls Head
next to the Birmingham Civic Hall, from which they formed the Clarion
Choir (not to be confused with the Clarion Singers) with Phillips and
another of the Clarion Skiffle Group, Dave Swarbrick. Dempsey remains
a popular Irish musician in Birmingham, performing and touring regularly
with his bands, Dempsey’s Lot and Drowsy Maggie, who were one of the
headline acts at the 2007 reopening of the Birmingham Town Hall Feast of
Irish Folk. Dempsey has often promoted the preparatory stage of Birmingham
for Irish music, boasting that, having left Ireland, his “career was born out
of the early ‘60s folk revival”.79

Such a sentiment may have riled traditional musicians in Ireland. Luke

Kelly’s sharing Irish music in England, his English-intoned political
leanings and camaraderie with the officious Ewan MacColl certainly
angered some performers, especially those subscribing to the thinking of
Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, although, according to Ronnie Drew, such
national tensions really ran no deeper than “that youthful hating of the
English phraseology. It was stupid”.80 The Dubliners showed no hesitation
in introducing Kelly’s British songs. According to Ciarán Bourke’s record
notes, the “Wild Rover was collected by Luke in England”, and “It was
Luke who collected the next song Tramps and Hawkers while singing with
the group in Scotland”.81 In the 1960s The Dubliners recorded an album

78
These are recorded on the album Ian Campbell and the Ian Campbell Folk
Group with Dave Swarbrick (Music for Pleasure, 1969) [on LP]. Campbell’s
composition “The Sun is Burning” also appears on Luke Kelly’s greatest hits
album, The Best of Luke Kelly.
79
‘Dempsey’s Lot: Tommy Dempsey’ <http://www.dempseys-lot.co.uk/tommy-
dempsey.htm> [accessed 12 November 2010].
80
Ronnie Drew on Luke Kelly The Performer.
81
Nathan Joseph, Liner Notes, The Dubliners In Session.
 Kelly the Boy from Kings Heath: The Folk and the Critics 115

in London’s formal folk headquarters, Cecil Sharpe House, performed at

the Cambridge Folk Festival and encouraged other folk revivalists in
Ireland to experience and publicise the Irish music scene in England. One
such was the All-Ireland banjo champion Mick O’Connor, for whom:

The banjo playing of Barry [sic] McKenna of the Dubliners group was what
inspired him to pick up the instrument in 1967. Within a few years, he was
hanging out in London learning from all the great Irish musicians there, such
as John Bowe, Bobby Casey, Tommy McCarthy, Roger Galway, and many
others.82

The folk revival provided the escape from an Irish identity, based on
nationality and politics. It was primarily a singing format, welcoming
instrumentalists but requiring a very different style of playing and
response to those sessions promoted by Lily Lawrie and the Birmingham
Comhaltas. In his posthumous definition, Phil Coulter confirmed the
music Kelly pushed in the English Midlands: “His protest songs; his
socially-aware songs; his songs by Ewan MacColl, by Ian Campbell, anti-
war songs or whatever were very much part and parcel of Luke”.83 In
addition, Kelly promoted Birmingham for the musical advancement of
singers. Fellow Dubliner Jim McCann followed an analogous path,
having been inspired to take up singing during summer employment in
Birmingham in 1964 and building on the lesson back in Dublin with his
band, The Ludlow Trio, before establishing his own television series, The
McCann Man. Luke Kelly performed his only recorded version of
Coulter’s “Scorn Not His Simplicity” in an episode of The McCann Man.84
In learning his trade in Birmingham during university holidays, McCann
also brought across the rural customs of Ireland, where, as Hugh Brody
recalls, traditional music was only performed for a quarter of the year as
an indication of the summer season.85 This explains, partly, why, as
permanent residents of 1970s Roscommon, the Lawrie family from
Handsworth struggled to find the regular evening session music so familiar
to them from their school holidays spent in Ireland.

<http://www.answers.com/topic/mick-o-connor-world-artist> [accessed 5 November

2008].
83
Phil Coulter speaks on Luke Kelly The Performer.
84
Coulter wrote “Scorn Not His Simplicity” following the birth of his first born
son with Down’s Syndrome. Luke Kelly was so affected by the sentiment that he
refused to sing the song as part of his usual concert repertoire.
85
Brody, Inishkillane, p.34.
116 Chapter Three

After Birmingham, Kelly would be most comfortable as one quarter of

a band rather than as an isolated solo artist. Con Houlihan describes his
band, The Dubliners, as a “meitheal” of four individual roles: Bourke
offered tin whistle and songs in Irish and Drew introduced Dublin songs;
McKenna brought banjo skills, whilst Kelly contributed a “vast store of
industrial and other songs”.86 Notwithstanding their variances with The
Dubliners, Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann launched an outreach programme
in 2008 which also had “at its core the Meitheal engine”.87 Yet Kelly
inhabits a unique space from both an Irish and a Brummie perspective and
his contribution in a study of Birmingham presents something of a two-
fold interaction. Kelly’s budding singing career was born of, and nurtured
by, his time in Birmingham and his contact with the Mulreadys, the
Thomsons, the Clarion Singers, Charles Parker and Ewan MacColl with
the Critics’ Group. His musical pursuits in Ireland were aided by
instruction from Birmingham’s socialists, and his realities of the city
helped maintain the often dark humour of his music.

As we saw in the previous chapter, the Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann

branch in Birmingham had been formed because of the domestic space
provided by Lily Lawrie. The domestic space of the Mulreadys’ house in
the city was no less responsible for helping to forge the musical style of
Luke Kelly, doubling (in a similar way to the Lawries’ doctor’s surgery)
as a public community site for those pursuing language lessons from the
Dublin English teacher Sean Mulready, another local figure of authority.
As this chapter has shown, Kelly also absorbed the folk clubs and the
university seminar rooms of Birmingham. It is to the other established
public city spaces of Ireland in Birmingham that we travel in the following
chapter.

86
The “meitheal” is the process by which rural peasant farmers pool their skills
and resources. Houlihan’s description appears in Liner Notes, The Best of Luke
Kelly, and is echoed by the band members interviewed on Luke Kelly The
Performer: John Sheahan described “a melting pot of influences”; Ronnie Drew
surmised “Everybody in the band had his own unique talent”; whereas Barney
McKenna said “Ronnie could do the Dublinese songs; John and I could provide the
traditional music; and Luke done the industrial ballads”.
87
Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, ‘Development Programme in Full Flight: 200
Projects and 16 Cultural Centres’, p.3.
 CHAPTER FOUR

WHISKEY ON A SUNDAY:
THE LORD OF THE DANCE

Parts of the immigrants’ Irish culture—and especially gaelic culture—

seem to have disappeared very quickly. All that remained were their
religion (and it is not insignificant, perhaps, that today the Catholic church
in England still cannot staff its parishes with English-born priests, but
must import the sons of rural Ireland, as it has done for more than a
hundred years), and their English-language ballads.1

In his final resting place, Luke Kelly continues to keep good company.
He lies, in Glasnevin Cemetery, amongst the most notable Irish
nationalists, politicians and artists, including his friend in life, Brendan
Behan. Across the road from that unpretentious gravestone, projected as
part of The Dubliners’ performance on St Patrick’s Day 2010, sits a
slightly grander monument commemorating the war hero Éamon de
Valera. Their shrines may differ, but both men have a shared experience;
that of presenting their passion for the Irish nation to supporters at the
Town Hall in Birmingham. After defeat in the 1948 elections, de Valera
spent his time touring Irish diasporas in Britain, America and Australia
strengthening his anti-partition cause. Birmingham was one of his first
ports of call. On 30 January 1949 the former Taoiseach was welcomed to
Britain’s second city by the visiting Terence MacSwiney Irish Pipe Band
and, flanked by thousands of enthusiasts waving Irish flags and wearing
rosaries, he processed up New Street and Corporation Street to address a
capacity crowd in Birmingham Town Hall.

De Valera’s impression of the city was understandably long-lasting.

On returning to Ireland, he attempted to improve the living conditions of
those Irish residents of Birmingham who had given him such a warm
reception, albeit in a reasonably backhanded manner. De Valera used the

1
‘Cecilia Costello’ <http;//www.btinternet.com/~radical/thefolkmag/Costello.htm>
[accessed 2 February 2010].
118 Chapter Four

Irish in Birmingham as a cautionary tale for youth in Ireland. In a speech

delivered to an audience in Galway on 29 August 1951, de Valera warned
about the perils of emigration and the “continuing price of English
colonisation”.2 He described the poor health of the Irish living in England
and, most alarmingly, the “deplorable conditions” of those working in
Birmingham.3 The evidence for this assault came out of an unpublished
report, commissioned by the Irish Embassy, from Maurice Foley of the
Young Christian Workers Association. Foley’s report, from May 1951,
criticised Birmingham’s treatment of its most recent Irish guests, flagging
up instances of houses accommodating up to fifty young men,
drunkenness and secularism. De Valera emphasised the latter as
particularly problematic, translating Ireland’s political embarrassment of
escalating migration to Birmingham, into a personal concern for the
spiritual welfare of young people living in this sprawling city without the
moral compass of a state Catholic religion.

For those in Ireland, De Valera’s spin gave a rosy tint to the

floundering economy that was driving this mass movement to
Birmingham. The popular imagination was fed by an image of poor rural
Irish families sitting around the fire with no entertainment save their
discussions of Catholic theology and philosophy. As Roy Foster explains,
historically, Ireland’s “Material and industrial disadvantage was, in fact,
directly linked to moral and cultural superiority”.4 A strong Irish music
tradition was related to—even depended on—a weak peasant society.
Foster’s hypothesis indicates a perverse logic. To maintain its moral and
cultural superiority, Ireland had to remain at a financial and industrial
disadvantage and this was sending vast numbers to Birmingham. The
pursuit of the Irish statesman in 1951 backfired. Extensive press coverage
of de Valera’s allegations in Galway did not stem emigration. Rather, it
introduced Birmingham to a story of Irish migration from which it was
still relatively unknown. Contrary to de Valera’s plan, passages to
Birmingham increased during the following two decades, with a
particularly large number of new arrivals from the west coast of Ireland,
Galway and its border regions—suggesting that, as Enda Delaney tells us,
“ironically, rather than creating panic or anxiety such statements [as de
Valera’s] may have incidentally increased curiosity about life in ‘immoral’
England”.5

2
O’Shea, The Making of Irish Traditional Music, p.41.
3
Delaney, The Irish in Post-War Britain, p.23.
4
Foster, The Irish Story, p.43.
5
Delaney, The Irish in Post-War Britain, p.160.
 Whiskey on a Sunday: The Lord of the Dance 119

De Valera’s publicity also presented Irish officials in Birmingham an

ideal opportunity to seek assistance for their housing shortages. The boom
in suburban building was halted in 1939 and the Irish population arrived
so suddenly at the end of the war that many did indeed live (as Foley’s
report noted) in ramshackle Victorian houses converted into flats and
boarding rooms in the cheap inner-city districts of Aston and Hockley.
Foley estimated that, by the late 1940s, at least half of the Irish in
Birmingham were living in such buildings in groups of between fifteen
and twenty. Most of these back-to-back houses had been demolished by
the fifties and sixties.6

In the aftermath of de Valera’s speech the Irish living in Birmingham

grew increasingly vocal, agreeing that they should be considered unique,
but not on account of any deplorable social conditions. Shortly after de
Valera had taken to the stage, the community performed a public reaction
against their implied immorality at St Chad’s Roman Catholic Cathedral, a
particularly pertinent venue given their countryman’s use of religion as
political propaganda. Built between 1839 and 1841, St Chad’s is
England’s first post-Reformation Catholic Cathedral, whose Irish
congregations increased dramatically in the twentieth century.

In 1952, on the first anniversary of Ireland’s patron saint following de

Valera’s speech, a congregation of 10,000 performed a spontaneous
rendition of Amhrán na bhFiann, whilst marching outside St Chad’s
Cathedral prior to Mass in what was an “unambiguously emblematic
statement of Irishness”.7 Limerick-born Fr Sean Connellan, then parish
priest at St Anne’s, led the procession. Any suggestion that Irish youth
were indifferent towards religion after moving to Birmingham was
undermined by this public display, which revealed the thriving musical,
nationalistic and Catholic community being built in the city’s central areas
by former residents of Ireland. It was a seemingly true representation.
Some young migrants found their religious practice actually increased in
Birmingham because St Chad’s and other churches proved convenient
social sites. The Archbishop of Birmingham, Francis Grimshaw, wrote a
letter to Archbishop Desmond McQuaid in Dublin during the following
decade, spreading the news that “the administrator of St Chad’s Cathedral

6
Enda Delaney gives these findings a stamp of authenticity by comparing conditions
in 1940s and 1950s Birmingham with nineteenth-century “Irish hovels” in
Liverpool and Manchester. Delaney, The Irish in Post-War Britain, p.99.
7
O’Flynn, The Irishness of Irish Music, p.84.
120 Chapter Four

remarked in passing that the Irish newcomers had often commented that
they had more contact with clergy in the city than at home”.8

Irish Catholicism was accommodated in line with Irish music in

Birmingham, leading Kaja Irene Ziesler to conclude that, in this city
“religion was so firmly a part of the Irish identity that it is difficult to
separate it from nationality”.9 The public space of the church enabled a
very different kind of Irish music to develop than those already explored.
In Birmingham, the Irish instrumental music of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí
Éireann and the Irish socialist songs of Luke Kelly had, at least partly,
developed in the “female” domain of the domestic interior. The local
church, in contrast, fostered a kind of Irish music in a space that was far
more assertively masculine; on a daily basis, the celebrants, the altar
servers and the authoritative voices were male.

Yet, whilst the Catholic Church in Birmingham could marginalise Irish

women, an important part of Irish social activities in the city revolved
around these public sites. The playing of popular and traditional music
created dance venues of church parish halls, a particular bête noir of the
Irish Catholic hierarchy. In these centres, Irishmen and Irishwomen had
the freedom to experience a range of musical styles and cultural
expression that puritanical clergy had quashed in mid-twentieth century
Ireland. Music was the process by which Lily Lawrie reclaimed the public
site of her husband’s doctor surgery for her Irish domestic domain in the
evenings. Church officials affected the demographic of Birmingham in a
similar way, promoting faithful Catholic worship and, after hours, opening
their sites to secular social activities.

The Easter Monday Men’s Mass

An Irish show of devotion at St Chad’s Cathedral on St Patrick’s Day
in 1952 was perhaps unexpected, given the ugly picture painted by de
Valera in Galway. It was not completely out-of-the-blue for Birmingham,
however, where public awareness of Irish Catholic observance had been
growing for some time, even before that massive migration of the post-war
period. In 1929 the Birmingham Post newspaper claimed that Catholicism

8
Grimshaw wrote to McQuaid on 9 July 1963, in the AP/J6 Grimshaw Papers,
BDA. See Delaney, The Irish in Post-War Britain, p.145-6, and also B Gerald
Hodgson, ‘The Irish in Britain’, The Furrow, 5 (1954), p.226.
9
Ziesler, The Irish in Birmingham 1830-1970, p.331.
 Whiskey on a Sunday: The Lord of the Dance 121

was only present in the locale because Irish settlers promoted their religion
as inherited from St Patrick.10 This was an appropriate year in which to
publish such a statement, on the back of a local religious argument that
fuelled the Irishness which would, ultimately, progress to public marches
for St Patrick in the fifties.

The Easter Monday Mass at St Chad’s Cathedral—which continues to

this day—is a rather unusual affair, in that, for the past ninety years, the
congregation has consisted entirely of men. The tradition began in 1919
when the Cathedral hosted an Easter Mass for the dead of the Catholic
Young Men’s Society, who continue to monopolise one of the most
important periods in the calendar to the exclusion of women.11 The
service soon became an annual occasion for the men’s society. Nine years
later, the Men’s Mass mushroomed into a large-scale event because of a
religious argument. On Easter Monday 1928 approximately 1,500 men
from parish churches across Birmingham arrived at the Cathedral, filling
every seat in the building, kneeling in the aisles, even overflowing onto the
street outside. This was no unprompted show of piety. Rather, in that
year the Anglican Bishop of Birmingham, Ernest Barnes, had challenged
the Catholic doctrine of the Real Presence in the Eucharist.12 The
Archbishop of Birmingham, John McIntyre, and local priests asked the
men of the diocese, especially those at the head of a family, to turn out for
an Easter Monday Men’s Mass in order to demonstrate displeasure at
Barnes’ words with solidarity for the faith.

Barnes pursued arguments in an abrasive way that, at the bishop’s

worst moments, took little account of the cultural sensitivities of others. If
it is often difficult for Catholics today to articulate the significance of the
Eucharist to non-believers, then it was all the more difficult for high
church Anglicans of the early twentieth century to engage constructively
with a bishop who condemned the adoration of the Blessed Sacrament as
simply “pagan sacramentalism”. What really galled the Catholic men of

10
‘The Catholics and Dr Barnes’, Birmingham Post, 18 March 1929, p.13.
11
The occasion arose as an extension of the Easter Monday Mass held for
deceased clergy in 1916.
12
Roman Catholics advocate transubstantiation, where Jesus Christ becomes
present at the Eucharist in what was previously bread and wine. The Anglican
Church represents a range of beliefs. High-Church Anglicans accept the Real
Presence, Evangelicals accept Holy Communion as an act of memorial, whilst the
broad majority accept the Eucharist as a metaphorical presence, to be treated
reverently but not adored.
122 Chapter Four

Birmingham was that, in trying to criticise the high element of his own
church, Barnes had delivered a major insult to a key part of Catholic
theology. Barnes repeatedly mocked the idea of transubstantiation,
distributed his own ideas about the sacrament in book form; and gave an
incendiary sermon in front of Birmingham’s Lord Mayor, challenging
anyone present to provide proof that the consecrated elements of the
Eucharist had changed in any way during the service. The final straw
came on 1 April 1928, when Barnes delivered a widely-reported homily in
Westminster Abbey, declaring that “All the elaborations and mystifications
of primitive or degenerate religion were quite foreign to His [Christ’s]
spirit”.13

The following week’s Easter Monday Men’s Mass at St Chad’s

Cathedral, which had been intended, as usual, for current members of the
Catholic Young Men’s Society to remember their dead, was instead
refigured as “an act of reparation for Bishop Barnes’s attacks on the Real
Presence”.14 Members of the Catenians, Knights of St Columba and
Brothers of the Little Oratory all turned out, alongside hundreds of men
from across the area, impressing local reporters who noted that city
councillors sat alongside impoverished local labourers. A message from
the Catholic Archbishop of Birmingham was read out during the service,
expressing his sorrow “at the things that had been publicly said against the
Blessed Sacrament” and thanking the local men for demonstrating their
“faith, and love, and loyalty”. Bishop Barnes remained unrepentant,
provoking the Catholic men of Birmingham to repeat their demonstration
the following year.

This time, attendance was even larger and more distinctly Irish, as the
Mass coincided with the centenary of Catholic emancipation, a victory that
had been secured by Ireland’s most prominent politician, “the liberator”
Daniel O’Connell. In 1829, O’Connell had staged mass political meetings
across Ireland. For many of the congregation at Birmingham’s Cathedral
in 1929, a giant gathering of masculine opposition to the Anglican bishop
would form a pleasing connection with this previous religious and
nationalistic campaign in Ireland.15 Accordingly, about 2,000 Catholic
men turned out for the Easter Men’s Mass, now advertised as “an act of
thanksgiving for the passing of the Roman Catholic Emancipation Act”.

13
‘Mass Offered As “Act of Reparation”’, Birmingham Post, April 10 1928, p.9.
14
Ibid., p.9.
15
‘The Catholics and Dr. Barnes’, p.13.
 Whiskey on a Sunday: The Lord of the Dance 123

Bishop Barnes would show remarkable longevity in Birmingham,

lasting as bishop until 1953, when he was in his eighties. By that time,
post-war immigration from Ireland was swelling the local Catholic
population. The Easter Monday Men’s Mass had become assured of a
fixed place in the diary of St Chad’s, long outliving the controversy with
the Anglican bishop. Without the Irish presence the annual Men’s Mass
would have withered away, but from the mid-twentieth century to the
present day, the Catholic Men’s Society (forced by realism to drop
“Young” from its title in later years) continued to organise this unique
male-only Easter service. Throughout the 1950s the St Chad’s Mass was
so popular that attendees had standing room only. Many of those who
arrived in Birmingham from Ireland after the 1920s would not have been
aware of the ceremony’s origins (although some archbishops of
Birmingham, such as Maurice Couve de Murville in the nineties, often
reminded their congregations of the spat with the Anglicans), yet they
embraced the idea of a male-only service. As upwardly mobile Irish
communities started to spread across the city, away from its central areas,
during the fifties and sixties, the Easter Monday Men’s Mass at St Chad’s
became the main event of the year at which Irish men could meet and
share news with their friends. As one attendee comments:

We would go to J. Lyons teashop in New Street after the service for a cup
of tea and currant buns and talk and have the craic and arrange to go for a
drink. There were loads of Irish men there in those days and we have
continued to be the backbone ever since.16

Without fail the Easter Monday Men’s Mass culminates with a

rendition of Frederick Faber’s hymn “Faith of our Fathers”, which is
particularly rousing in its all-male Irish-intoned delivery. The hymn’s
quasi-military message, that “we will strive to win all nations unto thee”,
accompanied by its praise of martyrdom (approving “dungeon, fire, and
sword”) correlates with those Pádraic Pearse-inspired songs proclaiming
death for Ireland’s nationhood. Faber was not Irish. Like St Chad’s
Cathedral, his hymn has, at times, been claimed by Ireland. The Galway
band, the Saw Doctors, rework the hymn’s melody for electric guitar in
their satirical pop song “Bless Me Father” for example.17 Irish ownership
was consolidated in 1997 with the release of the album Faith of Our
Fathers: Classic Religious Anthems of Ireland, on which the eponymous

16
In conversation with Men’s Mass attendee, April 2009.
17
“Bless Me Father” appears on the Saw Doctors, Play It Again Sham (Shamtown,
2003) [on CD].
124 Chapter Four

hymn also features.18 Furthermore, amongst the many fashionable Irish-

themed music and dance shows that sprang up in the nineties, came the
Faith of Our Fathers stage production; a theatrical display of traditional
Catholic hymns, performed by opera musicians, sean-nós singers, a
symphony orchestra and choir.

Ireland’s association with the hymn “Faith of our Fathers” confirms the
dominant national allegiance of those attending the Easter Monday Men’s
Mass in Birmingham and proclaims its masculine identity. Even if a
woman were to infiltrate this gathering at St Chad’s (as some have done as
helpers or carers), the soprano voice would be entirely incongruous in the
unified singing of male voices.19 What can be affirming to one group may
feel excluding to another. The music strengthens a sense of community
for Irish Catholic men, but such a phenomenon only serves to confirm the
marginal status of Irish non-Catholics, or, more obviously, Irish Catholic
women. Here, in Birmingham’s central Cathedral, we are in the realm of
the “faith of our fathers” and not the “faith of our mothers”.

For much of the twentieth century, the experience of male narratives in

Ireland tended to be privileged over those of women in many areas.
Women were given a far less active role than men, whether in iconic
political documents, such as the drafting of the Irish Republic constitution
of the 1930s, which prioritised the place for women in the Irish home; or
in iconic political moments of theatre, such as the nationalist play of 1902,
Cathleen ni Houlihan, where the heroine (representing the state of Ireland)
urges young men to sacrifice their lives for her sake. Irish women tend to
be constructed as home-makers or as the inspiration for male response,
whereas men themselves are the primary agents of political activity.

So too, in Irish nationalist music such imagery has been dominant. In

“Four Green Fields”, a “proud old woman” relies on her “fine strong sons”
to conduct the national struggle.20 The prospect of a successful revolution
comes only through the anticipation that a mother can raise and encourage

18
The liner notes explain, “many of the hymns on this album are Irish in origin,
others were adopted from countries”. Faith of Our Fathers (Enigma, 1997) [on
CD].
19
The aural effect is much like that of the traditional male-voice choir, growing
out of the mining communities in Wales that have come to be indicative of Welsh
national culture.
20
“Four Green Fields” personifies Ireland as an old woman, one of whose sons is
“in bondage”.
 Whiskey on a Sunday: The Lord of the Dance 125

sufficient brave male offspring to fight and die for Ireland. This kind of
trope confirms that it is the place of men to bear arms for the country’s
glorious independence, whilst it is the place of women to stay indoors and
cheer from the hearth. This passive woman who symbolises Ireland and
who often urges forth her sons has recurred again and again in Irish
literature, drama, art and music. She has appeared under different names:
Róisín Dubh (dark rosaleen), the Shan Van Vocht (the poor old woman),
Gráinne Úaile, Erin, Hibernia, and Cathleen ni Houlihan.

But Irish women did not stay at home in 1950s Ireland. They did not
watch from the sidelines as Irish men built a national identity in
Birmingham. As we have seen, the distinction of Irish music in this city
initially came about in the fifties because of a proficient woman from
Roscommon. Nevertheless, in the singing and worship of the Easter
Monday Mass at St Chad’s Cathedral, the same figure appears in a slightly
different form. Here the men’s prayers and hymns about the Virgin Mary
endorse her role as the suffering and patient mother, whose primary
function is to grieve and to inspire. It takes very little imagination to see
how the characteristic language associated with the Virgin Mary in
Catholic worship maps across from the language associated with Róisín
Dubh, the sixteenth-century daughter of the Earl of Tyrone; the metaphor
for Ireland used by Luke Kelly in “For What Died the Sons of Róisín”.21
In fact, some twentieth-century Irish nationalists, such as Pádraic Pearse,
wrote poetry that make this connection quite explicit.22

The form of the Mass was altered with the Vatican’s liturgical reforms
of the 1960s, which changed the language of the rite from Latin to the
vernacular. Traditionalist organisers of the Birmingham Easter Monday
service have wished to retain elements of the older liturgy nonetheless and
this augments its Irish ethnicity. Artists popular with the diaspora, such as
the American crooner Bing Crosby, have spread the romantic idea that
Ireland’s “St Patrick is also credited with introducing Latin into the

21
The Gaelic song, Róisín Dubh, composed in the seventeenth century,
metaphorically identified Ireland as a woman. Belfast folk group The Flying
Column combine a mandolin version of this song with “Four Green Fields” and
Padraic Pearse’s poem Mise Eire (I Am Ireland) on their album Four Green Fields
(Emerald Gem, 1971) [on LP]. See McCann, ‘Music and Politics in Ireland’,
p.60;p.73.
22
See Pádriac Pearse, Collected Works of Pádraic H. Pearse: Plays, Stories,
Poems (New York: AMS Press, 1978).
126 Chapter Four

country as the language of the church”.23 One of the most illustrious parts
of the Birmingham Men’s Mass from 1964 to the present day is the low-
pitched singing of the “Regina Caeli”, an ancient Marian hymn with a title
meaning “Queen of Heaven”. Each year, the men at St Chad’s sing in
Latin:

Regina caeli, laetare, alleluia:

Quia quem meruisti portare, alleluia,
Resurrexit, sicut dixit, alleluia,
Ora pro nobis Deum, alleluia.

[Queen of Heaven, rejoice, alleluia:

For He whom you did merit to bear, alleluia,
Has risen, as He said, alleluia.
Pray for us to God, alleluia].

For the Irish men who understood the Latin (which would not be the
entire congregation by any means), it would require little imagination to
see that the female figure familiar from popular Irish literary imagery
refigured the trope of the suffering mother in the Latin hymn. Besides
which, it is a completely opposite image to the female personification of
the island on which Birmingham is located. Great Britain’s “Britannia”,
based on the warrior queen Boudicca, contests her own battles, riding a
chariot armed with helmet and spear.

In the Catholic hymn, Mary’s role is to rejoice and to pray and to be

thankful that she deserved to give birth to Christ. She is essentially
passive, it is her male son who goes on to redeem mankind. Similarly, the
mother described in the Irish nationalist ballad “Four Green Fields”
celebrates the fact that she had sons “who fought to save my jewels / They
fought and they died, and that was my grief said she”. When we consider
these lyrics along with the fact that women were, and are, excluded
entirely from this particular religious service in Birmingham, we can see
that a rather disconcerting form of, specifically Irish, music is created
here; one that celebrates male action and tries to place women at the
margins. Those leaving de Valera’s Ireland, with his message that being
Irish meant practising traditional Catholicism, found a particular
expression in the Birmingham Men’s Mass. Irish Catholic imports and
Birmingham’s indigenous church service reinforced one another.

23
Liner Notes, ‘About Bing Crosby’, Bing Crosby, When Irish Eyes are Smiling
(Decca, 1952) [on LP].
 Whiskey on a Sunday: The Lord of the Dance 127

When it is not Easter Monday morning, St Chad’s Cathedral makes a

convenient meeting place for Irish men and Irish women. It was natural
that, in the absence of a domestic space in which to relax, an immigrant
group, often living in communally-rented rooms (sometimes even sharing
a bed with co-workers on shifts) should socialise in—as one Birmingham
migrant put it—the “church and the pub”.24 A range of Catholic churches
have functioned as unofficial Irish clubs, especially before permanent
premises for the Birmingham Irish Centre were purchased in Digbeth in
1967. Churches remained places of worship, but were also important
social centres where Irish groups could find a sense of common purpose
and belonging, distancing themselves from both the English folk music
venues and the Irish singer pub and drinking scenes.

Foremost in this set of important venues was St Catherine’s Church on

the Bristol Road. In the 1950s, St Catherine’s hosted evenings of Irish
music and dance at which crowds were so big that they spread into the
accompanying school hall besides the church. Events decreased in
popularity in the seventies and eighties, but St Catherine’s role as social
venue was rejuvenated in the 1990s when Birmingham’s St Patrick’s
Parade returned. St Catherine’s became the start and finish point for the
march, a site for preparations, celebrations and culminations of the city in
Irishness.25

St Patrick’s Day celebrations are promoted globally as occasions for

parading, drinking, singing and dancing. Birmingham’s festivities also
continue to emphasise the importance of religion in forging the Irish
identity abroad. Each year, these familiar universal pillars for St Patrick
have the antecedent of a morning Mass, now celebrated at another parish
of historical import for the Irish in Birmingham, St Anne’s in Digbeth. St
Anne’s has been a well-established “Irish parish” since 1935, when the St
Anne’s Ceilidh Club became the musical wing of the Birmingham United
Irish Societies. Its church hall has held social events for the Irish
community ever since. Every St Patrick’s service at St Anne’s Church
includes Irish hymns which amalgamate a national, cultural and religious

24
Gudrun Limbrick, A Great Day: Celebrating St Patrick’s Day in Birmingham
(Birmingham: Westpoint, 2007), p.49.
25
The Birmingham Irish Community Forum video recordings of the St Patrick’s
Day Parades from 1998 and 1999 pay homage to this locus of Irish activity by
opening with still shots of St Catherine’s Church, followed by sections of the
parade preparations taking place outside. The videos are held at Birmingham
Central Library, SIS Collections.
128 Chapter Four

discourse. Typically these hymns are “Hail Glorious St Patrick”, “Song to

the Trinity”, “Christ Be Beside Me” (the lyrics taken from the Lorica of
Saint Patrick), and “My Own Dear Land”, set to the tune of the Derry Air.
This Mass also features the distribution of shamrock, Bible readings in the
Irish language, performances of traditional instrumental music by the
South Birmingham Comhaltas and Irish dancing displays by the local
Scanlon and Kidd Schools of Irish Dance, on an altar that is invariably
covered in tricolours.

During conventional worship at Birmingham’s churches, a number of

hymns have also become popular that help to endorse a collective version
of Irishness. “Be Thou My Vision”, which first appeared for use in church
services in 1912, is not specifically about Ireland. Yet it does ratify a
coded form of Irish audibility. Its pentatonic triple-time melody is that of
the traditional Irish tune “Slane”, composed by monks on the Hill of Slane
in the fourth century. The Hill of Slane in County Meath accommodated
one of the earliest monasteries in Ireland, because—according to the pre-
Celtic legends of Árd Rí na hÉireann—it was from here that St Patrick
spread Christianity throughout the country, lighting his Easter Paschal
candle and defying the pagan High Kings of Tara.

The lyrics to “Be Thou My Vision” were provided by the second-

generation Irishwoman and writer of English history, Eleanor Hull, who
versified the 1905 translation by Irish speaker Mary Byrne of the Old Irish
poem Rop tú mo baile, which has been credited to St Patrick as part of his
Lorica (breastplate).26 Catholic congregations in Birmingham containing a
number of Irish families could, therefore, imagine a shared national
heritage when singing this hymn, particularly as recordings in the modern
Irish language by County Donegal singer Moya Brennan have become
popular away from church services in recent years and have repeatedly
been played on the Irish-themed radio programmes presented by Bob
Brolly (BBC Radio WM) and James McKeefry (BBC Leicester) in the
English Midlands.27

26
The Lorica of Saint Patrick, or Saint Patrick’s Breastplate, is a popular prayer of
protection in Ireland, particularly relevant for the diaspora, with text yearning for
God’s shield in a difficult land.
27
The same Irish tune, “Slane”, was used for another popular hymn, “Lord of All
Hopefulness”, which was written by Joyce Maxtone Graham, an agnostic English
composer who wrote under the ambiguous pseudonym of Jan Struther. In 1931
Struther’s version of “Slane” first appeared in Oxford University Press’s Songs of
 Whiskey on a Sunday: The Lord of the Dance 129

In Birmingham’s Irish-dominated Catholic churches, the singing of

hymns set to traditional Irish tunes by Irish women (hymns such as “Be
Thou My Vision” and “Lord of All Hopefulness”) may have created the
impression of collective worship. Yet for most of the twentieth century,
the active roles at such services were scarcely shared equally by men and
women. The Catholic Mass has been, and still is, dominated by men,
although, unless it is the Easter Monday Men’s Mass, women are free to
attend as members of the congregation. The Second Vatican Council of
1962-5 allowed women to act as Eucharistic ministers and as lectors,
which they had not previously been permitted to do.28 A general
permission for the use of female altar servers was also granted in 1994,
after which female participation in this support role became common
across Birmingham and beyond.29 However the dominant figures on the
altar were men. Male priests have always officiated. When women did
appear after the 1960s it was only in assistance roles, such as delivering
readings or distributing communion wafers.30

Boyce and Stanley

An interesting development in Birmingham’s contemporary music
culture is that, despite this gender imbalance in church, one of the best-
known young Catholic performers of religious music to emerge from the
city in recent years is a migrant woman, Joanne Boyce. Boyce, who is
originally from Trinidad, sympathises, associates and seek affinities with
all communities in Birmingham through music. She has enjoyed great
success since the 1990s with her music ministry, which has included
recording new versions of Irish folk tunes, set to Catholic devotional

Praise collection and has since become popular in the Catholic parishes of
Birmingham.
28
Amy Lind and Stephanie Brzuzy, Battleground: Women, Gender and Sexuality,
Volume I (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001), p.480.
29
Diane L. Barr, ‘Title II: The Obligations and Rights of the Lay Christian
Faithful’, in New Commentary on the Code of Canon Law, eds. by John P. Beal,
James Coriden and Thomas J. Green (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 2000), pp.291-303
(p.300).
30
Even twenty years later this was not without controversy in Birmingham. Fr
Patrick O’Mahony, then Parish Priest of Our Lady of the Wayside Church in
Shirley, recalled the “success” of only one official complaint after he introduced
the first female Eucharistic minister to Sunday services. Conversation with Our
Lady of the Wayside parishioner, October 2010.
130 Chapter Four

lyrics, designed for performance in church services around the city and
beyond.

Joanne Boyce has worked closely with the second-generation,

Birmingham-born Irishman, Mike Stanley. The two have been composing
and performing since 1994, founding their company, CJM Music, in 1996,
the name formed from initials of the original three members (composer
Chris Rolinson left in 1999). The songwriting partnership “Boyce and
Stanley” have produced music for the Catholic liturgy of parishes and
schools in the Archdiocese of Birmingham. Many of the songs are
designed for the popular market. Boyce’s composition “Earth Calling
Heaven” articulates a witty exploration of faith similar to that of Eric
Bazilian’s pop song “One of Us”, for example; a top ten hit for the blues
singer Joan Osborne in 1994.31 Other recordings are new settings of
traditional prayers and acclamations, such as the Hail Mary or the
Memorial Acclamation, which appear in standard Catholic hymnals across
Britain and America. Boyce and Stanley songs feature extensive
borrowings and recycling of Irish musical themes and ideas. Their
compositions include, most notably, “Song to the Trinity”, which sets
original lyrics to the traditional melody Buachaill on Eirne and “Lord of
All Creation”, which mimics the instrumental effects and singing style of
Enya, adapting motifs from her single “Evacuee”.32 Boyce and Stanley
have also recorded pieces composed by Irish artists, such as Liam
Lawton’s “Mass of the Celtic Saints”.33

Inspired by a call from Pope Benedict XVI for Catholics worldwide to

return traditional hymns to their services of worship, Boyce and Stanley
released an album of well-known Catholic Eucharistic songs in 2009. Age
to Age—Songs for a Pilgrim People was also a celebration of the duo’s
fifteenth anniversary and ten years making music as “Boyce and

31
“Earth Calling Heaven” features on CJM, Earth Calling Heaven (CJM Music,
1993) [on cassette]. “One of Us” features on Joan Osborne’s album, Relish
(Mercury, 1999) [on CD].
32
“Song to the Trinity” appears on the album, CJM, And Again I Say Rejoice
(CJM Music, 1995) [on CD]; “Lord of All Creation” appears on the album, Boyce
& Stanley, In the Company of Angels (CJM Music, 2000) [on CD]. Enya is a
singer, instrumentalist and composer from County Donegal. Her single “Evacuee”
appears on the album Shepherd Moons (Warner Music, 1988) [on CD].
33
Lawton is an Irish singer, composer and priest from County Offaly. Boyce and
Stanley broadcast his Mass on the BBC’s Sunday Worship, live from St Thomas
More Church, Coventry on 9 January 2009.
 Whiskey on a Sunday: The Lord of the Dance 131

Stanley”.34 Rather than any decisive “Best of” collection at this stage,
Boyce and Stanley wished to emphasise their music as one chapter in a far
broader journey of song and faith travelling between generations. This
notion, that a continual soundtrack outlives human being, is identical to
that calibrating Irish soundworld, facilitated at certain stages by individual
endeavours in Birmingham and passed on to their descendants.
Furthermore, it supports David Toop’s phenomenological reading of
music’s eternal resonances. Since the tick-tock of audible time is
immortal and its biological equivalent, the human heart, is fated, Toop
reasons that sound never truly disappears, but exists at all times and at all
moments, having life of its own.35 Boyce and Stanley’s collection of
hymns accurately reaches from age to age. They exhibit diverse
adaptations from genres of pop and rock to medieval plainchant. “Be
Thou My Vision”, set to its traditional Slane melody, is the album’s finale,
for which Boyce and Stanley include an extended instrumental outro with
guitar, whistle and horn that communicates the text’s and music’s Irish
origins.

Soon after its release, a copy of Age to Age was sent to the Vatican on
an I-Pod that had been engraved in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter.
Above all—alongside another inclusion, “Sweet Heart of Jesus”, for which
the album liner notes explain, “its origin is possibly Irish”—the relevance
of that Irish hymn “Be Thou My Vision” for Catholics in England seemed
to register with Rome. In the aftermath of receiving Boyce and Stanley’s
gift, Vatican Radio UK altered the musical background for their evening
Gospel readings to the traditional Irish melody, Mná ná-hÉireann (Women
of Ireland). The melody of Mná ná-hEireann is suitably legato to
accompany an evening liturgy service, but the implications of this choice
of song go deeper. The Vatican’s media outlet supports the notion that
Irishness has impacted on Birmingham’s mainstream audible identity and
confirms the place for Irish music with Catholic practice in the United
Kingdom.

Martin Stokes has specified “Irish balladry” as the primary example of

music that engenders the instant evocation of place.36 His point is
supported by those contemporary mainstream cinema soundtracks by James
Horner or Howard Shore, which give Hollywood narratives a subconscious

34
Boyce and Stanley, Age to Age 1—Songs for a Pilgrim People (CJM Music,
2009) [on CD].
35
Toop, Sinister Resonance, p.125-177.
36
Stokes, Ethnicity, Identity and Music, p.5.
132 Chapter Four

association with Ireland through pipes and fiddles and stepwise, sequential
melodies. In the same way, the Vatican’s Bible broadcasts to Britain with
a “Women of Ireland” musical backing place an Irish (and female) stamp
on Catholic England, realising, subliminally in music, the spiritual
conquering that the English Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Henry
Manning, had prepared for in the previous century: “I have spent my life
in working for the Irish occupation of England”.37

Manning made this intention at a time when the Catholic Church in

England was pursuing quite the opposite; to transform an initial wave of
Irish migrants into proper “English Catholics”. The influence of the
church in the nineteenth century perhaps, in part, accounts for the absence
of information on earlier Irish communities in Birmingham, who, led by a
desire to democratise wealth, were encouraged to be Catholic first and
Irish second. In her study, Religion, Class and Identity, Mary Hickman
explains that a similar operation continued into the twentieth century.38
Hickman describes a “dual strategy”, whereby churches ran insular parish-
based ethnic events whilst encouraging Irish migrants (particularly the
second generation) to incorporate with national political and education
systems, aware of a social hierarchy in which English Catholicism could
be bourgeois and fashionable, even acquiring the trappings of the
Establishment, whereas Irish Catholicism was for those of lower class,
lower reverence and lower intellect. Lily Lawrie’s close connection with
the Irish priests in Birmingham, who opened their parish halls to her
Birmingham Comhaltas, suggests that Irish congregations were prevented
from truly “sounding” English. Yet Hickman’s assessment on areas of
assimilation may account for the increasing awareness that an Irish voice
was lacking in Birmingham politics during the sixties.

The Vatican’s prohibitions during the twentieth century have made it

difficult for Irish women to play a prominent part in Catholic worship.
Nonetheless, in recent years Joanne Boyce has managed to become a
popular performer around the city, both at church services and elsewhere.
In her performances in services held at large venues, such as St Chad’s
Cathedral, the National Indoor Arena (for the Jubilee Mass in 2000), and
Cofton Park (for the visit of the Pope in 2010), Boyce threatens to upstage
the celebrating priests. It is notable that Irish recordings are such a
significant part of her appeal. The British-Trinidadian has successfully

37
Denis Gwynn, ‘The Irish Immigration’, in The English Catholics 1850-1950 ed.
by George Andrew Beck (London: Burns Oates, 1950), pp.265-290 (p.265).
38
Mary J. Hickman, Religion, Class and Identity (Hampshire: Avebury, 1995).
 Whiskey on a Sunday: The Lord of the Dance 133

adapted a number of traditional musical ideas. She serves to demonstrate

the way in which, following mass Irish immigration in the fifties,
Birmingham’s church music has provided the means by which differing
cultural traditions can meet and interact to create a definable city sound.
Moreover, whilst Catholicism and Irishness has long had a male bias, the
hybridisation of Irish and other traditions have opened up new possibilities
for audible female representations.

Dance Halls
When, in his Galway speech of 1951, Éamon de Valera warned Irish
migrants about the dangers of immorality they would encounter in
Birmingham, one of the things he was undoubtedly worried about was the
dance hall. Dance halls had been a particular bugbear of authorities in
Ireland for a number of years. In 1925, the Irish Catholic Church released
a statement that condemned the “evils of dancing” and recommended that
such “occasions of sin” needed strict supervision. English dance halls
were still worse. For members of the Irish hierarchy, the music and dances
of England were an insidious part of the secular foreign lifestyle that was
travelling back to pervade Ireland and Irish expression. In 1927, the
Bishop of Ardagh reported:

In many respects the danger to our national characteristics was greater now
than ever. The foreign press was more widely diffused amongst us; the
cinema brought very vivid representations of foreign manners and
customs; and the radio would bring foreign music and the propagation of
foreign ideas.39

A joint pastoral document issued in the same year also announced “At
the moment, [the devil’s] traps for the innocent are chiefly the dance hall,
the bad book, the indecent paper [...] all of which tend to destroy the
virtuous characteristic of our race”.40 After the 1935 Dance Hall Act,
which was designed to stop the secular pervasion of Irish culture, the
Church organised dancing venues supervised by clerics. The Gaelic
League also introduced dance classes and competitions to ensure a decent,
standardised manner of movement, and this was matched by the strict céilí
repertoire of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann. In effect, all of these kinds of

39
John Henry Whyte, Church and State in Modern Ireland, 1923-1970 (Dubliner:
Gill and Macmillan, 1971), p.25.
40
Marjorie Howes, Yeats’s Nations: Gender, Class, and Irishness (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), p.211.
134 Chapter Four

control were rather like reactions against the Weimar Republic, which had
encouraged modern art and greater sexual freedoms during the twenties.
They were a form of control allowing organisers to ensure that no person
from Ireland experienced dangerous (that is English and American)
dancing, with their potential for bodily contact and all kinds of illicit
desires.41

For migrants, the fulfilment of such desires might have been extremely
attractive. A kind of compulsory celibacy was suffered by many who
lived in the rural areas of Ireland most affected by emigration. Many
single people left home from the 1950s not only to find employment in
Birmingham, but also to find a spouse. Hence, despite the Church’s
reservations, dance halls for the Irish in Birmingham became a popular
spot from the mid-twentieth century. The Irish entrepreneur Patrick J.
Doyle set up the first dance hall for the Irish community in 1947. He
based his “Pride of Erin Social Club” on the large venues that had
emerged in London at the end of the Second World War, designed to cater
for a rapidly emerging Irish middle class. The patrons of these halls were
mindful of contemporary trends in America, drafting in Irish and non-Irish
musicians to play modern ballroom tunes in one room with the traditional
Irish music promoted by supporters of Lily Lawrie and the Birmingham
Comhaltas—popular in church and parish hall céilís—consigned to
another.42

Similar clubs soon sprang up across Birmingham. Andy Moran from

Ballaghadereen established the “Emerald Social Club” in Green Lane;
John McAndrew from County Mayo began the “John Mitchell 32 County
Social Club” on the Stratford Road; Galwayman John Courtney opened
the “Four Provinces”. There was also the “Palace”, run by Limerick
migrant Paddy Ryan, the “Masque” on Walford Road in Sparkhill and the
“Institute” in Moseley, among others.43 In its first edition, in 1970, the
Irish Post could immediately boast the progress of the post-war Irish

41
Wilson and Donnan, The Anthology of Ireland, p.97.
42
The model can be compared to those of other diasporic groups in America. An
interviewee on Jewish violinist Itzhak Perlman’s In the Fiddler’s House explains
the mix of live modern and traditional musics in the social halls: “When I started
working in Catskills in 1935, which was sixty years ago when I was a kid up there,
it was dance music and it was Klezmer music. The Klezmer was to get your heart
started the minute you’d walk into the social hall”. In the Fiddler’s House (EMI,
1995) [on VCR].
43
Chinn, Birmingham Irish, p.139.
 Whiskey on a Sunday: The Lord of the Dance 135

migrant in Birmingham, with the hard evidence that the “younger

generation find a continuous supply of Ireland’s pop groups at the
Shamrock and Mayfair Ballrooms—While the older and more settled Irish
are nicely catered for at the Irish Community Centre”.44

In pairing the Shamrock with the Mayfair, the article emphasised how,
because of migrants’ financial ascent and urban aspirations since the
fifties, Birmingham now needed to cater for an “Irish social life diversified
along class lines”.45 The Shamrock and the Mayfair were set up in a
similar manner, with a room for live American-influenced dancehall bands
and one for Irish-style traditional music, but the Mayfair attracted a more
professional clientele, whilst the Shamrock was a younger, working-class
and more nationalist venue: “even though we rebelled against our parents
[first generation Irish migrants], we definitely identified as Irish still.
We’d go out to places like the Shamrock”.46 The attraction of having a
separate site in the Mayfair may have been that, as Delaney explains, “by
maintaining social distance from other, less-educated migrants, the
inevitable danger of being lumped together as simply ‘Irish’ could be
avoided”.47

In the Shamrock Club, next to the Hippodrome Theatre on Hurst

Street, the sense of an inimitable Irish identity increased among the second
generation. Attendance was often a radical act, as Siobhan Gorman
remembers; celebrating Irishness on St Patrick’s Day in 1960s
Birmingham “wasn’t such a big statement because so many people joined
in with the parade—not like going to the Shamrock”.48 In much of the
public discussions about emigration, Ireland’s church and government
authorities continued to voice fears that the young manual labourers would
be unable to maintain and uphold the identity of Ireland while living
abroad. Consequently, priests in Birmingham were very proactive with
their service—meeting trains at New Street; setting up “safe” dancing and
music sessions in churches and clubs. Their fear was that a naïve migrant
might be more easily attracted to alternative political musical activities,
such as those on offer at socialist and Marxist clubs in the city, or worse
still, to the nascent Birmingham Connolly Association.

44
‘With the Irish in Birmingham’, Irish Post, Friday February 13 1970, p.3.
45
Ziesler, The Irish in Birmingham 1830-1970, p.293.
46
Limbrick, A Great Day, p.47.
47
Delaney, The Irish in Post-War Britain, p.198.
48
Limbrick, A Great Day, p.53.
136 Chapter Four

The Irish hierarchy warned young people in England about listening to

modern popular, big-band and jazz music in letters printed by
newspapers.49 But, by creating a loud statement of their Irishness at the
Shamrock, this younger section of the diaspora in Birmingham
undermined the concern that a national identity would be lost when they
were away from home. Furthermore, as the Mulreadys proved, the
attraction of non-religious social activities was not a predilection particular
to the young or the working-class. To many from Ireland, English dance
halls could feel extremely liberating. Reg Hall has argued that dance halls
attracting Irish youth in mid-twentieth century England enjoyed popularity
because they were free from the tight community and clerical control of
Ireland, but were familiar enough to feel safe in sprawling urban centres.50
Parish dances could feel less restrictive than those in Ireland, because, in
their adopted role as fear an tighe, most priests in Birmingham allowed
musical innovations of jazz and rock ‘n’ roll alongside traditional Irish
music; that dangerous intermingling of Irish and “foreign” musics that so
vexed the bishops in Ireland. The swing band, The Elegant Set, formed in
Birmingham by John Fitzgerald, frequently played in local parish social
clubs. So too the Irish Rooney Brother’s Showband from Sparkhill
regularly featured alongside céilí music at St Francis’s parish hall.51
Besides which, independent Irish dance halls in Birmingham were not
necessarily established in opposition to the Catholic Church. Some Irish
clubs grew directly out of church-based socials of the 1950s, mimicking
the musical set-up of such parish hall dances as those at St Paul’s in
Handsworth, St Mary’s in Whitehouse Street, or the Sacred Heart in
Witton Road.

Many in Ireland worried about a diminution in the faith for those

heading to a country like England where religious practice could often be
seen as sporadic at best. Delaney explains that in Dublin “much ink was
spilt on the problem of ‘leakage’, that is, Catholics, who failed to maintain
strict ‘Irish’ norms of religious observance in England”.52 English-based
clergy, such as Canon Augustine Emery, working in Handsworth, worried
primarily about the effect of Birmingham’s dance venues upon the morals
of the newly arriving Irish population:

49
Hall, Irish Music and Dance in London 1870-1970, p.190.
50
Ibid., p.190.
51
Chinn, Birmingham Irish, p.143.
52
Delaney, The Irish in Post-War Britain, p.37.
 Whiskey on a Sunday: The Lord of the Dance 137

They come to England in need to get employment in a factory or in

transport etc., and very soon the goodly wage packets come rolling in.
They do not know how to spend or how to save. In a different country,
away from home, surrounded by the glare of the cinema, the dance hall, the
bingo club etc., they spend their money recklessly and many of them have
no idea of saving for a rainy day or to provide for the future.53

As a response to these freedoms, priests in Ireland hindered the

progress of professional Irish artists popular with the diaspora. The
Dubliners released “Seven Drunken Nights” in 1967, which reached a top
twenty spot in the UK pop charts, and was immediately banned by the
Republic of Ireland’s national broadcaster Radio Éireann at the behest of
the Bishop of Cork, who instilled the message that watching The
Dubliners was a mortal sin.54 The poor judgement on this version of Irish
music contrasted to the Catholic Church in Ireland’s highly visible
endorsement of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, where the annual Fleadh
Cheoil na hÉireann still opens with a priest’s blessing and a festival Mass
is a major part of official proceedings.

The dance halls would, in fact, rejuvenate Irish traditional music in

Ireland, which had felt particularly staid after 1935. With outdoor step
dancing forbidden from this time, rural house music flourished in Ireland
and subtle instruments like melodeons, concertinas, whistles and fiddles
came to proliferate—cultivating our modern concept of “authentic” Irish
music—to the detriment of the, apparently more native, but indiscreet
pipes, harps and drums that had to be consciously reintroduced to the
canon of Irish instruments in the mid-twentieth century. Dance halls
enjoying popularity in Britain encouraged the reintroduction of these
louder instruments for quite practical reasons. They required an increased
volume of Irish music to fill bigger rooms.

In time, the adoption of popular music genres by the identifiably Irish

dance halls of Birmingham would feed back to the home nation. Pop and
rock music, in particular, has facilitated a contemporary Irish identity since
the eighties and nineties and has assisted singers hoping to rehabilitate

53
Delaney, The Irish in Post-War Britain, p.200.
54
The Dubliners had the last word in this instance and pointed out that their
version was simply an English translation of a sean-nós song in the Irish language
which had been popularised already by Seosamh Ó hEanaí. Since this earlier
release had not been prohibited airplay, they questioned the understanding and
dedication of the church and broadcasters to the official first language of Ireland.
This anecdote is included on the DVD, Luke Kelly: The Performer.
138 Chapter Four

ideas of the dutiful, muted, female promoted by the Catholic Church and
Irish nationalist discourse. O’Flynn explains about two of Ireland’s
reformist singers:

While the 1990s productions of solo performer Sinéad O’Connor and

Dolores O’Riordan of The Cranberries could both be labelled under
mainstream Anglo-American rock, various aspects of each singer’s vocal
style (timbre, ornamentation, urban/rural accent, tessitura, etc.) could be
interpreted as rock, Irish or individualised, or as combination of these.
Furthermore, the singers themselves projected contrasting images (in
O’Connor’s case, constantly changing images) that were appropriated from
conventional markers of Irish identity, notably, from Roman Catholicism.55

As O’Flynn has argued, dance halls begun by Irish communities in

England provided impetus for “the first popular music phenomena in
Ireland”.56 Precursors to O’Connor’s and O’Riordan’s developments in
Ireland may well have been the showbands and dance halls that fixed the
Irish identity of parishes in Birmingham. The Irish who left home from
the 1950s had freedom to experiment with a fusion of musical styles in
these spaces. Although this made Catholic figures like de Valera uneasy,
the city prefigured the way that a more liberal Ireland would be able to
blend and mix musical styles in mass media, moving to that imagined
centralised position in Europe by the end of the century and escaping some
of the strictures of Irish Catholicism that dominated those who stayed at
home after the 1930s.

Such was Ireland’s innovative global notoriety with pop music from
the late eighties and its uptake by diasporic musicians (bands like Dexy’s
Midnight Runners), that, at the plenary music session of the 1993
“Imagining Ireland” conference in Dublin, it was necessary to impose an
“Irish-living-in-Ireland” subject rule.57 Irish and English people,
traditional and British, European and American popular musics merged
under one roof in Birmingham. Applicable to this situation is Marie
McCarthy’s idea of the “transculturation process of reciprocal influence
between colonisers and colonised, which becomes institutionalised by the
urban middle class in the bureaucracies of postcolonial states”.58 In dance

55
O’Flynn, The Irishness of Irish Music, p.31.
56
Ibid., p.28.
57
Barbara Bradby, “Imagining Ireland” Conference, Dublin, October 30th-31st,
1993’, Popular Music, 13 (1994), pp.107-109.
58
Marie McCarthy, Passing it On: Transmission of Music (Cork: Cork University
Press, 1999), p.23.
 Whiskey on a Sunday: The Lord of the Dance 139

halls, Birmingham could nurture its Irish sound, whereas Ireland would
benefit from the popular music associated with its national identity,
inspired by Anglo-American drum beats and electronic guitars, when
groups like U2, The Cranberries and The Hothouse Flowers placed their
country at the forefront of international music trends in the 1980s and
1990s.

Aston Villa Folk Club

One of the best examples of this complicated fusion of Irish and
English musical identities is found today in a most vocal “folk club” in
Birmingham that has a distinctly Irish sound. Villa Park, home of Aston
Villa Football Club, may be a slightly larger, more public space than those
private upper rooms frequented by Kelly, MacColl et al from the fifties,
but it is a logical extension—and one befitting a research focus on sites for
performance—of Andrew Motion’s idea that football songs are but a
“huge reservoir of folk poetry”.59 Motion makes sense. Stadium chants
qualify as poetry for uniting the folk; they express the current, collective
situation of those singing them. Of course, the same could be written
about the chants of, say, the Syrian opposition, but the ubiquitous sport of
football presents a unique consideration. Because of television broadcasts,
big-money sponsorship and international tournaments, spectators are
increasingly familiar with the game in countries other than their own,
whilst, at the same time, as Thomas Hylland Eriksen explains, “teams
continue to be locally based and are associated with a home ground and a
team mythology”.60 Eriksen describes football as a social phenomenon in
such a way that it relates to the business model of “glocalization”; the
process of serving both global and local markets. Glocalization is the term
cultural theorists Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash adopt when describing
the universal condition, where activities and artefacts intersect in a local
area but “over broad stretches of time and space”.61 Featherstone and

59
Motion was on the judging panel of the Barclaycard-sponsored “Chant
Laureate” Competition in 2004, which was won by a Birmingham City supporter
who wrote a chant for Aston Villa, in an unusual twist on peace-brokering in
Birmingham. ‘England’s first Chant Laureate’, BBC News Tuesday 11 May 2004
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/3702313.stm> [accessed 16 January
2010].
60
Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Globalization: The Key Concepts (Oxford: Berg,
2007), p.82.
61
Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash, ‘Globalization, Modernity and the
Spatialization of Social Theory: An Introduction’, in Global Modernities, eds., by
140 Chapter Four

Lash’s temporal analysis accords, quite readily, with the chronotope

concept framing this ethnomusicological study of Irish opportunity and
recreation in Birmingham.

Poetry makes an Irish folk site of Villa Park and football has tended to
be particularly topical for the broader diaspora in England. Leeds United
midfielder John Giles from Dublin remembers his childhood team-mate
Luke Kelly coming to watch him play when on tour in England with The
Dubliners in the early seventies, “We would play golf, which may surprise
a few people who never associated Luke with the Royal and Ancient
game. But mainly he loved his football, and he would always come to
Elland Road”.62 Football has British origins but lacks the disquieting
colonial associations of sports like golf, cricket or rugby. Giles’ relocation
to the UK, admittedly, remains a typical career path for Irish players,
however, because Ireland “still lacks the infrastructure to enable Irish
football’s ‘independence’ from England”.63 When the Republic of Ireland
national team reached their first World Cup football finals in 1990, Irish
fans sang Timothy Sullivan’s republican “God Save Ireland” with new
lyrics of support for their English manager Jack Charlton: “We’re all part
of Jackie’s army, we’re all off to Italy”.

Supporters of the Gaelic Athletics Association (formed in 1884 as a

branch of the wider republican political movement) have not always
accepted association football (soccer) as Ireland’s “new nationalism”. The
Football Association of Ireland was forced to withdraw its bid to host the
2008 European Championships because the GAA refused to allow football
matches to be played at their superlative stadium, Croke Park in Dublin.
But such petty bellyaching is largely scoffed at. Of more relevance to
contemporary Irishness is Aidan Arrowsmith’s succinct billing; “a central
aspect of contemporary Irish culture, as well as a key export—soccer”.64

Aston Villa’s senior team in the nineties contained some high-profile

Irish exports (in particular, the Dublin defender Paul McGrath).

Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash and Roland Robertson (London: Sage Publications,
1995), pp.1-24 (p.4).
62
Elland Road is the home ground of Leeds United. John Giles, A Football Man
(Chatham: Hodder & Stoughton, 2010), p.277.
63
Aidan Arrowsmith, ‘Plastic Paddies vs Master Racers: “Soccer” and Irish
Identity’, The International Journal of Cultural Studies, 7 (2004), pp.460-79
(p.461).
64
Ibid., p.476.
 Whiskey on a Sunday: The Lord of the Dance 141

Consequently, local football fans in Birmingham cultivated a repertoire of

Irish songs. These have been maintained on the terraces in the years
following the World Cup, creating a place for local Irishness that is
verified by the personal, three-fold geographic allegiances of 1950s
teenage emigrant Seamus Kennedy: “With me it’s all about Roscommon
and Birmingham… and Aston Villa”.65 Since 1990, the most famous song
at Villa Park has been a setting of the traditional Irish melody the “Wild
Rover”, with the words, “And it’s Aston Villa, Aston Villa FC, we’re by
far the greatest team, the world has ever seen”.66 The syllables and
accents fit badly with the melody, but then the priority for folk poetry—as
verified by those Critics’ Group members—was to annunciate the message
of the lyrics above all.

Along with the “Wild Rover”, those at Villa Park often express their
feelings on the state of play to the melody of the hymn, “Lord of the
Dance” (beginning “Villa, wherever you may be, We are the boys from the
Holte army”67). “Lord of the Dance”, like “Faith of Our Fathers”, was
penned by an English writer but occasionally claimed for Ireland. The
Dubliners popularized Sydney Carter’s original hymn with audiences at
home in the sixties, parodying the marriage of religion and music in the
longstanding national identity of Ireland. For followers of the band, this
union remained strong, especially amongst the diaspora in areas of urban
Britain. In sleeve notes to their album Plain and Simple (1973), for
instance, Ken Bennett, the Northern News Editor of the Sunday Mirror,
includes the anecdote of a Dubliners’ concert in London’s Royal Albert
Hall where, on hearing their Irish music, “a woman with a crucifix tightly
clasped to her chest, broke down and wept”.68

The reappearance of the hymn “Lord of the Dance” at Villa Park

develops George Scott’s reference to football as the sport of choice in his

65
Limbrick, A Great Day, p.117.
66
Variations of this song have since been taken up by the supporters of many
English football clubs. Although evidence on football chants is anecdotal (and
contested), claims that this song originated at Villa Park are substantiated by the
websites, Football Jokes <http://www.footballjokes.co.uk/songschants/
miscellaneous.html> and Pie and Bovril <http://www.pieandbovril.com/forum/
index.php/topic/124703-crap-football-songs/page__st__25> [accessed 10 February
2012].
67
The Holte End is a stand at Villa Park.
68
Ken Bennett, ‘Plain and Simple’, on The Dubliners, Plain and Simple (Polydor,
1973) [on LP].
142 Chapter Four

description of Roman Catholic (and more often than not Irish) communities
in Britain from the late nineteenth century. Of the Middlesbrough Irish,
Scott writes: “Catholics it seemed, lived in the slums or the council estates,
they drank and (women included) they used bad language at football
matches”.69 By the time Carter’s song moved to Villa Park in the mid-
nineties, a more instinctive “Irish” association was probably with Michael
Flatley’s Lord of the Dance stage production, in which the melody created
a spectacular finale that proclaimed Flatley as a kind of jigging Messiah.
The way that the Irish community have passed “Lord of the Dance” from
the realm of the sacred into the secular illustrates the duality of music laid
out in the dance hall and Enda Delaney’s contention that religious and
nationalistic sentiments “were rarely separate spheres in the Irish case”.70

In 1951 the Irish priest Fr Sean Connellan preached at Mass on St

Patrick’s Day in St Chad’s Cathedral. Connellan encouraged not integration
or assimilation, but rather a complete and concise remoulding of the city
of Birmingham by arrivals from Ireland: “If every Irish person could get
one other person every month to seek instruction in Roman Catholicism,
Birmingham would become, in two years and one month, the greatest
Roman Catholic city in the world”.71 Perhaps Connellan would be
disappointed. The Irish would not come to dominate Birmingham through
its conversion to a Catholic religion, but, as the church services and dance
halls of the time showed, their cultural alignment with English and other
ethnic groups in the city would become apparent in music.

A subsequent study of Birmingham’s Irish community, compiled by

Valentin Iremonger in 1956, downplayed the poor housing and sporadic
religious practice of Foley’s report, but raised, as a more “disturbing
matter”, people from Ireland mixing with Caribbean and South Asian
settlers in the city.72 Irish music and religious practice encountered other
ethnicities in Handsworth and central areas of Birmingham. But any
positive outcome from these social and religious interactions was not
considered by Iremonger. The situation he presented must have appeared
concerning to those in largely white Ireland. Even some Catholic priests
working in Birmingham advised, “there is no excuse for mixed marriages.

69
George Scott, The R.Cs: A Report on Roman Catholics in Britain Today
(London: Hutchinson, 1967), p.51.
70
Delaney, The Irish in Britain, p.140.
71
Limbrick, A Great Day, p.28.
72
Iremonger’s “Report on the Irish in Birmingham” was printed on 7 Aug 1956.
See Delaney, The Irish in Post-War Britain, p.102.
 Whiskey on a Sunday: The Lord of the Dance 143

You can always find a nice Irish companion”.73 Nonetheless, in the dance
halls in Birmingham, where priests indirectly promoted rural match-
making traditions, could be heard ethnic and popular musics alongside
traditional Irish sounds. As the example of Joanne Boyce demonstrates,
by the end of the century Irish culture would come into contact with other
world Catholicisms inside Birmingham’s churches in a creative way,
where music allowed congregations to sidestep some of the restrictive (and
misogynistic) strictures of old-style Irish Catholicism.

That the diaspora’s reaction to Éamon de Valera in the 1950s took

place outside St Chad’s Cathedral reaffirms the place for a universal
Catholic religion within an Irish nation abroad. Whether inspired by his
own genuine sense of vocation or not, de Valera’s was a canny political
move, as it shifted the responsibility for the welfare of Irish migrants away
from the resources of the Irish state and onto the international network of
Catholic clergy. When it came to governing their subjects in Birmingham,
as Delaney writes, the Roman Catholic Church “absolved the Irish state of
responsibility in this regard; this was no doubt the source of some relief
for civil servants and ministers alike”.74 De Valera’s delegation onto the
church sowed the seed for later government handlings, or rather hand-
washings, of Irish emigration from Ireland. As Rachel Harbron, who left
Dublin in 1986, put it:

the Irish government is glad to get rid of a few more people off the dole
queues, that’s what it’s like. They’re really glad if you decide that you’re
going to England—that’s it, they’ve got a few more people off their
shoulders.75

Priests in Birmingham aided the movement of Irish traditional music

from the Lawries’ house into the city with their safe parish centres and
sustained the cultural protection of Ireland. In the 1950s Archbishop
McQuaid of Dublin also helped this Irish identity abroad. He fostered the
Legion of Mary in Birmingham and sent missionary priests to provide
accommodation and employment for the large number of Irish arrivals to
the city.76 McQuaid’s Birmingham counterpart, Archbishop Grimshaw,

73
Pat Bolton, ‘Is There Green in her Eye?’, Midlands Catholic Pictorial, January
1960, p.2.
74
Delaney, The Irish in Post-War Britain, p.202.
75
Lennon, McAdam and O’Brien, Across the Water, p.205.
76
The Legion of Mary is a lay Catholic association, founded in 1920s Dublin to
provide voluntary aid for the members of the Church at home and abroad.
144 Chapter Four

promised him that everything was being done to integrate the Irish
newcomer into the life of the Birmingham Diocese. This integration was
reinforced outside general church business, in parish centres for music and
social activities. The two archbishops maintained regular correspondence
well into the sixties, with Grimshaw reporting to McQuaid in 1963, that,
since the mid-1950s every parish in Birmingham had had at least one Irish
priest.77 John Rex and Robert Moore are consistent with this in their study
of the Sparkbrook area of central Birmingham, stating, “the Roman
Catholic church is the biggest Irish migrant organisation of all”.78

De Valera need not have worried about Birmingham. The Irish outside
Ireland tended to remain affiliated to their state religion. The sociologist
Tom Inglis has identified as a reason for this:

the monopoly position that the Catholic Church developed in the religious
field [in much of Ireland] from the nineteenth century. During this long
reign, the church effectively managed to eliminate any form of opposition,
or thinking outside of the Catholic box.79

For the traditionalist Irish men who attended, and continue to attend,
the Easter Monday Men’s Mass at St Chad’s Cathedral in Birmingham,
their presence and their singing affirms this kind of conservative identity.
This service, more than any other Irish parish event, provides evidence
that, for some at least, arrival in urban England and contact with non-Irish
peoples and cultures would not make the Irish male any less Catholic or
any more willing to countenance foreign ideas about gender, nationalism
or ethnicity.

Frank Ryan, an Irish emigrant and regular attendee at St Chad’s, places

religion amongst the key signifiers of national identity for the Irish
community in twentieth-century Birmingham. In an interview with the
local historian, Gudrun Limbrick, Ryan acknowledges the diversity of
Irish arrivals in the city but explains that the diaspora here “had in
common two assets. The first is a will to work and to do the best they

77
Grimshaw wrote this letter to McQuaid on 9 July 1963. See Delaney, The Irish
in Post-War Britain, p.146.
78
John Rex and Robert Moore, Race, Community and Conflict; A Study of
Sparkbrook (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), p.127.
79
Patsy McGarry reports on the findings of the Inglis study in her article, ‘Irish do
not ‘shop around’ for religion, conference told’, Irish Times, Saturday October 31
2009, p.8.
 Whiskey on a Sunday: The Lord of the Dance 145

could and the second was their religion”. Clarifying his statement, Ryan
explains the shaping of Birmingham, a city across which the Irish migrant
“built churches, and schools. And music was also important”.80 Hymns
for St Patrick and on Easter Monday and the relocation of music beyond
church and school to parish centres and dance halls publicised a religious
signifier of Irishness in Birmingham.

Birmingham’s English Catholics sometimes seemed reluctant to find

common ground with their Irish counterparts and could feel excluded from
a faith whose ceremonies now included priests from Ireland, Irish hymns
such as “Be Thou My Vision” and “Lord of All Hopefulness”, and church
céilí evenings. These alienations have subsided with familiarity. With the
subsequent waves of migration to Birmingham from places such as
Eastern Europe and the Philippines, Irish music has become incorporated
as part of the city’s broader Catholic identity. At times, Irish music in
Birmingham’s churches has clearly united members of the congregation,
but as the original migrants grow older it is no longer clear that these
sounds have as much of a national resonance as they once did.

In the end, the local dance halls lost out to changing fashions in
recorded live music. For a time, they had played an important part in
introducing a generation of Birmingham migrants to a new, traditionally-
based culture, allowing them to shrug off the overbearing engagement of
the Catholic Church in Ireland. Dance halls in Birmingham provided a
venue for migrants to experience a range of traditional music and dance
styles that could barely have been found or developed at home. One of the
Irish migrants interviewed by Charles Parker in 1960s Birmingham said,
“There’s something in Irish music […] the priest cut that out over yonder
the day he stopped the county house dancing”.81 It can be seen then—as
was the case with Dublin landmarks in Birmingham city centre and the
rural Roscommon ways of Handsworth—that in Birmingham the past
impinges on the present for the diaspora; a part of Irish music that had
“disappeared” from Ireland is protected.

With the return of some Irish migrants from the city during the
twentieth century came a loosening of the inseparable bond between
religious practice and cultural identity. In contemporary Ireland or

80
Limbrick, A Great Day, p.48.
81
Birmingham: Birmingham Central Library, Charles Parker Archive MS
4000/2/107. “The Crack” (working title “The Irish Navvy”): Actuality Transcripts,
p.10.
146 Chapter Four

England, very few people would approach the Catholic clergy for advice
about where to go dancing, but the changed social attitudes and
corresponding updated musical styles that altered and shaped the future
direction of the home country were facilitated by church events in
Birmingham. The opening epigraph of this chapter emphasises a certain
loss of Irish culture caused by immigration. Irish music has, in fact, been
maintained quite publicly in Birmingham. Even non-musical parts of Irish
culture, language and set dancing, which may appear to have disappeared,
exist in the private classrooms at the Birmingham Irish Centre for a small
section of the diaspora.82 What have disappeared are those dance halls
designed for Irish youth in the 1940s. Many of Birmingham’s Irish dance
halls had been closed and replaced by the 1980s with non-Irish nightclubs
or discos that had all the technological resources to cater for new tastes in
synthesized music and ultra-violet lighting. Birmingham’s trendy
Arcadian Centre comprising bars, clubs and restaurants now inhabits the
sites of the Shamrock and the Mayfair. Then again, this type of venue had
already been banished in Ireland on account of not being part of an
indigenous culture in the first place. At the time of their closing, the dance
halls had certainly done their job in Birmingham; their legacy being
unconstrained Irish music at large in the city.

82
Irish set dancing, not to be confused with the more common solo step dancing, is
square dancing for groups of couples based on quadrilles. Set dancing is
associated with rural Irish communities but became less popular with the rise of
céilí and swing trends in the twentieth century.
 CHAPTER FIVE

MARCHING ALONG IN THE BIG PARADE:

PIPING FOR ST PATRICK

There’s a strong cultural community in Birmingham—we’ve got the best

Irish dancers, an amazing music scene—and it all comes together at St
Patrick’s.1

The popularity of the Mayfair and the Shamrock accelerated in the

seventies amongst the settled diaspora and second-generation youth, as
rates of migration from Ireland, in fact, began to slow. Through such sites
(including those clubs owned by the Regans) the permanence of place and
music could balance the transience of people. Birmingham was missing
the number of new Irish faces seen in the previous decades, but it
remained a training ground for new Irish sounds. One of those preparing
Ireland’s music in Birmingham was the Irish-born singer Christy Moore, a
well-known and commercially-successful balladeer. The Pogues’ singer
Shane MacGowan would go on to claim Christy Moore as one of his
ultimate childhood heroes of Irish music.2 At this stage, Moore’s own
hero would seem to be Luke Kelly, whom he had befriended on the Dublin
music scene in 1967. For five years in the seventies, Moore’s career
looked to be taking a similar course to Kelly’s, as he also lived and busked
in Birmingham. The music journalist Mike Rowan explains, “it was in the
English clubs that he [Moore] learned his trade and where he was given
chances denied him in Ireland”.3 Moore too was tutored by Ewan
MacColl and would go on to record many of the English man’s socialist
songs, including “Green Islands”, “Companeros” and “Go, Move, Shift”.4

1
Limbrick, A Great Day, p.90.
2
See Martin liner notes for The Very Best of the Pogues.
3
Mike Rowan, ‘Christy Moore: Birmingham, Friday 23 May, 1997’, The Living
Tradition, 22 (1997), pp.34-35 (p.35).
4
“Green Island” appears on Smoke and Strong Whiskey (Newberry, 1991);
“Companeros” appears on This is the Day (Columbia, 2001); “Go, Move, Shift”,
appears on Live at the Point (Sony, 2006).
148 Chapter Five

Moore expressed his particular affinity with Kelly in a tribute track, “Luke
Kelly”, his version of which is included on The Dubliners’ anniversary
album, 25 Years Celebration, released in 1987.5 Like Kelly, Christy
Moore retained close ties after leaving Birmingham to resettle in Ireland.
He returns regularly to perform at the Birmingham Irish Centre and other
venues in the local area.

One of Christy Moore’s most stirring performances took place in

Birmingham Town Hall in 1990. Moore sang his own song, “Scapegoats”,
creating a particularly emotional atmosphere because its lyrics “examined
the controversy surrounding the Birmingham pub-bombing convictions.
That he was singing this some three hundred yards from the scene of that
blood-letting raked emotive memories”.6 Moore’s personal interest in this
episode was promoted in April of the same year when he presented the
Irish voice in a musical display of and for Birmingham. Moore performed
alongside the Critics’ Group’s American singer Peggy Seeger and
Birmingham’s Scottish musician Ian Campbell at a Birmingham Six
Benefit concert, held in London’s Wembley Arena, which was intended to
put further pressure on the authorities to reopen this case, following Chris
Mullin’s well-received investigations. Moore, Seeger and Campbell led
the audience, including relatives of the six men wrongly detained for 1974,
in a rendition of the “Wild Mountain Thyme”, with additional chants of
“Free the Birmingham Six”.7

These concerts were not the first during which Moore had challenged
British political policy with Irish music. An earlier programme, performed
at the Birmingham Odeon in May 1986, included his “Ninety Miles from
Dublin Town”; a song about the strip-searching of women in Armagh jail
and other British prisons. Afterwards, the music critic Andrew Bibby
noted, “it would be nice (if probably optimistic) to hope that he won’t need
to have to sing it too many more times”.8 Bibby’s optimistic thread did
carry through however and, despite his little faith, more hopeful times
ensued in the nineties. In 1997, one music journalist reviewed Moore’s
concert in central Birmingham, connecting him, in contrast, to the festivity

5
The Dubliners, 25 Years Celebration (Celtic Collections, 2003) [on CD].
6
J. Kennedy, ‘Christy Moore/Cindy Lee Berryhill: Birmingham Town Hall’, Folk
Roots, 79 (1990), pp.87-88 (p.87).
7
Jacqueline Dagnall, ‘Birmingham Six Benefit: Wembley Conference Centre,
London’, Folk Roots, 82 (1990), p.79.
8
Andrew Bibby, ‘Christy Moore Birmingham Odeon’, Folk Roots, 35 (1986),
p.46.
 Marching Along in the Big Parade: Piping for St Patrick 149

and holiday atmosphere now associated with Irish musical events there:
“the weekend revellers are out in force, parading down Broad Street
laughing, lusting and drinking dry the Continental cafes of Gas Street
Basin […] as 1,500 fans stream into the pink and cream cavern of
Symphony Hall”.9 There is clearly a tension here between a desire for the
commercial success of the sell-out concert, with its cheering and CD-
buying audience, and the more controversial political message that Moore,
in following Luke Kelly, has, at times, attempted to convey from
Birmingham. Moore is balanced between the conservatism of an Irish
singer making a living from his craft and the radicalism of an Irish subject
selling a republican social commentary through the medium of music.

Comparing these two reviews of Moore’s Birmingham concerts reveals

the spatial change for Irish performance during this decade. By 1997, Irish
revellers were absolutely out in force in the heart of the city. The
successful reinstatement of a parade for St Patrick in March of the
previous year consolidated this public city space as Irish and implied
complete acculturation in the English Midlands. Moreover, this parade
has become a commercial success, one of the best known and most
communal expressions of Birmingham’s Irish identity since the nineties.
Unlike in the seventies and eighties, when Moore’s Irish music had
provoked a certain resentful Irishness inside the city’s concert halls, the St
Patrick’s Parade ensured Irish music was now playing outside for the
solidarity of Birmingham, a city happy to be seen as Irish. This chapter
will discuss a tension analogous to Moore’s, between conservatism and
radicalism that exists within the musical performances of Birmingham’s St
Patrick’s Parade. With the Birmingham Parade is created a space of
diasporic flows and mobilities. Since 1996, Birmingham’s St Patrick’s
Parade has been a non-political festival for all, but its increasing
radicalism lies in this inclusiveness of other local cultures seeking to
become Irish for the day.

The St Patrick’s Parade is an entirely different form of Irish ritual to

that discussed so far. The sequential nature epitomised by a procession
reflects the broader diaspora of Birmingham and is key in deconstructing
any notions of a single Irishness within the city. By its very nature, a
parade communicates continually shifting forms. So too, the socio-
political journey of the Irish community into Birmingham, towards a
reappraisal of the city as multicultural, has been one of fits and starts. Just

9
Rowan, ‘Christy Moore: Birmingham, Friday 23 May, 1997’, p.34.
150 Chapter Five

as history reveals no continuous, linear trajectory, so the St Patrick’s

Parade highlights a mosaic of Irish performances. It also combines the
sacred and secular commitment for Irish music-making in Birmingham.
Those planning events for St Patrick’s anniversary remain mindful of the
familiar religious signifiers of Irishness. When the Birmingham Irish
Community Forum produced a promotional video of the 1998 St Patrick’s
Parade, they continued to emphasise its Catholic identity. Sandwiched
between scenes of the pipe bands preparing to parade is a clip of the St
Patrick’s Mass (then held at St Catherine’s), capturing the moment when
the congregation exchange signs of peace, whilst singing the lines of Dave
Bilbrough’s hymn, “Let there be peace shared among us, let there be peace
in our eyes”. Church attendance has dwindled significantly since the
fifties and stereotyped Irishness has become divorced from religiousness
on the global stage, but parade organisers allow for the celebration of
Mass prior to the main street march and for a visible presence of Catholic
memorabilia on and around the parade route.

Mike Cronin and Daryl Adair date the emotional pull of St Patrick’s
Day for Catholics to 1607, when it was first listed as a holy day in
Ireland’s legal calendar.10 The cultural use of a church service also
concurs with Philip Bohlman’s and Ruth Davis’ readings of an ethnic
parade as a “pilgrimage”.11 During his homily at the St Patrick’s Mass at
St Anne’s Church in March 2009, the local second-generation Irish priest,
Fr Eamonn Corduff, described the parade to follow in exactly the same
way; a “pilgrimage” from his church onto the city streets. It is the
“pilgrim people” and particularly “those who have gone before us”, for
whom Joanne Boyce and Mike Stanley provide a soundtrack with their
album Age to Age. In essence, however, the significance of that post-de
Valera march around St Chad’s in 1952 was that, here was Birmingham
holding the first St Patrick’s Parade in twentieth-century Britain, forty-five
minutes ahead of a new London parade of Irishness.12 This Parade-and-

10
Cronin and Adair, The Wearing of the Green, p.1.
11
Bohlman, Philip, The Music of European Nationalism: Cultural Identity and
Modern History (California: ABC-Clio, 2004); Davis, Ruth ‘Time, Place and
Memory: Songs for a North African Jewish Pilgrimage’, in Music and
Displacement: Diasporas, Mobilities and Dislocations in Europe and Beyond,
eds., by Erik Levi and Florian Scheding (Plymouth: Scarecrow Press, 2010),
pp.71-88.
12
The organisers of the London parade were inspired by Birmingham’s example,
but the parade there began forty-five minutes later because it followed rather than
 Marching Along in the Big Parade: Piping for St Patrick 151

Mass modus operandi for honouring St Patrick continued annually in the

city centre, becoming an increasingly important demonstration of local
pride for a community that had recently been associated with poverty and
unsanitary living conditions by the local and Irish press. Of Birmingham’s
diaspora in the mid-twentieth century, Ziesler explains:

While the majority of Irish organisations and their proceedings were of interest
to a minority of the Irish population, there was one specific event which had a
broad-based appeal and attracted those who, for most of the year, felt no need
for public expressions of pride in their race, nationality or religion. This was
the annual St Patrick’s Day parade.13

The city responded positively to this new public display of Irishness. As

compensation for the fact that cafes would be closed on a Sunday in 1952,
Birmingham Corporation opened twelve nearby civic and cinema
restaurants, encouraging Irish people to mingle after church, after a service
at which they had been encouraged, in a sermon by the presiding priest, Fr
John Connellan, to name and shame any bad local landlords.

In the months following the IRA bombing of Birmingham, the St

Patrick’s Parade was voluntarily withdrawn from the city’s calendar, for
fear that it would make the Irish community available for violent reprisals.
It was a sensible response. The Birmingham Irish Centre and the
Shamrock Club had been targets for retaliation in the immediate aftermath
of the bombs and organisers in London had already set a precedent by
suspending their St Patrick’s Parade in 1972 and 1973, when secret peace-
brokering talks between the British government and the IRA had broken
down. Those in Birmingham did not reckon on such a lengthy
disappearance for their parade after 1974, although, with hindsight, wider
problems had already been evident. The Parade committee were winding
down proceedings prior to the pub bombings because of growing political
turbulences. The Irish Post journalist Peter Kennedy reported that the
parade of March 1974 was “on a smaller scale than usual”.14 Between
1974 and 1996—the years when the parade was missing from the city—a
mini parade for children was held in the Birmingham Irish Centre, creating
a less prominent, less political and less perceptible continuation of Irish

preceded an anniversary Mass. See O’Flynn, John, The Irishness of Irish Music
(Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), p.84.
13
Ziesler, The Irish in Birmingham, p.255.
14
Peter Kennedy, ‘Lá le Padraig at home and abroad’, Irish Post, Saturday 16
March 1974, p.7.
152 Chapter Five

performance. These private displays were often inaccessible for those

beyond, or unfamiliar with, the diaspora. From 1974, it was the case then,
as Lennon, McAdams and O’Brien explain, that “cultural and social
networks existed, as they had always done, such as Irish dancing, music
sessions, the Gaelic Athletic Association, church clubs and welfare
organisations, but they were not, in the main, very visible to outsiders”.15

What did become visible to outsiders over the following twenty two
years was the success of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger economy, the fashionable
global Irishness expressed in music from Riverdance to The Corrs, and the
eventual release of the Birmingham Six. All of these were contributing
factors, enabling the Irish community in Birmingham to resurrect their
public march for St Patrick in the mid-nineties. Memories were not so
short and the restored Parade was rerouted away from New Street and the
Rotunda, where the devastated pubs had been located, out of respect for
those killed and maimed in 1974. This new journey, up and down High
Street Deritend (turning, since 2003, around the iconic Selfridges
building16) is completed by Irish-themed floats, vehicles, marching bands
and dancers every year. Birmingham’s parade rapidly grew in popularity
and organisers now claim the largest St Patrick’s festival in the UK and
the third largest St Patrick’s Parade in the world. According to the
Birmingham Mail newspaper, the parade in 2009 attracted 80,000
people.17 The newspaper describes this as being a record crowd, although
in other years the local press and parade organising committee have
claimed attendances of 100,000 to 135,000. It is difficult to know exactly
how they arrive at these figures, but the anniversary of St Patrick is clearly
the biggest civic event in the city of Birmingham each year.

Perhaps the very absence of the Birmingham St Patrick’s Parade

during the seventies, eighties and early nineties aided immediate support
for the revived event in 1996. At the time of their disappearance in
Birmingham, grand St Patrick’s Day Parades sprang up across the USA,
feeding into new commodified Celtic events in Dublin and, with them, a

15
Lennon, McAdams, O’Brien, Across the Water, p.9.
16
For St Patrick’s celebrations in 2007, the illustrious Selfridges “blobitecture”
exterior was coloured with green lighting. James Moran uses this image for the
front cover of his publication, Irish Birmingham.
17
‘80,000 Flock to Birmingham’s St Patrick’s Day Parade’, Birmingham Mail,
March 15 2009 <http://www.birminghammail.net/news/top-stories/2009/03/15/80-
000-flock-to-birmingham-s-st-patrick-s-day-parade-97319-23151794/> [accessed
22 April 2009].
 Marching Along in the Big Parade: Piping for St Patrick 153

growing amount of cynicism. James W. Flannery commented

retrospectively on Irish society in 1976, “today many Irishmen view the
patriotism of this period in their country’s history as an embarrassing
memory, associated in the mind with the green beer and shamrocks of St
Patrick’s Day observances”.18 By withdrawing the parade at this juncture
in the mid-seventies, Birmingham bypassed the certain loss of composure
that came to be associated with honouring St Patrick, which often served
to disillusion those who hailed from Ireland.

The Parade Form

So far, this book has examined musical performances that have
happened in discrete, bounded physical environments, such as the
Birmingham Town Hall, homes, pubs and churches. As we have seen,
each of these sites—when music is performed within it—has its own
resonances and connections with specific moments of local musical and
political history. Yet there is something qualitatively different about
music that takes place outside as part of a parade. It is true that the route
itself and the buildings along it may have historical significance and
meaning, but the unbounded, open-air and sequential nature of a
procession means that those who are bystanders hear only snatches of any
one particular performance, while individual musicians who are playing
from floats—or marching along the street—hear only their own sound and
are almost entirely oblivious to the other, competing musics that go before
and after them.

Because of crucial differences between the parade form and the music
that is performed within one particular locus, I wish to begin this chapter
by considering the nature of the journeying mode itself. Scholars
examining this phenomenon have typically given little thought to audible
expressions that often comprise the key part of an organised march. In the
few investigations that do exist, the sphere of music is static, generally
considered in terms of who is playing what at which moment, rather than
from the perspective of a powerless audience, receiving the continually-
moving conveyor belt of musics.19 Domenico Pietropaolo’s important

18
Leland Lyons, ‘Review of James W. Flannery, W.B. Yeats and the Idea of a
Theatre, in the Irish Times, December 1976, as quoted in Foster, The Irish Story,
p.40.
19
See for example, Jane Gladden Kelton, ‘New York City St Patrick’s Day Parade:
Invention of Contention and Consensus’, The Drama Review, 29 (1985), pp.93-
105, which considers the crowd only in terms of their dress during a brief
154 Chapter Five

article on the procession as a form usefully defines time and space as

being the key interrelated components of any procession, arguing that their
interconnectedness:

constitutes the chief hermeneutical implication of the poetics of space. It is

relevant to all sight-dependent artistic perceptions, but its significance is
especially clear in the case of processional spectacle, which consists of
spatial coexistence progressively unfolding in time within the field of
vision of the attending community. This field of vision is defined by a
triadic structure comprised of a focal point, which determines the
perceived logical arrangement of each processional unit, and two lateral
edges, in which objects come to presence and fade away from vision. As
the perceptual experience is interiorised, the external field of vision
becomes an internal field of consciousness, wherein the focal point is the
moment of perception under the aspect of actuality and the lateral edges
are those aspects of the same moment through which objects recede from
centrality in the form of structured memory or emerge from indeterminacy
as anticipated development.20

I have quoted this at length because there is much to agree with here.
In particular, Pietropaolo usefully defines the way that the meaning of a
parade is created. The lateral edges of a focal point, where events recede
and come into vision, are externally imposed rather than individually
determined. However, spectators who watch the parade automatically
interiorise what they are seeing at that certain moment. They inhabit their
own lateral edge by relating personal experiences to the recollections of
what they have seen at an earlier point in the spectacle to the anticipation
of what they expect to see in its future. Thus, for example, if at the
Birmingham St Patrick’s Parade a group of musicians play songs
associated with The Dubliners, then regular attendees may relate that to
tape recordings of the Irish band that have blared from an earlier wagon in
the carnival. The same spectators may also anticipate that—given The
Dubliners’ ubiquity in settings such as the “Irish pub” and the
commercialised Arthur Guinness or St Patrick’s Day festivals of the

concluding section; or Charles Carson, ‘“Whole New Worlds”: Music and the
Disney Theme Park Experience’, Ethnomusicology Forum, 13 (2004), pp.228-235,
in which the audience move and the performers are stationary.
20
Domenico Pietropaolo, ‘Spectacular Literacy and the Topology of Significance:
The Processional Mode’, in Petrarch’s Triumphs: Allegory and Spectacle, eds. by
Konrad Eisenbichler and Amilcare A. Ianucci (Otawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1990),
pp.359-368 (p.361).
 Marching Along in the Big Parade: Piping for St Patrick 155

modern era—they will be hearing more of their music at a later point in

the procession.

When these moments in the parade change from being potential

moments to actual moments, emerging from indeterminacy to a central
focus, then spectators undergo a continuing process of self-appraisal that
helps them to understand the accuracy of their own prediction. A transient
soundtrack directly alters the degree to which people truly feel at home as
part of the Birmingham Irish community. Having observed St Patrick’s
Parades in Birmingham at first hand since their restoration in 1996, I can
develop Pietropaolo’s line of thinking about the internal field of
consciousness. During the parade, every time one of my internalised
predictions is upset or contradicted, I am likely to feel more and more
removed from this spectating group. Members of the Birmingham Irish
community will have seen many similar St Patrick’s Parades in previous
years (notwithstanding the relatively recent introduction of this form of
musical expression for an Irish community since 1950), so are continually
observing and integrating new elements in accordance with a pre-
established set of accumulated memories. Whilst this helps the initiated to
make sense of the proceedings, it perhaps alienates outsiders who cannot
call upon such a store of recollections and reminiscences.

Whilst Pietropaolo’s reasoning therefore leads us in a useful direction

when attempting to understand this Irish procession as a form, there is a
large gap in his argument. In his emphasis on visual “spectators” and on
“spectacular literacy”, Pietropaolo completely ignores the pivotal aural
creation of meaning. After all, parades are never entirely sight-dependent.
As Philip Bohlman explains, “music provides the template for parades and
ceremonies that allow the collective nation to remember its past”.21 One
of the defining features of Irish cultural and historical processions, such as
the Orange parades in the North of Ireland, or the parades past the GPO
marking the anniversary of the Easter Rising in Dublin, is the distinctive
(and in these cases very different) musical expressions that are
incorporated into the events. Something to be noted about the music
chosen for Irish parades is the preference for those instruments less
capable of tonal and dynamic range, but more percussive and resonant

21
Philip Bohlman, Focus: Music, Nationalism, and the Marking of the New
Europe (Oxford: Routledge, 2011), p.93.
156 Chapter Five

(with lambeg drums, tin whistles and bodhráns featuring heavily,

depending on the parade22).

Neither can the soundtrack to a march be understood straightforwardly.

On a parade route, no single musician or group of musicians can hope to
use those patterns of repetition and motif that might aid listeners trying to
understand the significance of what they are hearing. This kind of national
or ethnic procession, where musical displays develop a narrative in a non-
linear way—as a montage—poses problems for organisers, who control
the sequence for a unified show, but might find that different parts of the
content appear to endorse quite different ideas or ideologies.

In a concert in a walled room, Luke Kelly could refer to “the sons of

Róisín” at one instance, then to the old woman of Ireland’s “four green
fields” at another, developing and changing the meaning of a single
musical and poetic trope. Similarly, a Catholic congregation can, in one
separate service, sing many different prayers about a religious figure like
the Virgin Mary, with the theological and devotional significance of those
prayers shifting in national and social emphasis depending on the musical
context. By contrast, such subtlety is scarcely permitted on the parade
route, where one group passes by after another, drowning out and
overlapping their sounds. Spectators, or rather listeners, will catch only a
few moments of a longer tune or performance.

This is, then, where I feel that Pietropaolo’s analysis is most useful.
Although he speaks exclusively of the “field of vision”, my experience of
the Birmingham St Patrick’s Parade has demonstrated that the “field of
aurality” works in much the same way; that threefold structure of a focal,
or rather an aural, point (the musical moment which can be heard most
clearly and is being produced by the group passing closest to the listener)
and two lateral edges (the musical performers who are higher up the
procession and whose music was the focal point a few moments before
and those musicians who are next to become the focal point). Both these
lateral edges can be heard simultaneously with the focal point, helping to
create internal meaning for the individual auditors and widening the
cumulative appeal of the parade, by way of comparison, contrast in time,
memory, place and anticipation.

22
The lambeg drum is a large drum beaten with curved malacca canes and
associated with the Unionist marches in Northern Ireland. The bodhrán is
associated generally with Irish traditional music and often has nationalistic
undertones.
 Marching Along in the Big Parade: Piping for St Patrick 157

The fact that the music of the parade creates a soundtrack in the
transitory fashion outlined above may, in part, be the reason why much of
the inclusions in Birmingham’s St Patrick’s Parade can seem relatively
unsophisticated or ill-defined, compared to some of the other performances
analysed in previous chapters. However, another reason the music of the
St Patrick’s Parade can seem ad hoc and less polished is that it is
deliberately being performed in this way. The procession marks a holiday,
a festival time that, in Bakhtinian terms, distinguishes the event and
separates it from the world of work and labour. To aspire to the rigid
professionalism of the concert hall would somehow be to fit in with the
hierarchies of conductor, producer, recording engineer and so on. As we
saw with Charles Parker’s recordings of the Critics’ Group sessions, the
Irish music associated with Birmingham could often be a very specialised
matter indeed, with performers highly aware of their role as elite, paid and
trained professionals. Similarly, the great seriousness with which much of
the church music in Birmingham has been performed indicates a
willingness on the part of Irish congregations to engage with an audible
identity capable of in-depth discussion and serious theological ideas.

Yet as Mikhail Bakhtin outlined in his book, Rabelais and his World,
the festival form—such as that of a parade—can be characterised as
essentially carnivalesque.23 If everyday life is defined by paid work,
rigidly enforced hierarchies and official structures, then the carnival world
is a release from, or a reversal of, these mundane rules. In the St Patrick’s
Parade, the local roads (ordinarily the arteries of Birmingham’s industrial
processes, facilitating the movement of goods and people between
economic sites) are consciously used in a way that brings no financial
benefit to the participants. At the same time, those local figures, whose
place at the top of Birmingham’s social order is assured in a number of
ways, are instead set up for mockery; the mayor, local businessmen,
teachers from nearby schools and so forth are deliberately dressed in
comic fashion and paraded around on carnival floats in order to provoke
laughter in onlookers. Traditional figures of authority in Ireland—
particularly religious powers—are also parodied by those who have
dressed in novelty priests’, bishops’ and nuns’ regalia for the day,
endorsing John Nagle’s view of parades; “where subjects go to participate
in experiences often presumed to be other-worldly or the reverse side of
modern day life characterised by ennui, repression, and routine”.24

23
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1984).
24
Nagle, ‘“Everybody is Irish on St Paddy’s”’, p.570.
158 Chapter Five

Bakhtin claimed that in the middle ages, the carnival provided an

opportunity for freedom from “the prevailing truth and from the
established order”, arguing that it “is the suspension of social and
behavioural codes that generates ‘the atmosphere of joyful relativity
characteristic of a carnival sense of the world’”.25 Bakhtin felt that by
giving voice to contradictory and subversive elements, by combining the
comic and tragic with the grotesque, the vulgar with the serious, the folk
festival was naturally anarchistic. Prior to the relaunch of the Birmingham
St Patrick’s Parade, Christy Moore had often aspired to break down
established hierarchies, political roles and values through the subject
matter of the Irish music he sang in the city. The incongruous
combinations in the parade suspend these social codes more publicly,
making people realise their shared kinship with others so that, whilst
restoring a personal field of vision, everyone becomes aware of their
reciprocal roles as part of a single Irish community.

The notion that a united society parades as performance has, however,

acquired potentially distasteful connotations, especially for those who
follow the reasoning of members of the Frankfurt School of critical theory.
After the war, Theodor Adorno made the case that popular audiences tend
to be malleable and passive, easily manipulated by the messages
promulgated by mass politics and, in particular, the malign stimulus of
repetitive musical forms, describing the “mechanical repetition” of jazz
music, or the “ecstasy [...] without content” of jitterbug dancing.26 Adorno’s
assumptions about the control of masses with music are not an altogether
irrelevant consideration for Birmingham. The misogynistic and violent
lyrics of rap music have recently been accused of inciting gang warfare
and gun crime in the city centre.27 However, Adorno’s picture of
anonymous, controlled masses simply does not allow for the infinite levels
of belongings and desires felt by many migrants in an urban centre.
During the 1970s, in particular, Irish people and their descendants had to
decide whether or not to even be Irish in Birmingham; those choosing

25
Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, p.10; p.107.
26
Adorno, Theodor, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (New
York: Routledge, 1991), p.61; p.46.
27
The shootings of Letisha Shakespeare and Charlene Ellis in Lozells in 2003
were connected to rivalries between two hip-hop groups in Birmingham. See
Jones, Steve, ‘Rap Music Feud Behind Gun Violence in Birmingham’, Birmingham
Mercury, Sunday 20 June 2010
<http://thegrimereport.blogspot.com/2010/06/rap-music-feud-behind-gun-
violence-in.html> [accessed 8 November 2010].
 Marching Along in the Big Parade: Piping for St Patrick 159

otherwise often altering their accents, surnames and social circles to

distance themselves from their past in light of current political issues. The
St Patrick’s Parade enables “Irish” self-analysis. Its music provides the
forum in which to continually reassess one’s position in, and belonging to,
an ethnic group, while simultaneously publicising the strength of one Irish
community.

The literary critic Stephen Greenblatt provides a more likely explanation.

Greenblatt revises Bakhtin’s views of the carnivalesque by arguing that
powerful regimes often allow certain subversive voices and challenges
precisely because transgressions ultimately serve to strengthen the regime
itself.28 In other words, the sanctioned release of tension prolongs rather
than threatens social supremacy. After all, early modern kings and queens
not only licensed and allowed particular forms of insurrection, but they
produced them, relied upon them even, in order to maintain power. When
Queen Elizabeth I employed those Irish harpers at her palace in Greenwich
there was scarcely a corresponding social climb for Ireland’s subjects in
England’s class system. Rather, as Lloyd describes, it was a source of
great amusement that music and language from Ireland inspired composers
to write Irish-themed airs at her English court, and the gentry to dance to
Irish melodies or garble Gaelic phrases, “just at that time when England
was waging a ferocious and repressive war […] and broke the back of the
ancient Gaelic culture that had produced the tunes”.29

A modern translation could be that the mock versions of kings or

queens simply remind us of how grand and important the real-life version
is. Given the, at times, torrid history of the Irish in Birmingham and the
fact that the city council holds the reigns of contemporary St Patrick’s
Parades, the implications of this reading are clear. This is an inclusive
parade, rather than a stage for the individual to analyse and pontificate.
The sight of the city’s Irish or non-Irish lord mayor dressed in green face-
paint and dancing a jig every March might simply remind us of the
mayor’s gravitas and importance during the rest of the year. This image
would not be amusing if not predicated on it being different to the social
norm. So too, the vision of an apparently under-rehearsed folk singer on a
carnival float waving to the crowd and making spontaneous comments and
remarks as part of their set might help to reinforce the fact that, if the same
singer was performing inside to a paying audience at any of the formal

28
Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1988), p.63.
29
Lloyd, Folk Song in England, p.163.
160 Chapter Five

concert venues of Birmingham, they would scarcely behave in this way.

Such occurrences can serve to increase the relevance of this Irish parade
for the entire population.

In recent years, the ambiguity of the St Patrick’s Parade in

Birmingham has been its celebration and display of Irishness through the
inclusion of local non-Irish groups such as Indian Dhol drummers, South
American samba bands and Chinese fan dancers. Increasingly, it is not
just those offering knowledge of Irish culture who create the biggest
display in and of Birmingham every March. As a city council representative
recently declared, to participate, “you don’t have to be Irish. It does help a
little bit, but you don’t have to be Irish”.30 Given that its volume reaches
those residents of Birmingham beyond the route, an Irish parade through
the city centre could represent a threatening ritual that is like Walter
Benjamin’s aestheticization of politics; corralling individual viewpoints
into a potentially disturbing display of mass emotion.31 Yet, instead of
this, it is a display of ethnic difference, paralleling the liminal nature of the
carnival itself, that now makes evident Breda Gray’s version of “Ireland as
a space of global flows”.32 St Patrick’s festival organisers are eager to
customise this parade for the whole of Birmingham, through cultural
representation from all communities who have made a contribution to the
city, especially where experiences of mass immigration may parallel those
of the Irish. In Bakhtinian terms, these ethnic innovations in the festival
allow people from across the multicultural city to realise the great deal
they have in common, sharing a joint “festival laughter” in Irish
Birmingham. The tacit message now is that “everybody is a little bit
Brummie” rather than “a little bit Irish” on St Patrick’s Day.

The process of undoing spatial, temporal and social hierarchies is

contradictory. Birmingham’s St Patrick’s Parade is hardly a spontaneous,
random event. Its planning is charted in local newspapers and on council
and community webpages months in advance. Despite the radical
multicultural dimension, the festival is subject to its own rigid hierarchies
and controls and there is an innate conservatism to it. Members of the
Irish community emulate the Catholic parades first organised in the 1950s,

30
The statement was made by Birmingham’s “official” St Patrick, an Englishman
Len Cale, and was included in the Birmingham Irish Community Forum’s St
Patrick’s Parade Video 1999.
31
Benjamin, Walter, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in
Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Pimlico, 1979), pp.217-51.
32
Gray, ‘The Irish Diaspora’, p.128.
 Marching Along in the Big Parade: Piping for St Patrick 161

arranging themselves behind Ireland’s thirty two county banners in their

four provinces, with dancers and bands marching in formation, and, in
general, Birmingham’s Rose of Tralee heads the procession with a
tricolour.33 On one hand, then, anyone can take part, the offer of Irish
friendship is open to all, a communal holiday for Birmingham. On the
other hand, the route is fixed, areas for the crowd are demarcated by metal
barriers, and music, dance and cultural groups are invited to participate.
Nagle has seen a similar situation (that of foregoing social hierarchies in a
sequential Irish parade) in London as “problematic because they are
anomalous and conspicuously fail to be neatly categorised as either liminal
and transcendent, or ceremonial and the negation of social critique”.34
Birmingham’s is a complex and schizoid parade; a crucial site for St
Patrick, in which the various struggles of ethnicity in England are played
out. A variety of ethnic stereotypes are mobilised to sell an image of the
city whose history of multicultural harmony has been patchy, within a
recognisable popular idea of the Irish nation, “What could be more Irish
than extending hospitality to others”.35

Victor Turner explains that a carnival type of performance represents a

critique “of the social life it grows out of, an evaluation […] of the way
society handles history”.36 In this way, the decision to persist with a St
Patrick’s Parade Mass allows Birmingham to embrace its longer, pre-
1970s, history. St Patrick has been celebrated in Birmingham in one way
or another since the 1820s, albeit with events that were somewhat
spontaneous and irregular. The city’s first formal St Patrick’s Day
observance, held in 1869, was a celebration organised by local clergy.
Carl Chinn describes, the “principal public feature was an Irish ballad
concert at the Town Hall”, in connection with concerts held at St Chad’s
Cathedral, and the parishes of St Anne’s and St Michael’s.37 According to

33
In early parades from the 1960s and 1970s, Birmingham’s Miss Ireland would
lead the procession, flanked by four Aer Lingus air hostesses. The Birmingham
Rose of Tralee is something of her modern equivalent, drawn from the Rose of
Tralee annual carnival queen festival held in County Kerry. Birmingham, London
and New York were the only three non-Irish cities to have been represented at the
first competition in 1959.
34
Nagle, ‘“Everybody is Irish on St Paddy’s’”, p.571.
35
‘Winds of Change at St Patricks Festival’, An Craic, 136 (2009), p.35.
36
Victor Turner, ‘Images and Reflections: Ritual, Drama, Carnival, Film and
Spectacle in Cultural Performance’ in The Anthropology of Experience (New
York: PAJ, 1986), p.22.
37
Carl Chinn, ‘The Irish in Birmingham: Celebrating St Patrick’s Day’, Harp,
April 2012, p.21.
162 Chapter Five

James Moran, today’s massive St Patrick’s festivities are the direct

development of this nineteenth-century campaign for Irish independence
in Birmingham.38

The desire to collapse historical distance, to emulate the past,

potentially snares participants at Birmingham’s St Patrick’s Parade into
apparently endorsing ideas that they might usually avoid or ignore. The
English-born, atheist daughter of strictly Catholic Irish-born parents may
find herself joining in with the St Anne’s church service on the parade
day—singing the hymns and prayers that she remembers from childhood
and so forth—in order to maintain face and a sense of unity with her
family and the Irish community. After all, as Bronwen Walter clarifies,
with second-generation children, there is “a taken-for-granted assumption
that they would accept this [Irish] identity and be prepared to proclaim it
publicly in Britain”.39 Whilst these second-, third- and fourth-generation
Irish participants of a new parade may declare their allegiance, they may,
in addition, find it difficult to know where exactly to position themselves
with regard to the habitual display of county banners.

In Birmingham’s St Patrick’s Parades from the fifties and sixties,

marching behind the banners was automatic (and all but compulsory) for
those recently arrived from Ireland.40 In this earlier era, unlike today, far
more people were active in the march than passive onlookers. At the
Parade’s resurrection in the mid-nineties however, the Irish community
was socially diverse and widely integrated, such that participating in the
march became confusing, unsubstantiated or irrelevant, especially for the
Irish born in Birmingham to parents from two different counties. Also, as
historian Patsy Davis explains:

It’s easy for the first generation they can march with Galway or whatever
but it’s much harder for second generation people. I could march with
Galway but I’m not sure I would know anyone. My mom would always
meet her friends. But I’m not sure I think of myself as being from
Galway.41

38
Moran, Irish Birmingham, p.8.
39
Bronwen Walter, ‘Celebrations of Irishness in Britain: Second-Generation
Experiences of St Patrick’s Day’ in Ireland the Festive and the Tragic, eds., by
Marie-Claire Considère-Charon, Philippe Laplace and Michael Savaric
(Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), pp.192-207 (p.195).
40
Limbrick, A Great Day, p.24.
41
Ibid, p.47.
 Marching Along in the Big Parade: Piping for St Patrick 163

Davis’ quandary clarifies why, just a week before the parade returned
in 1996, the Irish Post made a call for volunteers in Birmingham to march
behind the banners of nine counties without representation.42 It may have
been the result of personal or social complications rather than political
caution. We can find in this recruitment of participants, which feels at
best forced, something of the disturbing energies that Adorno located in
mass culture. Whilst supporting a banner may seem fairly innocent, some
local county associations have preserved contentious political messages
that attract onlookers. At the parade of 1998, which occurred on the eve of
the historic Good Friday Agreement in Stormont, the Birmingham County
Tyrone association employed a single piper to play “The Minstrel Boy”
(an Irish patriotic song written by Thomas Moore) behind a green banner
celebrating the 1916 Easter Rising with the faces of the executed Irish
rebels, James Connolly, Thomas Clarke, Pádraic Pearse and Sean
McDermott surrounding a central image of the General Post Office in
Dublin.43 Rather than receiving any sort of censure, the Tyrone committee
won this year’s award for best county banner at the parade.

It was easier to appreciate colourful artwork rather than the

unadulterated presentation of a troubling piece of Irish and English history
because the accompanying music, a solo pipe melody, was a far cry from
Adorno’s “ecstasy […] without content”. The banner’s soundtrack was
inoffensive, vulnerable even, and unobtrusive. Multiplying the solo piper
by ten, twenty or forty, would have created a quite different atmosphere.
One of the more assertive musical features of the St Patrick’s Parade in
Birmingham is the mass participation of united bands of pipers, through
which it is revealed that tensions between different kinds of radicalism and
conservatism are heard, rather than seen, in a parading performance.

The Birmingham Pipe Band

In March 2008, the ITV journalist, Steve Keeling, reported on the
city’s St Patrick’s Parade for the local central news network. His piece
opened with shots of the band, the Birmingham Irish Pipes and Drums,
playing the melody of J.K. O’Reilly’s nationalist song “Wrap the Green
Flag Round Me Boys”. O’Reilly’s radical message of being willing to die

42
‘Birmingham all set for big parade’, Irish Post, March 16 1996, p.32.
43
The General Post Office (GPO) on Dublin’s O’Connell Street became the
headquarters for Irish republicans who assembled an uprising in 1916 with the aim
of ending British rule in Ireland.
164 Chapter Five

for Irish independence grew increasingly popular with republicans after

the events of 1916, about which the County Tyrone marchers continue to
reminisce. The Irish nationalistic sentiment is consistent throughout
Keeling’s television report. A pipe band from Arklow performs the
melody of Peadar Kearney’s “The Foggy Dew”, which encourages
Irishmen to attack “Britannia’s Huns” at a later moment when Keeling
happily declares that this was “essentially a day for national pride”. That
the reporter appears oblivious to the political significance of this music is
explicable. The immediate renunciation of such songs of rebellion in
recent decades in Birmingham means that few, if any, of his early evening
television watchers would have been particularly stirred by, or even
conscious of, these choices. Besides which, they were not actually
performed as songs in this instance, but wordless soundtrack musics by
pipe bands that could hardly make any textual narrative explicit.
Moreover, “The Foggy Dew” may have been known by Keeling’s
audience as a tale of true love rather than of rebellion, because The Corrs
set the melody to the less political lyrics, “Moorlough Shore”, for their
album Home, released in 2005.

Unlike some of the musical activities discussed thus far, those in pubs
or dance halls traceable only to the trends of the diaspora in twentieth-
century England, the marching band has sound origins within performance
spaces of Ireland. Fife-and-drums are associated with the temperance
movement, the Fenians, the Land League, Home Rule and the Ancient
Order of Hibernians. At various stages, as Ireland has modified a national
identity, so military bands have marched in Ireland. The contemporary
pipe band in Birmingham is similar to those that paraded in Ireland and
collapses the distance between the diaspora and home. Pat Baggot, who
left Ireland in the sixties, is typical of many in Birmingham for whom the
pipe band holds a profound connection: “I love the Pipes and Drums. It
reminds me of home and some of the tunes are just lovely they remind me
of Ireland”.44

The Birmingham Pipe Band was formed in 1948 and headed every St
Patrick’s Parade in the city until it was cancelled in 1974. Two years after
the parade returned, the band, then re-branded the Birmingham Irish Pipes
and Drums, was put back at the front of the procession. Such was the
instant hit of the parade, and the positive reception afforded to its pipe
bands, that just five years later the Birmingham Irish Pipes and Drums

44
Limbrick, A Great Day, p.56.
 Marching Along in the Big Parade: Piping for St Patrick 165

became an iconic representation for the entire community, appearing on

the front cover of Carl Chinn’s publication Birmingham Irish. This image
celebrates Irish music, quite literally journeying on Birmingham, in step
with views such as those of Josie and Brendan Mulvey, originally from
County Leitrim, who believe that “just like the parade the band is part of
the community at large”.45 Whilst synonymous with the St Patrick’s
Parade, the Birmingham Irish Pipes and Drums regularly represents the
West Midlands at local, national and international events throughout the
year.

Those fêted “authentic” links to historical Ireland explain why the pipe
band continues to be such a big part of the Irishness restored by
Birmingham’s St Patrick’s Parade. This expression of nationalism is
significant. As Martin Stokes explains, “marches are aggressive
occasions”.46 Whilst we can marvel at a genuine piece of Ireland
surviving in this new geographical context, pipe bands are intentionally
employed to provoke in certain sectarian marches in Ireland (something
witnessed in July every year in Northern Ireland). So too, an Irish display
in Birmingham could at times represent a connection with dangerous
politics. During parades in the early seventies, when the IRA were waging
a bombing campaign on the British mainland, activists would jump in
from the crowd with Sinn Féin flags to join the procession en route.
Unsanctioned republican speakers often set up sites in Birmingham city
centre, preaching to crowds of participants milling around after the parade,
further stoking up nationalistic fervour, inciting the masses and engaging
with a more complex history of Irish religious display that served to
antagonise and exclude British unionists altogether. As Moran has stated
of the Parade, “For all the rhetoric of togetherness, of course, the event
clearly equated Irishness with Catholicism, and gave scant thought to
Birmingham’s Irish Protestants”.47 Organisers in Birmingham were
concerned about these happenings and sought to prevent political
messages from being disseminated.

Mindful of the powerful social effect of music, the parade committee

began to avoid certain antagonistic, unambiguously Irish sounds in the
sequence. Birmingham’s final St Patrick’s Parade before the event ceased
was unusual in featuring no visiting pipe bands. Instead the less fierce-
sounding Killishall Accordion Band from County Tyrone was invited to

45
Chinn, Birmingham Irish, p.171.
46
Stokes, Ethnicity, Identity and Music, p.9.
47
Moran, Irish Birmingham, p.176.
166 Chapter Five

participate as token Irish representatives. Isolated letters of protest were

sent after the march was cancelled in 1974, most voicing a fear that halting
the procession would “kill the Irish culture here for a long time”.
Complaints from members of the Irish community were few however,
because many had noticed a change in proceedings since the late sixties.
As Jim Gilraine explains, “before the bombings I think it had got too
political. People thought of it as a Republican march—I think the police
wanted it stopped”.48

Neither had related political tensions bypassed Birmingham when the

parade returned in 1996 of course. The Provisional IRA detonated bombs
in both Manchester and London in the year prior to Birmingham’s parade
restoration and those publicising Irishness for the first time in twenty-one
years were justifiably fearful of a rumoured reactionary attack by the
National Front. The huge police presence along the city’s streets did little
to assuage some of that year’s worried participants. The parade’s official
St Patrick, Rob Kerrigan, wondered if “standing up there on the top of that
bus, I might get shot”.49 The personnel was different, but this committee’s
comprehension of the command of music was identical to that of their
predecessors working in the seventies. Space was made for just three
visiting marching bands from Ireland at this 1996 parade. Only one of
these was a pipe ensemble.50

After a peaceful first year however, the parade organising committee,

like Steve Keeling in 2008, have shown little concern for the potentially
contentious message of pipe bands. A problematic dynamic could be
noted at Birmingham’s St Patrick’s Parade in 1999, for instance. Five
months before this parade the prospect of peace in Northern Ireland had
been undermined by the bombing of Omagh in County Tyrone. The Real
IRA murdered twenty nine people and two unborn children, as Omagh
stole from the Birmingham pub bombings the unenviable title of the worst
single act of violence during the Troubles. The returning tense states of
national affairs could easily have affected Birmingham, where the memory
of that earlier wave of republican warfare in the 1970s was still fresh and
where Irish music had only been acceptable for public parading for the
past three years. Yet one of the first pipe bands to line up in the following
Birmingham St Patrick’s Parade was that from County Leitrim, which

48
Limbrick, A Great Day, p.44.
49
Ibid., p.89.
50
These bands were the O’Neill Pipe Band from Monaghan, the Castlerea Brass
Band for Roscommon, the Buncrana Accordion Band from Donegal.
 Marching Along in the Big Parade: Piping for St Patrick 167

played republican rebel melodies such as Patrick McCall’s “Kelly the Boy
from Killan”, and John Keegan Casey’s “The Rising of the Moon”.51
These pieces were celebrated as part of the parade soundscape. By this
stage, a series of musical processes had moved Irishness with the city to
become the city. Social, political and musical interchange had afforded
Birmingham Irish people their distinct identity so that this diaspora’s
distance from Ireland could also be increased, as difficult situations for the
Irish at home demanded.

Those present at the St Patrick’s Parade in 2010 may have been

reminded of the more militant parades in the 1970s. Members of the
“Troops Out Movement” hijacked this parade in a similar way to earlier
Sinn Féin supporters, marching alongside the musical floats and dancing
troupes to advertise an upcoming protest by the relatives of Bloody
Sunday victims in central Victoria Square. Such continuing anxieties may
explain the reason for the contemporary St Patrick’s Parade being sold as a
celebration for the city. The inclusion of other ethnic groups diffuses and
defuses political messages and serves to break down the regimented social
hierarchies.

The proliferation of pipe bands in Birmingham’s St Patrick’s Parade

presents Irish traditional music within the colonial space of white British
music. The original Birmingham Pipe Band confirmed their allegiance by
playing on the morning of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953 whilst
marching around the city in a route that took them down Oliver Street and
Cromwell Street.52 The current pipers share their instruments with a scout
group based in nearby Nuneaton and the Band has recruited a number of
non-Irish and junior members and people with disabilities or special needs.
Ear-splitting drum beats are intended to keep young beginners in time with
the march rather than to intimidate, or incite an audience to riot for the
cause of a nation once again.

The Birmingham Irish Pipes and Drums are the native diasporic band
of Birmingham; musical hosts of other local pipers invited to share the
city’s roads and lessening any republican impact. The line-up in 1970, for

51
“Kelly the Boy from Killan” features the United Irishman leader, John Kelly,
who was hanged by British soldiers in 1798. “The Rising of the Moon” recounts a
battle between the United Irishmen and the British Army during the Irish rebellion
of 1798.
52
The English political leader Oliver Cromwell waged a brutal military campaign
in Ireland from 1649.
168 Chapter Five

example, included bands presenting themselves as ethnic and regional,

rather than as national Irish mouthpieces; Birmingham’s Irish and Scottish
Pipe Bands, Coventry’s Irish Pipe Band, Gloucester’s Pipe Band, and
Shirley’s Scout Pipe Band and Silver Band, as well as other English bands
from beyond the West Midlands. The British Legion Brass Band received
an invitation and was positioned between the City of Dublin’s Boys’ Pipe
Band and two local girls’ pipe bands for the march.53

The tension between British imperialism and Irish nationalism is not

the only community strain that has been challenged in the work of the pipe
bands in Birmingham. The pipe band was originally an all-male outfit.
When, in the 1960s, an offshoot of the Birmingham Pipe Band, the Kevin
McCaughey Pipe Band, decided to admit three female drummers—Mary
and Elizabeth Moran and Carmel Clark—some of the original members
felt so disgruntled that they decided to leave, forming new groups, such as
the Bill O’Connor Pipe Band, and leaving the city’s piping scene weaker
for its fragmentation. Some male marchers were disenfranchised. Their
scope for presenting the weighty seriousness and assertiveness of Irish
piping was somehow diminished by the admission of females raised in
Birmingham. Theirs may have been a general disregard for Irish music
played by the second generation, although this is unlikely considering the
number of migrants registering their children in Birmingham as Irish
foreign births.

Rather, those who left the band after the introduction of these three
drummers probably feared a similar result in Irish music as had happened
in Irish dancing, where “what was an activity of mature men has become,
primarily, an activity of young girls”.54 Suffice it to say, this is not a
particularly Irish issue. The American harpist Carl Swanson has presented
the theory that, in the twentieth century, “any time a profession was
primarily identified as ‘female’, men (at least straight men) would steer
away […] By the same token, many, many men have been resistant to
women entering their professions”.55 Hence the new united Birmingham
Irish Pipes and Drums of the 1990s, replete with men, women and

53
These were St Mary’s Girls Pipe Band and Victoria St Pipe Band. For a full
account of the Birmingham parade line-up from 1970, see ‘Big Plans for St
Patrick’s Day Parade and Ceili’, Irish Post, Saturday March 14 1970, p.5.
54
Patrick O’Sullivan, ‘Introduction: the Creative Migrant’, in The Creative
Migrant ed., O’Sullivan (London: Leicester University Press, 1994), pp.1-27
(p.18).
55
Swanson, ‘Wonderful Work Sam’.
 Marching Along in the Big Parade: Piping for St Patrick 169

children, presented the coming-of-age of the community as much from

within as from without. The changed demographic between the
Birmingham Irish Pipes and Drums and the former Birmingham Pipe Band
means that this aspect of the parade day accords with Bakhtin’s ideas of
the carnivalesque, in which,

What is suspended first of all is hierarchical structure and all the forms of
terror, reverence, piety and etiquette connected with it—that is, everything
resulting from socio-hierarchical inequality or any other form of inequality
among people (including age).56

In recent years, venues in Birmingham have been similarly democratic in

welcoming all St Patrick supporters, regardless of age or gender.

South Birmingham College Adopts the Pipers

Digbeth remains a hive of activity for many hours after the Sunday
morning parade for St Patrick. Pubs lined along the parade route host
parties into the evening to lure revellers with live and recorded versions of
popular Irish anthems such as “The Fields of Athenry”, “Molly Malone”
and “When Irish Eyes are Smiling”.57 One site in the middle of this—the
South Birmingham College—is converted into a pub and concert venue for
the day, abandoning its usual educative function and endorsing Bakhtin,
catering for a wide range of the population, particularly families with
young children and pensioners. Instead of lectures and classes, on Parade
Day the college becomes Irish, mimicking those dance halls of the 1950s,
with pop music and traditional music heard simultaneously in two separate
spaces.

On the face of it, the mixed crowd welcomed at South Birmingham

and the replacing of the college’s usual purpose appear to be a direct
reversal of the everyday hierarchical world of the institution. In fact, the

56
Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1984), pp.122-23.
57
Pete St John’s ballad “The Fields of Athenry” is set during the Great Irish
Famine. It is sung by supporters of Celtic Football Club, of the Republic of Ireland
football team and of Ireland’s rugby union. “Molly Malone”, first published in
Massachusetts in the nineteenth century, is something of an anthem for Dublin’s
“fair city”. Ernest Ball set the lyrics of Chauncey Olcott and George Graff Jr.’s
romantic tribute “When Irish Eyes are Smiling” to music in 1912. It was an
immediate hit amongst the diaspora in Britain and the United States.
170 Chapter Five

college may simply be taking advantage of the festival in order to

reinscribe and reinforce its usual role. South Birmingham College has no
Irish or Celtic studies department and offers no such courses, but it does
use the parade in a canny way in order to attract prospective students.
Hoping to advertise itself to those who attend on St Patrick’s Day, the
college uses its participation in the parade as a prominent part of its online
recruitment campaign.

In the display of Birmingham’s St Patrick’s Parade 2009 on their

website, South Birmingham College gives particular attention to the array
of local and visiting pipe bands.58 The Birmingham Irish Pipes and Drums
provide the initial shot in this filmed internet report and are seen
performing the familiar music set to Yeats’ poem “Down by the Salley
Gardens”. This is followed by images (and sounds) of the Wolverhampton
Pipe Band who play a standard duple time set, and then the Combined
Pipe Band of the Nautical Training Corps from Portsmouth, who play
glockenspiels at this moment, a more appropriate choice for the light-
hearted sentiment of Glenville and Miller’s “If You’re Irish Come Into the
Parlour”. Only after these scenes of the pipe bands come the more
stereotypical, global Irish sights; session musicians, dancers and mock-St
Patricks, although at this stage a voice-over begins on the video, the
soundbite of a young attendee who mentions music as a foremost
attraction, “There was so much that went on today. I heard a lot of the
bands”. The apparent rejection of the college’s everyday role is, in
essence, little more than an appearance. South Birmingham College uses
St Patrick’s celebrations in order to bolster its recruitment by abandoning
any sense of day-to-day pedagogy and replacing it with a set of broad-
based musical performances, within a context of drinking and socialising.
In this environment the pipe music of the parade is associated not with a
radical political cause but with a de-politicised advertising campaign for a
higher education institution, situated within the vicinity of the
Birmingham Irish Centre.

The Irish residents of Birmingham demonstrate their progress in a

large street parade for St Patrick. By contrast with the early St Patrick’s
processions used as a display of difference for Catholics in America, or
with the sectarian marches in Northern Ireland, Liverpool, London and
Glasgow, Birmingham’s parade has never developed a particularly

58
In the weeks following the parade the video was shown on the South
Birmingham College homepage, <www.sbc.ac.uk> [accessed 1 April 2009].
 Marching Along in the Big Parade: Piping for St Patrick 171

coherent message about nationalism. 59 Instead, the city hosts a kind of

hybrid festival, whose musical expression tends to impact on a number of
competing (and sometimes mutually exclusive) ideologies. While
increasingly resorting to what Nagle describes as “the fetishization of
ethnic difference”;60 that is to say, the joke leprechaun costumes, green
pom-poms, balloons and universal advertising proclamations of a “Lovely
Day for a Guinness”, Birmingham’s diaspora has continued to foster its
own ambiguous character in remembering the national saint of Ireland.
Without their flawless high school majorettes, glittering floats, and
pyrotechnic displays, this, the third largest St Patrick’s Parade in the world
may, admittedly, lack some of the polish of the two that supersede it in
size, but given the inclusion of local musicians—with all of their
amateurism and all of their differences in approach—it perhaps provides a
more reliable account of the position of the Irish community within the
city, a community which has often been diverse and incoherent in its own
political desires. David Wiles has clarified that, when groups organise
public marches, the

procession is a narrative. As it passes the static spectator, an arrangement

in space becomes an arrangement in time. The sequence of places passed
by the procession may also carry the bones of the story, clarified when the
procession halts at key locations.61

If this is the case, then the Birmingham St Patrick’s Parade certainly tells a
story about significant sites. The day starts with morning Mass at St
Anne’s and the parade route, plotted in the festival programme by way of
the pubs en route, endorses the notion that Irish social life is recognised in
the public domain as one revolving around the church and the pub.

One of the first pubs the parade reaches on its route from Camp Hill,
and an officially-recommended “watering hole” for revellers, is the Old
Crown. Housed in Birmingham’s oldest building, the Old Crown has a

59
Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics have claimed ownership of the St Patrick’s
Day Parades in New York throughout its history. See Kelton, Jane Gladden, ‘New
York City St Patrick’s Day Parade: Invention of Contention and Consensus’, the
Drama Review, 29 (1985), pp.93-105. Protestant “Orange” marches take place
across Northern Ireland on 12 July, whilst the equivalent Grand Orange Lodge of
England parade in Liverpool and London. Parades remain sectarian in areas of
Scotland. See Walter, ‘Celebrations of Irishness in Britain’, p.203.
60
Nagle, ‘“Everybody is Irish on St Paddy’s”’, p.568.
61
David Wiles, A Short History of Western Performance Space (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003), p.64.
172 Chapter Five

lengthy history with England’s anti-Irish policies. It is ironic that a pub

with this name was a favourite for those who resented the monarchy:
“Cromwell’s Birmingham supporters had rallied at the Old Crown,
sallying forth the next day to do battle with Prince Rupert”.62 Such a
crowd supporting Cromwell would also have been much maligned in
Ireland. The humour of this history was not lost on Carl Chinn who
emphasises the fact that the Old Crown pub only exists because of the
contemporary Irish community in Birmingham. As Chinn describes,
having been restored by a family from Ireland, the Brennans, it now
thrives under the ownership of the Hickeys, another “respected Birmingham
Irish family”.63

However, a large part of understanding the narrative of the parade

comes from considering the way that the procession itself is arranged so
that the audible focal point at any one time interrelates with the memories
and anticipations of other parts of that year’s parade, as well as the
memories and anticipations of the parades of previous years. Spectators of
Birmingham’s contemporary St Patrick’s Parade are likely to associate
some of the music with the successful Irish popular music of the early
nineties, mindful that in the decade during which the modern parade was
revived, singers from Ireland won the Eurovision Song Contest four times.
Others will associate the parade music with that of sessions in the Irish-
themed bars, which became a staple of cities of Western Europe and
beyond. Certain songs, such as the “Wild Rover” and “God Save Ireland”,
will remind local soccer fans of the way that these tunes have been
creatively reworked in order to support local Irish footballers (such as Paul
McGrath and Steve Staunton) based at Birmingham’s largest sports arenas
during the 1990s. In his concert in Birmingham Symphony Hall in 1997,
Christy Moore joked that those repressed subjects he had been singing,
quite passionately, about in the city during the seventies or eighties were
now either dead or playing for Aston Villa.64

St Patrick’s Day events outside Ireland have always tended to take on

specific colourings. For example, Frank Molloy explains that no
nineteenth-century St Patrick’s Day celebration in Australia would have

62
‘Genesis of a Folksinger/Songwriter’, Vera Johnson; Canadian Folk Music
Bulletin’, <http://cfmb.icaap.org/content/29.1/BV29-Iart2.pdf> [accessed 6
January 2009].
63
Chinn, Birmingham Irish, p.20.
64
Rowen, ‘Christy Moore: Birmingham, Friday 23 May, 1997’, pp.34-35.
 Marching Along in the Big Parade: Piping for St Patrick 173

been complete without a rendition of Moore’s Melodies.65 Thomas Moore’s

introduction to Volume Three of his collection of Melodies (“Ireland is the
country, of all others, which an exile must remember […] our music is the
truest of all comments upon our history”)66 perhaps speaks most loudly to
those seeking to perform their Irish identity away from Ireland. This
Australian-Irish display was far from “authentically” Irish however. At
that time, most residents of Ireland found Moore an intolerable colonial
presence, far too friendly with the English gentry, with his Melodies
reflecting the aesthetic of “English aristocratic drawing rooms”.67

One of the most distinctive things about the Irish musical narrative in
Birmingham is that it contains elements that are contradictory and scarcely
fit together well. At times, the music of the pipe bands is stridently
nationalistic, proclaiming the notion of self-sacrifice for Irish independence
that is associated with figures such as Pádraic Pearse and Bobby Sands.
However the parade includes moments that endorse no such notions, with
performers marching from the British Legion Brass Band and the West
Midlands Fire Service. If the eclectic or incongruous political views of the
Birmingham St Patrick’s Parade were presented by a single Irish musician
or Irish band, or during an Irish concert inside a building, the audience
would no doubt feel that performance to be rather schizophrenic. Yet,
because of the way in which those watching a parade understand the
processional event as a series of sequential moments, contradictions along
the route are not generally a cause for concern. Instead, these
inconsistencies help to tell an overall mosaic narrative of a diasporic
community that is living in a variety of ways in a large and multicultural
city. The circular path of the new St Patrick’s Parade is no social
metaphor. There can be no route that returns to the era of silenced pipes
and peoples in the seventies. Birmingham has accommodated a public
sound of Irishness that remains quite separate to that associated with any
political messages of Ireland.

65
Frank Molloy, “‘The Sigh of the Harp Shall be Sent O’er the Deep”: the
Influence of Thomas Moore in Australia’, in The Creative Migrant ed., O’Sullivan,
pp.115-132 (p.128).
66
Thomas Moore, ‘A Prefatory Letter to the Marchioness Dowager of D’ in A
Selection of Irish Melodies, eds. by Thomas Moore and Sir John Stevenson
(London: J. Powers, 1810).
67
Matthew Campbell, ‘Thomas Moore’s Wild Song: the 1821 Irish Melodies’,
Bullán, 4 (1999), pp.83-103 (p.84).
174 Chapter Five

The strength of this sound, and of the Irish community creating it,
becomes quite public at the Birmingham St Patrick’s Parade, where there
is no opportunity for participants or audiences to step back from the
procession and question why certain effects are heard by certain groups at
certain moments. The dramatic, immediate impact of the parade in the
1990s and its likeness to those marches that began in the 1950s creates the
idea that the city’s Irish music scene was not killed for twenty two years,
but had merely disappeared from the city’s public spaces, as the vulnerable
social status of the diaspora demanded. A continuing, if largely concealed,
interaction between Birmingham’s identity and Ireland’s culture allowed
for the “sudden” location of the world’s biggest display for St Patrick
outside Ireland and America in the heart of England, with music befitting
of, and customised for, the region.
 CONCLUSION

ONGOING INTERCULTURAL PERFORMANCE

A space is understood and appreciated through its echo as much as

through its visual shape, but the acoustic percept usually remains as an
unconscious background experience1

In spring 2010 a series of lunchtime concerts entitled Mid-Day Mantra

was launched at Birmingham Symphony Hall. The programme was
organised by Sampad, a development agency working, since 1990, to
promote South Asian culture in Birmingham. The concert in May was
unique in that it married the “haunting sounds of the Indian Alaap to the
pounding energy of Irish reels”.2 Indian musicians Surmeet and Upneet
Singh performed with Irish musicians Chris O’Malley and Sam Proctor in
a fusion of guitar, tabla, sitar, fiddle, bodhrán and accordion. Birmingham
Symphony Hall houses several arenas on many levels, each of which open
onto a large central space with cafes, shops and bars. Sampad’s free
“Indo-Irish” display took place in one of the foyer bars. Chairs and tables
were moved to create an open antiphonal area that blurred the boundaries
between entertainers and entertained. From here, the music could carry
and reach people sitting on every floor, including those merely passing
through Symphony Hall en route to Birmingham’s Paradise Circus
shopping centre (many of whom demonstrated a momentary involvement
with the show by moving in time to the beat). Mid-Day Mantra, designed
to promote South Asian arts, encouraged most spectators to engage in
Riverdance-style Irish dancing on this occasion, accompanied by Indian
and Irish traditional instruments in a public place for performance in
Birmingham.

The use of Irish music for the promotion of South Asian arts suggests
that, by now, everybody in Birmingham can respond to the city’s annual

1
Juhani Pallasma, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (Chichester:
Wiley, 2008), pp.50-1.
2
Promotional literature for the concert produced by the Arts Council England in
association with Sampad.
176 Conclusion

street parade and be Irish at every moment. A display pairing identifiable

Indian music with identifiable Irish music complements the picture painted
of Birmingham on St Patrick’s Day, where the Irish community amplifies
the recognisable sound(s) of India, Scotland, Brazil, China and other
diasporas invited to participate. Like the boundless creation of space at
Symphony Hall, at this outdoor procession, Irish and non-Irish musics fuse
and reach those in Birmingham simply passing through the central areas,
who do not themselves intend to be involved in a music or ethnic
performance. A series of musical activities between Irish, English and
other cultures has ascertained Birmingham as increasingly multicultural
since the 1950s. Exchanges have happened in unrestricted areas and in
spaces constrained by financial and diplomatic rules. Jazz piano elements
were combined with Irish traditional music at Birmingham Comhaltas
sessions; English pop songs and church hymns were accommodated in
Irish social clubs and parishes, and a similar set of collaborations and
interactions has affected the other examples discussed. In this way,
Birmingham’s Irish diaspora has successfully implemented Ruth
Finnegan’s pattern for music as an “effective integrating theme” in
society.3 They have employed music as a process protecting ethnic
difference; the way by which minorities can acculturate and, ultimately,
become the primary identity of an adopted city.

Mid-Day Mantra is not evidence of Irish acculturation specific to

Birmingham. There is no tangible narrative from Dun Mhuire, culminating,
via the Shamrock Club and St Chad’s Cathedral, in a lunchtime
soundscape of Irish-India (indeed, as the case studies of this book show,
there is no single linearity between the three former sites alone). It is
evidently easier for the contemporary city to be Irish than it was at times
during the previous decades, but the sounds created by the Mid-Day
Mantra are also a product of broader, global Celticism; a fashion that has
moved Irish music into an innovative world music genre. Claiming Irish
music as a world music broadens the theoretical reading of this subject.
The instinctual power of Irish music is appreciated more easily in societies
for which it has a different role to fill than in Ireland and its global
popularity feeds into the musical processes happening to the internal Irish
sound of these societies. Having established itself as the world’s favourite
“other” during the nineties, ethereal, romantic Celtic music associated with
Ireland, can also be everybody’s “own” sound. A universal relocation of
Irish music permits many varied fluid constructions between ethnic and

3
Finnegan, Tales of the City, p.103.
 Ongoing Intercultural Performance 177

(inter)national musics. Sampad’s concert provides one of the most notable

recent fusions of Irish and other musics in Birmingham. Juhani Pallasmaa
has observed, “Every building or space has its characteristic sound of
intimacy or monumentality, invitation or rejection, hospitality or hostility”.4
Specific sites have played a key part in the development of a distinctive set
of Birmingham Irish sounds. The examples I have presented—from the
Birmingham Comhaltas to the marching pipe bands—are best understood
as particular, place-based episodes that constantly engage with a broader
set of international issues and cross-cultural debates at various locations.

The progression of Irish music has been continual, if not temporally

consistent, in Birmingham, affected by interethnic tensions. Many original
post-war migrants passively established a distinct culture by virtue of
inhabiting the new territory of the West Midlands. They were England’s
working class, regarded, on occasion, with suspicion by native residents of
the region because the employment of cheaper labour threatened to lower
wages. There was also the longstanding wariness in England of militant
Catholic practices associated with Irish performance.5 At this stage,
Conradh na Gaeilge Irishness, associating music with language, religion,
sports and other idealised signifiers of nationhood, was epitomised by the
pastiche of the domestic idyll created in Dr Lawrie’s doctor’s surgery in
Handsworth. In this inchoate multicultural context, where religion and
politics could often appear confrontational, Irish music also took on, as
Enda Delaney tells us, “visceral forms in Birmingham such as singing
rebel songs on a Saturday night or, less imaginatively, engaging in late
night taunting of the English”.6 One of the first marks of Irish nationhood
in post-war Birmingham was the founding of thirty-two separate county
associations, an act that immediately asserted diversity and subsets within
that very label, “Irish”. Irish music was constructed as diverse and plural,
but in a parochial sense, and performed in just a few specific sites. While
the Birmingham Comhaltas preserved techniques and customs of County
Roscommon, these styles and their meanings have been changed through
musical performances in Birmingham.

Another community (and musical) division existed between the socialist

movements and the Catholic Church. Church halls and dance clubs alone
accommodated different forms of Irishness. A male seasonal migrant
from County Mayo would attend a different social event to a female nurse

4
Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, pp.50-1.
5
Ziesler, The Irish in Birmingham 1830-1970, p.179.
6
Delaney, The Irish in Post-War Britain, p.185.
178 Conclusion

from Dublin permanently stationed in the city. Such community divisions

yield specific results in music. Groups such as the South Birmingham
Comhaltas and the Birmingham Irish Pipes and Drums have both
attempted to play rules-based versions of Irish music, but their
organisations and purposes are contrasting. Musicians have also
mimicked American-style jazz and big bands in order to express cultural
Irishness in Birmingham. As popular trends have altered, Gerry Smyth’s
“noisy island” of Irish pop and rock has been created in the city by
contemporary guitar-based bands such as the Fr Teds and Cairde.7

In the interim, Irish migrants in Birmingham proved comparatively

silent on the public stage. After the IRA attacks of the seventies, the
possibilities for deliberate collaboration between Irish and non-Irish
musicians were reduced. Parades disappeared from the city centre, the
microcosm for a reactionary “total withdrawal of the Irish community in a
social and political sense”.8 Many Irish people collapsed all spatial and
temporal distances; only this time not with Ireland, but with their new
land. Many instantly integrated with urban England by neutralising Irish
accents, Anglicising Irish names and losing or destroying any music
records and concert programmes that might incriminate them with
applauding Ireland. A series of cultural alliances steadily evolved,
however, with limited public success, as shown in the early eighties by the
pop group Dexy’s Midnight Runners. Dexy’s Midnight Runners made
their impact as the dance halls in Birmingham were closing, having
introduced a fusion of Irish and American popular dance musics. From
the 1980s they could be the symbol for a second, third and fourth
generation of the diaspora, whose set of musical precedents and concerns
differed from any original migrants travelling to Birmingham.

By the time a Birmingham Irish sound enjoyed its renaissance during

the nineties, with a returning street festival and popular Irish concerts in
the city, the sturdy architectural structure of global Celticism could
complement the process. This universal music trend reinforced
Birmingham as an example of the way in which Ireland’s economic
“independence” might increase the appeal of Irish cultural products away
from Ireland. This led Colin Irwin to the hubristic conclusion that the
“whole world is Irish now”.9 Traditional instrumental music, such as that

7
The Father Teds (or sometimes just The Teds) are a five-piece Irish folk-rock
band. Cairde (“friends”) are a seven-piece instrumental band.
8
Chinn, Birmingham Irish, p.164.
9
Irwin, In Search of the Craic, p.123.
 Ongoing Intercultural Performance 179

originally promoted by the Lawries, remains the typical genre with which
to present an Irish sound because of its promotion in the global themed
pub fashions of the nineties. There are, naturally, infinite variations within
this one, communal genre. Traditional session groups are seen to provide
a strong sense of unity, but they allow for customisation and innovation
amongst individual contributions to the picture. In the 1980s, Sean Ó
Riada advised traditional musicians playing in Ireland to mimic the
trajectory of the sun, which rises uniformly each day, but lights up
different occurrences never repeated. Traditional music, he explained,
must follow a similar pattern, with performances adhering to a set
structure but incorporating customised ornamentation and innovation
every time.10

Hence, Irish music away from Ireland defies any easy a priori
definition. Demarcating one characteristic sound underestimates the
relational construct and network with other musical styles, consisting
ultimately of encounters between musicians and audience members in the
adopted location. It is accurate to speak not of the Irish music of
Birmingham, but, instead, of a series of interacting Irish musical idiolects,
in terms of how such interactions were moulded and enabled by particular
performance places. The fact that such a system of interactions may take
place in definable geographical spaces at certain moments in history
means that we can analyse performances in order to locate and understand
the distinctive features of regional communities. But we cannot expect to
find an identikit version of Irish music being replicated from city to city.
Specific places, performers and audience expectations make local Irish
music different to the Irish music of Liverpool, London or New York.
Irish musicians in these locations may be looking back to Ireland as the
fons et origo of their work, but they may be thinking of different parts of
Ireland, of different periods of Irish history and of entirely different
musical styles. This book is based in particular sites of performance
because they provide the discrete environments in which developments
have taken place, moving the expressions of certain private and public
spaces with the city and making Irish sounds synonymous with
Birmingham.

Musicians negotiating their own history and shifting paradigms are

catering for different audience anticipations, are disguising the origins of
their music during periods of interethnic tension and are deliberately

10
Ó Riada, Our Musical Heritage, p.21.
180 Conclusion

adopting a range of Irish and non-Irish musical influences for aesthetic

reasons. A large measure uniting Birmingham’s Irish sounds is its grand
narrative; the fact that music was begun by first generation migrants and
has developed unpredictably at varying paces and exposures since the
1950s, directly responding to particular social, political, financial,
geographical and cultural happenings. Nevertheless, Irish music has
contributed to an international musical community in recent times. While
each location may be unique, the consequences of this are comparable
across the global diaspora. The professional musician and Irish expatriate
Ross Day is the architect of a new Cretan lyra now important for the
musical identity of Greece, for example. The ethnomusicologist Caroline
Bithell has described an active space inhabited by the young Irish diaspora
in Corsica that is similar to the mobile, current Ireland in Birmingham: “an
expression of a contemporary reality, as opposed to a museum-like
reconstruction of a bygone era”.11 With marked assessments of each
region, an imagined community for the global Celt is created.

Global Celticism
When Martin Melhuish singled out the Birmingham pop group, Dexy’s
Midnight Runners as a catalyst for the Celtomania of the 1990s, he
referenced the group’s prominent Irish fiddle and the success of their
single “Come on Eileen”. Melhuish makes an appropriate choice. Dexy’s
Midnight Runners gained a mainstream fan base in America after the
dissemination of this particular pop song through a music video played on
MTV (over a thousand times in 1982 alone), on which the soul band dance
Irish jig-style steps and play fiddle, banjo and accordion on a street corner,
much like an Irish pub session, al fresco. Melhuish’s account suggests that
there was something particular about this group of Birmingham musicians,
as opposed to the Lawries, Luke Kelly, Joanne Boyce and others
protecting or presenting a physical minority voice in Irish much.

Whilst the playing of a fiddle connects new Celtic music to the rural
traditions of Ireland, the pop aesthetic of professional “soulsters” Dexy’s
Midnight Runners differs from other amateur Irish musicians of
Birmingham. This latter group have penetrated further into Birmingham,
whereas, trading under the Celtic label, Dexy’s Midnight Runners reach a

11
Caroline Bithell, ‘Shared Imaginations: Celtic and Corsican Encounters in the
Soundscape of the Soul’, in Celtic Modern, eds. by Stokes and Bohlman, pp.27-72
(p.64).
 Ongoing Intercultural Performance 181

wider audience with a shallower Birmingham rooting. Their measure, in

other words, is global width, rather than regional depth. Dexy’s Midnight
Runners’ song is, typically, Celtic rather than Irish music. As Scott Reiss
explains, Celtic is more engineered, designed for exchange, marketed and
public, but without the natural social connection of identifiable Irish
music.12 Celtic music gained a popular identity without the strictures of
old-style republican Irishness. This music could be boundless by its
commercial success.

The Celtic sound is associated, most prominently, with Irish and

Scottish musics. In Celtic Modern, Martin Stokes and Philip Bohlman
uncover various themes caught up in the recent phenomenon of Celtic
music. Peter Symon’s chapter in their collection presents the social
processes of Scottish traditional music and introduces the case where
“people not only exist locally, they also exist nationally”.13 The
Celtomania growing in America from Dexy’s Midnight Runners presents
an Irish version. An analysis of Irish traditional music in Birmingham
would not necessarily highlight Dexy’s Midnight Runners. Not all
members of the band have Irish ancestry and theirs is not a concern for
music that sounds overtly Irish or presents Ireland’s interests. In essence,
Dexy’s Midnight Runners exist internationally but not locally. The band
could appear fashionable and Celtic in America in the 1980s, as the global
diaspora still “sought to reimagine Irish music free of and beyond Irish
national experience”.14

There had been particular instances of global “freedoms” in Irish music

prior to the revival of popular Celtic music. In his piece, “Celtic
Australia”, Graeme Smith claims Irish music as a distinct and significant
measure of Australian national identity. Sounds brought by Irish
immigrants in the nineteenth century found an immediate home as
Australia sought a culture that would show its national distinction from
England. Performing Irishness there could also mean being Australian
first. Bush bands have since become a musical signifier of Australia and

12
Scott Reiss, ‘Tradition and Imaginary: Irish Traditional Music and the Celtic
Phenomenon’, in Celtic Modern: Music at the Global Fringe, eds. by Stokes and
Bohlman, pp.145-169 (p.158).
13
Peter Symon, ‘“You Cannae Take Your Music Stand Into a Pub”: A
Conversation with Stan Reeves about Traditional Music Education’, in Celtic
Modern eds. by Stokes and Bohlman, pp.257-274 (p.261).
14
Graeme Smith, ‘Celtic Australia: Bush Bands, Irish Music, Folk Music, and the
New Nationalism’, in Celtic Modern eds. by Stokes and Bohlman, pp.73-92 (p.89).
182 Conclusion

they, like the band on the “Come on Eileen” music video, comprise fiddle,
mandolin, accordion, and whistle; instruments derived from the rural
house music relocated by the Irish diaspora and protected in the céilí band
set-up. Such fluid musical constructions of nationhood would ultimately
result in the global Celtic movement, where people in other locations
could strengthen their own identity by adopting the qualities of a
boundless, ownerless, ethnic, world music.

As the Australian example illustrates, the “Celt” was not a product of a

1980s pop revival. Indeed, Stokes and Bohlman’s study of Celtic
identities is founded on the thinking that Native Americans were—perhaps
unconvincingly—considered to be the descendants of earlier Celtic
immigrants and to have shared a process of colonisation and territorial
dispossession similar to Gaelic Ireland.15 In general, however, musicologists
have tended to disregard the importance of location and identity when
analysing the commercial success of recent Celtic music labels. Adam
Krims cynically describes “that racialization of whiteness that the music
industry has come to label ‘Celtic’”;16 Stephen Feld considers the broader
“world music” title as simply a “new ubiquitous global pop sales genre”.17

Nonetheless, Dexy’s Midnight Runners bridge the gap, between the

packaged pop of global Celticism— Melhuish’s “Celtomania”—and the
Irish music complementing it in Birmingham. The Birmingham Irish have
enjoyed a progressive involvement with the musics of other cultures,
benefiting from contact with English and a range of ethnic traditions since
1950 and, later, helped by the Celtic global movement. Such processes
illuminate the existential crisis debated by the Pakistani-born Londoner
Sarfraz Manzoor about the state of the host nation itself in 2004: “the
question of English identity has been most fiercely contested, and one
which has regularly attracted writers searching for the heart of
Englishness”.18 By contrast with the essentialist worries of the writers
cited by Manzoor, the process of cultural exchange may be a relatively
fluid and dynamic one, as shown by musical scholars who have succeeded
in locating various global Celticisms.

15
Stokes and Bohlman, ‘Introduction’, in Celtic Modern, p.11.
16
Krims, Music and Urban Geography, p.134.
17
Stephen Feld, ‘The Poetics and Politics of Pygmy Pop, in Western Music and Its
Others: Difference, Representation and Appropriation in Music, eds. by Born and
Hesmondhalgh, pp.254-279 (p.255).
18
Sarfraz Manzoor, ‘Bradford reflects on many shades of Englishness’, The
Observer Review, 5 July 2009, pp.4-5 (p.4).
 Ongoing Intercultural Performance 183

England Versus Ireland?

The shameful history of nineteenth-century Australian colonisation and
genocide allowed the Irish to encounter a cultural vacuum there that they
could fill. It is tempting to assume that this same kind of dynamic (albeit
less devastating) occurred in Birmingham during the following century.
Birmingham’s weak voice in academic and popular publications may be a
direct consequence of a particularly enfeebled kind of cultural identity. In
1974, for example, the music critic Rob Partridge blamed the apparently
indistinguishable sound of Birmingham specifically on its geography:
“Too close [to Manchester, Liverpool and Sheffield in the north, and to
London in the south], perhaps, to form its own unique identity, but situated
just right to catch whatever happens to the north or south”.19

The advertised sound of Birmingham since then has been either an

imbibed spoken accent habitually voted the nation’s worst regional dialect,
or else, as Adam Sherwin asserted when constructing a musical map of
Britain in 2008, it is “the stronghold of reggae”.20 Sherwin’s idiomatic
newspaper report scarcely develops the chronotopic analysis to support
this. Neither does he describe the location of the city or the ethnicities of
its people. Rather, Sherwin affords Birmingham a typically laidback,
lackadaisical genre growing from the musical traditions of “seriously easy
going” Jamaica, based solely on the international successes of UB40, a
reggae band formed by the Birmingham-born sons of Scottish folk
musician Ian Campbell. It might appear, therefore, that Irish music and
accompanying traditions coursed quickly through Birmingham’s veins
because the city hunted a particular kind of identifiable sound from any
and all inhabitants. As Kathleen Paul explains, the “British postwar case
would appear to suggest that formal citizenship matters less than the
constructed national identity”.21

From the 1950s, a sizeable proportion of Brummies—those creating its

global identity—would have identified with Irish music. Unlike the self-
conscious, marketable and ubiquitous Celtic music genre, County Meath
emigrant Frank Griffin explains the initial process of Irish integration at
this time as a simple matter of numbers rather than organised musical
strategy, describing how, “We became part of the city life and up to the

19
Partridge, ‘Brum Beat: New Musical Express 1974’.
20
Adam Sherwin, ‘Nation divided in quest for perfect beat’, The Times, Tuesday
February 5 2008, p.9.
21
Paul, Whitewashing Britain, p.xv.
184 Conclusion

present day, if you see three people standing talking, at least one will be
Irish or be of Irish descent”.22 The writings of Sean O’Casey—whose life
famously led him from Dublin to London and then to Torquay—
demonstrate how Griffin’s argument can exist not only locally but
nationally. O’Casey argued the similarity of England to Ireland; “as
Ireland isn’t anything as Irish as some Gaels make her out to be, so
England isn’t as English as many Irish think her to be”.23 Irish music was
not an automatic consequence of the migratory statistics in post-war
Birmingham, but those moving to Birmingham chose to perform music
indicative of Ireland at various times in order to restore their urban
difference.

In as early as 1839, just as Irish music was creating Australia, Thomas

Carlyle acknowledged an English resistance to such cultural expression; a
paranoia that the migrant Irishman, “not by his strength but by the
opposite of strength, drives out the Saxon native, takes possession in his
room”.24 A contemporary ethnomusicological application of Carlyle’s
idea might imply that, if Irish music flourishes as an identifiable sound of
Birmingham, it must have driven out the audible English identity. These
binary divisions are ultimately flawed because of the ongoing process of
negotiation and collaboration between musical cultures. The Grey Cock
Folk Club—where audiences would go to encounter English folksong in
mid-twentieth century Birmingham—owes its name to the ballad of the
Grey Cock, which was introduced to the folk circuit by a second-
generation Irish woman, Cecilia Costello (née Kelly), demonstrating that
even the very scholarly restoration of an “English” traditional music in
Birmingham was aided by contact with local Irish residents.25

Such an encounter has worked both ways. The career of Luke Kelly
shows that Irish music can fill a void in Birmingham and it can profit by
the reappearance of native music. The English folk revival and, precisely,
Kelly’s fellowship with British and American socialist singers in
Birmingham, inspired his own performances. In fact, according to fellow
Critics’ Group member Denis Turner, it took much cajoling by Kelly’s
wife (who ran a theatre company in Dublin) to persuade him to leave
Birmingham and accomplish the Irish music revival in Ireland.26 A clearer

22
Chinn, Birmingham Irish, p.131.
23
Sean O’Casey, Sunset and Evening Star (London: Macmillan, 1954) p.92.
24
Thomas Carlyle, Chartism (London: James Fraser, 1839), p.28.
25
Lloyd, Folk Song in England, p.147.
26
Conversation with Denis Turner, December 2009.
 Ongoing Intercultural Performance 185

demonstration of the fertile interaction between Irish and English music

can be seen once Kelly had left Birmingham with the city’s Irish music
hushed in the seventies. Rather than blossoming, filling the void, as a
reaction, English socialist music suffered its own breakdown, susceptible
to the influence of American popular trends, divisions within the MacColl
camp and a general petering out of the city’s unfashionable folk clubs. It
is not the case, then, that the success of Irish music as a public sound of
Birmingham meant the failure of English music, or vice versa. Rather, in
Birmingham, different cultural strands have been mutually reinforcing and
sometimes mutually weakening.

The ways in which Irish and English communities combine is best

embodied in the cultural display by second- and third-generation Irishmen
and Irishwomen of Birmingham, including Kathleen Lawrie, Noreen
Cullen and Katie Jordan. A sharper understanding of Ireland’s audibility
in the city comes from considering individual contributions to the entire
picture. Those promoting Birmingham Irishness beyond the city’s sites
during the 1990s include Colin Dunne, the Birmingham-born Irish dancing
world champion who appeared on the BBC children’s show Blue Peter as
a youngster and replaced the Irish-American Michael Flatley as the lead in
Riverdance. Also from that second generation of the 1970s is the All-
Ireland champion uilleann-piper, Marcus Coulter; an artist who opened his
own workshop in Birmingham, the products of which have gained high
praise from the Irish press: “Every novice piper should be given the
chance to start playing with a chanter like this! Fantastic work Marcus!”27

The second-generation have been instrumental in constructing and

maintaining positive examples of Irishness in Birmingham. These artists
are English-born, their primary frame of reference is usually to English
schools, English histories and the English language. Yet such people
categorise themselves as Irish because of their family background and,
after the traumas of the Troubles, believe themselves to be playing a key
role in restoring the reputation of Ireland, although, as Enda Delaney has
pointed out, the children of migrants are sometimes contrasted harshly
with the “worthy inhabitants of the motherland”.28 Those who sing songs
bemoaning their loss of an Irish home and their pain at leaving Irish
family, having never experienced any such thing, nor the realities of
building a life in contemporary Ireland, require the rhetoric of identity and

27
Kieron Concannon, ‘Birmingham Pipers’ Club’, An Píobaire, 4 (2004), p.11.
28
Delaney, The Irish in Post-War Britain, p.68.
186 Conclusion

community and sense of place that lie at the heart of this book. It is a
rhetoric that modern Celtic brands of culture can sometimes overlook.
Music determines the perception that people are Irish in Birmingham,
reifying the connection with a mythical global Celtic homeland. The
engagement of Irishness with other diasporas is not at the expense of
Englishness, but the inevitable product of those “worthy inhabitants” who
succeeded in urban England.

The Birmingham Irish

In Lily Lawrie’s house in Handsworth; in dance halls, pubs and
churches across the city, post-war migrants etched out their spaces with
musics. From these, in due course, a Birmingham Irish identity entered
the public sphere, so that today’s grand St Patrick’s Parade is a colourful,
boundless, all-embracing artistic spectacle for the city. The journeying of
music from within these specific spaces towards a more transient arena is
symbolic of the global Celtic movement, whose performances have
developed outwards from American MTV pop favourites of the 1980s.
The situation is echoed in other world musics too, most notably, the
Klezmer revivalists who introduced new forms of Jewish traditions in
American commercial music at this time. Developing a musical identity
that grows beyond its roots in one particular place is relevant because
people themselves are self-evidently mobile. Many of those who travelled
from Ireland to Birmingham have since moved with music to other
locations, or have seen descendants travel further afield. Paul O’Brien
now sings “Birmingham Irish I am I am” from his new home in Canada
for instance.

One assumed consequence of a place-based musical identity may be

exclusivity. There is a danger that those who do not know the cultural
codes associated with the performance of the region may feel excluded
without the reassurance of wider global analogies. Someone who has no
knowledge of the complex history of the English Midlands could not
understand the resonance of a particular song being sung in a Birmingham
location. The reaction to singing “God Save Ireland” in a rebuilt pub on
New Street near the site of the IRA attacks would be entirely different to
the reaction if that song was performed in the Cromwell supporters’
historic Old Crown, for example. However, the Irish occupation of the
city has been inclusive and audible and assisted by those sounds of Ireland
that have become a self-conscious part of universal Celtic music. Irish
music in Birmingham is the perfect sphere for many born outside Ireland
 Ongoing Intercultural Performance 187

to feel part of a shared culture. Little prior knowledge is required or

assumed, because everybody can engage with music that is billed as a
“world music”.

The successful nativisation of Ireland in Birmingham represents

something very different to the ideas of Ireland in Ireland however. Irish
musicians in Ireland play Irish music, not world music. Fintan Vallely
sees in modern concepts of Celtic musics a certain bastardisation of
Irishness, with “world music” a racist term for Irish musicians, given that
those born in Ireland needed no broader context for their national music-
making and “simply KNEW what it [Irish music] was”.29 Vallely’s
appraisal repudiates Birmingham’s Irish artists and echoes Éamon de
Valera’s much mocked boast that “to know what the Irish people wanted I
only had to examine my heart”.30 The approach dismisses such
scholarship on social acculturation as Benedict Anderson’s persuasive
arguments that second-generation migrants may feel and express a deeper
connection to the homeland than their parents do.31 A comparable state of
affairs is described by Giora Fiedman. When writing about the global
uptake of Jewish musical traditions presenting an apparent contradiction of
identities, Fiedman explains why a scholar such as Vallely may be
“confused because we are educated that this is mine, this is yours […]
Music doesn’t have borders”.32

At times, Birmingham’s Irish music has displayed a similar

exclusivity. The non-Catholic Irish man or the Irish woman discouraged
from attending the Easter Monday Mass at St Chad’s Cathedral are
unlikely to feel that they are part of the communal Irish identity
proclaimed by the music. Then again, these events are balanced by open
folk and traditional music performances at centres like the Spotted Dog
pub and the Birmingham Irish Centre. Any contrasts are epitomised by
the deliberate multicultural displays of Birmingham’s St Patrick’s Parades,
where a wide assortment of participants (particularly those who have no
connection with Ireland) are positively encouraged to take part at every
stage of restoring Irishness for the city.

29
Fintan Vallely, ‘The Apollos of Shamrockery’, in Celtic Modern, eds. by Stokes
and Bohlman, pp.201-217 (p.202).
30
Quoted by Peter Cottrell, The Irish Civil War (Oxford: Osprey, 2008), p.30.
31
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections of the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).
32
Gruber, Virtually Jewish, p.212.
188 Conclusion

In their recent series, Thar Saile, the Irish language television station,
TG4, celebrated the success of the Irish diaspora. By recording Irish
language-speaking communities in various countries they acknowledge
that Irish cultural traditions do exist and expand away from Ireland. There
is an acceptance that intercultural contacts are made between Irish heritage
and cultural arts in international locations and that these can, in fact,
strengthen rather than weaken Ireland’s national camaraderie. Indeed, for
some commentators, these contacts may be the only way for Ireland to
recover from the recent implosion of its economy. In the face of the
country’s latest financial downfall, the increasingly desperate Irish
government appointed Gabriel Byrne as cultural ambassador in New York,
whilst the economist David McWilliams argued:

For years, the exiled Irish reminded us of a failed Ireland; in our globalised
future they will be the saviours of a successful Ireland. The tribe is the
catalyst which will power the Hibernian lift-off. All we need is the
courage to imagine a Greater Ireland that transcends geography, where the
country is the mother ship and the tribe the nation.33

The different musical genres, groups and goals described in this book
reinforce a continual movement of Irishness into Birmingham, quite at
odds with the strategy of marketing organisations such as the Irish Tourist
Board, Fáilte Ireland. Their intention is to draw new audiences by
proclaiming the distinctiveness of Irish culture specific to Ireland. Yet,
without embracing the space in world music, that sense of distinctiveness
is established through codes that may be impenetrable or alienating to
outsiders. Quite contrary to the publicised message, some county pub
sessions in Ireland are notoriously unfriendly or closed to those outside the
local tradition. In Ethnicity, Identity and Music, Martin Stokes recounts
the disturbing story of a holidaying musician being attacked with an axe
after turning up for an Irish session and attempting to join in with the
regular local players.34 When performing in County Kerry in August
2000, the East Clare fiddler Martin Hayes made more humorous
distinctions between the tourist-friendly stereotypes of Ireland’s rural past
and the very different realities of musicians in contemporary Ireland.35

33
David McWilliams, The Generation Game: Boom, Bust and Ireland’s Economic
Miracle (London: Macmillan, 2008), p.274.
34
Stokes, Ethnicity, Identity and Music, pp.9-10.
35
O’Flynn, The Irishness of Irish Music, p.80.
 Ongoing Intercultural Performance 189

In the new recession-era Ireland, an increasing number of musicians

have sung cynical, knowingly self-referential songs that would not travel
with groups of Irish migrants (or their descendants) who were unaware of
the latest social developments in the country. Eleanor McEvoy’s
composition dealing with the prosperous area of South Dublin, the “Fields
of Dublin 4”, highlights the irrelevance of erstwhile famine songs such as
the “Fields of Athenry”, whereas street buskers in Dublin’s Temple Bar
have composed a popular song with an original opening line to the
tourists’ favourite “Wild Rover”, replacing “I’ve been a Wild Rover for
manys a year”, with “I’ve been a Wild Rover for too many years”.36 The
world-weary scepticism of these rewritten versions (with their references
to particular Irish politicians and particular Irish economic activities)
would make little sense to those who do not know about specific
developments in Dublin during the post-Celtic Tiger era.

Chronological Period: Through the Troubles

and the Tiger
Tina Ramnarine proposes two models for a multicultural society. One
has aspirational inclusiveness at the expense of cultural distinctions. This
society emphasises “universal exchanges resulting in various ‘fusions’ that
characterise global cities like London”. Ramnarine’s alternative promotes
a diversity of cultures that separates groups in one urban space, to “foster a
view of various cultural groupings maintaining distinct traditions”.37
Birmingham has exhibited both of these models. At times during the past
two decades, when Ireland has generally been regarded as a global
economic and cultural success, Irish music has been performed at some of
the most prestigious and luxurious concert venues in the city,
demonstrating the successful integration of a migrant community with
Birmingham society. But in an earlier period, during the IRA attacks and
poor performance of the Irish economy during the 1970s and 1980s, and
now, post-Tiger, Irish music plays an important part in maintaining the
self-confidence of a community that sometimes feels itself to be under
siege in a city of separate cultural groupings, within which Irish music
might not be welcome in a number of public forums.

36
‘Fields of Dublin Four’ appears on Eleanor McEvoy, Out There (Moscodisc,
2006) [on CD].
37
Ramnarine, ‘Musical Performance in the Diaspora: Introduction’, p.6.
190 Conclusion

As a socially creative movement for migrants to Birmingham, Irish

music has been the sound of a multicultural globalised city. Birmingham’s
Irish music retains particular interdependencies of space, time and
memory, but the identity has never been fixed. There are inevitable
fluctuations and mutations because, one success of cultural integration, is
that the Irish music discussed here has scarcely been occurring in a
vacuum. The Birmingham Irish community has embraced the opportunity
for interchange with non-Irish sounds of the city. Irish music is not
policed, played or heard only by an élite group who self-identify
themselves as Irish. Instead, people of different ethnic backgrounds in the
region, including the English host majority, have appropriated musical
themes and motifs associated with Ireland in order to suit their own
purposes. The alignment of Irish music with Indian music at the Mid-Day
Mantra indicates the city’s space for Celtic globalisation since the 1990s;
a globalisation that has accelerated the progress of Ireland in Birmingham
and has provided the impetus to categorise Irish music as a world music.

In essence, then, we can trace a vital aspect of the history of the Irish
diaspora through its private and public musical performance spaces in
Birmingham. Ethnomusicologists cannot hope to complete its historical
reconstruction through collections of verbal and musical statements from
performers, or from written sources pertaining to relevant events, but such
archives can remain dynamic sources for the construction and
reconstruction of history. In acknowledging the opportunity for continual
musical manipulations amongst the various ethnicities of Birmingham, we
can see that this Irish story in music is far from finished. It continues to
develop, resonating with migrant communities beyond Ireland and beyond
Birmingham. In our modern, networked world, musical calibrations will
take place in various international and virtual ways that may well mirror
the site-specific progress of Birmingham.

The Mid-Day Mantra celebration at Birmingham Symphony Hall in

2010 typifies the issues we have considered for Irish audibility in
Birmingham over the last sixty years. The performance of Irish music in
Birmingham has been a process of negotiating borders (as shown by the
clearing of furniture out of the foyer bars), who such borders might
include (as shown by the audience dancing, collaborating with the
performers) and whether borders really exist at all (as shown by the area
beyond the performance site reached by the music). David Fitzpatrick has
explained that, for incipient Irish communities in early twentieth century
Britain, integration to a kind of “curious middle place, came for those of
 Ongoing Intercultural Performance 191

Irish descent”.38 Fitzpatrick’s assessment is social, but my analysis has

presented the audible city of Birmingham as this very real, curious middle
place of England. Understanding the physical places of performance is the
means by which to fully appreciate that Irish music has interacted with the
West Midlands since the 1950s. Birmingham Irish music can, then, have a
broader relevance for the expanding, transient Celtic movement. In an era
of mass travel, high-speed communication and globalisation, Irish music is
not entirely bounded by territorial considerations and it is broadened by
contact with a wider geographical range of listeners and enthusiasts.

Sampad’s recent celebration of Irish and Indian musics shows that an

intercultural set of musical partnerships between the Irish and other
communities of Birmingham has proved successful, in terms of attendance
and public profile. This success has not been arrived at easily. It has been
the result of a complex set of cultural negotiations and realignments.
Today, as both Ireland and the UK weather a new period of recession, with
potential emigration and economic decline, these intercultural negotiations
are set to continue. Irish music is prominent in Birmingham for the same
reason that it is prominent in America and elsewhere, because “Irish men
and women have found it relevant to their experiences of the modern
world. This relevance has been based in the long-standing accommodation
with emigration”.39 At the time of writing, as Ireland suffers from a
renewed bout of financial paralysis and stagnation, the Irish music of
Birmingham is entering into another series of negotiations with the music
of other communities in the locale. The Celtic Tiger era can now be
historicised and, in a fresh chapter, Ireland will find innovative ways of
articulating its particularity—and its national relationships with other
regional and world cultures—through music as a community art for the
diaspora. In the forthcoming years, musical collaborations and contrasts
with increasingly vocal diasporas from other countries (most notably India
and China), whose economic progress and cultural prestige in the
imagined global village seem to be progressing on an entirely different
track, will continue to elucidate our narrative of the Birmingham Irish
communities of 1950-2010.

38
David Fitzpatrick, ‘A Curious Middle Place: the Irish in Britain, 1871-1921’, in
The Irish in Britain 1815-1939, eds. by Swift and Gilley (Maryland: Barnes and
Noble, 1989), pp.10-59.
39
Smith, ‘My Love is in America’, p.221.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bibliography of Published Sources

Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture
(New York: Routledge, 1991)
Kofi V. Agawu, Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries,
Positions (London: Routledge, 2003)
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections of the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983)
Arjun Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural
Economy’, Public Culture, 2 (1990), pp.1-24
Aidan Arrowsmith, ‘Plastic Paddy: Negotiating Identity in Second-
Generation ‘Irish-English’ Writing’, Irish Studies Review, 8 (2000),
pp.35-43
—. ‘Plastic Paddies vs. Master Racers: “Soccer” and Irish Identity’, The
International Journal of Cultural Studies, 7 (2004), pp.460-79
Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1984)
—. Rabelais and his World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984)
Diane L. Barr, ‘Title II: The Obligations and Rights of the Lay Christian
Faithful’, in New Commentary on the Code of Canon Law, eds., by
John P. Beal, James Coriden and Thomas J. Green (Mahwah: Paulist
Press, 2000), pp.291-303
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Pimlico,
1979)
Tony Bennett, ‘Popular Culture and ‘the turn to Gramsci’’, in Cultural
Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, ed., by John Storey
(Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994), pp.222-229
Andrew Bibby, ‘Christy Moore Birmingham Odeon’, Folk Roots, 35
(1986), p.46
Birmingham City Council, Cultural Background: 2001 Population
Census: Ethnic and Religious Groups, Country of Birth (Birmingham:
Birmingham City Council, 2007)
—. ‘Irish History in Birmingham’
<http://www.birmingham.gov.uk/GenerateContent> [accessed 23 June
2008]
194 Bibliography

Caroline Bithell, ‘Shared Imaginations: Celtic and Corsican Encounters in

the Soundscape of the Soul’, in Celtic Modern: Music at the Global
Fringe, eds., by Martin Stokes and Philip Bohlman (Maryland:
Scarecrow Press, 2003), pp.27-72
Philip Bohlman, ‘Composing the Cantorate: Westernizing Europe’s Other
Within’, in Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation
and Appropriation in Music, eds., by Georgina Born and David
Hesmondhalgh (London: University of California Press, 2000),
pp.187-212
—. Focus: Music, Nationalism, and the Marking of the New Europe
(Oxford: Routledge, 2011)
Barbara Bradby, “Imagining Ireland” Conference, Dublin, October 30th-
31st, 1993’, Popular Music, 13 (1994), pp.107-109
Avtar Brah, Cartographies or Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London:
Routledge, 1996)
Breandán Breathnach, Folk Music and Dances of Ireland (Dublin: Talbot
Press, 1971)
‘Brendan Mulvihill’ <http://www.brendanmulvihill.com/> [accessed 5
November 2008]
Hugh Brody, Inishkillane: Change and Decline in the West of Ireland
(London: Allan Lane The Penguin Press, 1973)
Maggie Burns, George Thomson in Birmingham and the Blaskets
(Birmingham: Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Forthcoming)
Barbara Callaghan, ‘Birmingham Comes of Age’, Treoir, 15 (1983),
pp.11-13
Matthew Campbell, ‘Thomas Moore’s Wild Song: the 1821 Irish
Melodies’, Bullán, 4 (1999), pp.83-103
Sean Campbell, Irish Blood English Heart (Cork: Cork University Press,
2011)
Thomas Carlyle, Chartism (London: James Fraser, 1839)
Charles Carson, ‘“Whole New Worlds”: Music and the Disney Theme
Park Experience’, Ethnomusicology Forum, 13 (2004), pp.228-235
Ciarán Carson, Irish Traditional Music (Belfast: Appletree Press, 1986)
‘Cecilia Costello’
<http;//www.btinternet.com/~radical/thefolkmag/Costello.htm>
[accessed 2 February 2010]
Eugene Chadbourne, ‘Mick O’Connor Biography’
<http://www.answers.com/topic/mick-o-connor-world-artist>
[accessed 5 November 2008]
 Irish Music Abroad: Diasporic Sounds in Birmingham 195

Malcolm Chapman, ‘Thoughts on Celtic Music’, in Ethnicity, Identity and

Music: The Musical Construction of Place ed., by Martin Stokes
(Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1994), pp.29-44
Carl Chinn, Birmingham Irish: Making Our Mark (Birmingham:
Birmingham Library Services, 2003)
Jonathan Coe, The Rotters Club (London: Penguin, 2002)
Joan Schraith Cole, ‘The Wren’
<http://www.autunmalwind.com/joan/wren.htm> [accessed 11 April
2011]
Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, ‘An Irish Ireland in Britain’, Treoir, 2
(1970), p.9
—. ‘Birmingham Céilí House’, Treoir, 11 (1979), p.6
—. ‘Cashel’s Welcome for Birmingham’, Treoir, 4 (1972), p.11
—. ‘Competitions’ <http://comhaltas.ie/events/competitions> [accessed 22
August 2010]
—. ‘Development Programme in Full Flight: 200 Projects and 16 Cultural
Centres’, Treoir, 40 (2008), p.3
—. ‘English Tour’, Fonn: Bulletin of the Newry Branch of Comhaltas
Ceoltóirí Éireann, 3 (1963), p.10
—. ‘History’ <http://comhaltas.ie/about/history> [accessed 21 August
2010]
Kieron Concannon, ‘Birmingham Pipers’ Club’, An Píobaire, 4 (2004),
p.11
Pat Conway, Soodlum’s Selection of Irish Ballads (Dublin: Soodlum
Music, 1981)
Nicholas Cook, ‘We Are All (Ethno)musicologists Now’, in The New
(Ethno)musicologies, ed., by Henry Stobart (Lanham: Scarecrow Press,
2008), pp.48-70
Roger Cooter, When Paddy Met Geordie: The Irish in County Durham
and Newcastle (Sunderland: University of Sunderland Press, 2005)
Copperplate Distribution, ‘Marcas Ó Murchú, Turas Ceoil’
<http://www.copperplatemailorder.com/cicd163html>
[accessed November 18 2010]
Peter Cottrell, The Irish Civil War (Oxford: Osprey, 2008)
Ultan Cowley, The Men Who Built Britain: A History of the Irish Navvy
(Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 2001)
Mike Cronin and Daryl Adair, The Wearing of the Green: A History of St
Patrick’s Day (London: Routledge, 2002)
P.J. Curtis, Notes From the Heart: A Celebration of Traditional Irish
Music (Dublin: Torc, 1994)
196 Bibliography

Jacqueline Dagnall, ‘Birmingham Six Benefit: Wembley Conference

Centre, London’, Folk Roots, 82 (1990), p.79
Graham Davis, The Irish in Britain, 1815-1914 (Dublin: Gill and
Macmillan, 1991)
Patsy Davis, ‘Birmingham’s Irish Community and the Murphy Riots of
1867’, Midland History, 31 (2006), pp.37-66
Ruth Davis, ‘Time, Place and Memory: Songs for a North African Jewish
Pilgrimage’, in Music and Displacement: Diasporas, Mobilities, and
Dislocations in Europe and Beyond, eds., by Erik Levi and Florian
Scheding (Plymouth: Scarecrow Press, 2010), pp.71-88
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1976)
Seamus Deane, ‘General Introduction’, in The Field Day Anthology of
Irish Writing, 3 volumes, eds. by Seamus Deane et al (Derry: Field
Day, 1991-2002), I, pp.xix-xxvi
—. ‘Poetry and Song 1800-1890’, in The Field Day Anthology of Irish
Writing, 3 volumes, eds. by Seamus Deane et al (Derry: Field Day,
1991-2002), II, pp.1-114
Enda Delaney, Demography, State and Society: Irish Migration to Britain,
1921-1971 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000)
—. The Irish in Post-War Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)
‘Dempsey’s Lot: Tommy Dempsey’ <http://www.dempseys-
lot.co.uk/tommy-dempsey.htm> [accessed 12 November 2010]
John Denvir, The Irish in Britain From the Earliest Times to the Fall of
Parnell (London: Kegan Paul Trench Trüber, 1892)
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, trans. by Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1995)
Andrew Downes, ‘Bringing Down the Barriers Pops the Elitist Bubble’,
FourFour Magazine, 18 (2007), p.4
—. Celtic Rhapsody (Stourbridge: Lynwood Music, 2002)
‘England’s first Chant Laureate’, BBC News Tuesday 11 May 2004
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/3702313.stm> [accessed
16 January 2010]
Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Globalization: The Key Concepts (Oxford:
Berg, 2007)
Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash, ‘Globalization, Modernity and the
Spatialization of Social Theory: An Introduction’, in Global
Modernities, eds., by Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash and Roland
Robertson (London: Sage Publications, 1995), pp.1-24
Stephen Feld, ‘The Poetics and Politics of Pygmy Pop, in Western Music
and Its Others: Difference, Representation and Appropriation in
 Irish Music Abroad: Diasporic Sounds in Birmingham 197

Music, eds., by Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh (London:

University of California Press, 2000), pp.187-212
Steven Fielding, Class and Ethnicity (Milton Keynes: Open University
Press, 1992)
Ruth Finnegan, Tales of the City: A Study of Narrative and Urban Life
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
—. The Hidden Musicians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1989)
David Fitzpatrick, ‘A Curious Middle Place: the Irish in Britain, 1871-
1921’, in The Irish in Britain 1815-1939, eds., by Roger Swift and
Sheridan Gilley (Maryland: Barnes and Noble, 1989), pp.10-59
Rachel C. Fleming, ‘Resisting Cultural Standardization: Comhaltas
Ceoltoirí Éireann and the Revitalization of Traditional Music in
Ireland’, Journal of Folklore Research, 41 (2004), pp.227-257
William Grattan Flood, ‘Irish Music in the Time of Queen Bess’, Journal
of the Irish Folk Song Society, 13 (1913), pp.20-21
Football Jokes
<http://www.footballjokes.co.uk/songschants/miscellaneous.html>
[accessed 10 February 2012]
Robert Fitzroy Foster, The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in
Ireland (London: Allen Lane, 2001)
Romain Garbaye, ‘City Template Birmingham’
<http://www.unesco.org/most/p97birm.doc> [accessed 30 October
2010]
‘Genesis of a Folksinger/Songwriter’, Vera Johnson; Canadian Folk Music
Bulletin’, <http://cfmb.icaap.org/content/29.1/BV29-Iart2.pdf>
[accessed 6 January 2009]
Des Geraghty, Luke Kelly: A Memoir (Dublin: Basement Press, 1994)
John Giles, A Football Man (Chatham: Hodder & Stoughton, 2010)
Breda Gray, ‘The Irish Diaspora: Globalised Belonging(s)’, Irish Journal
of Sociology, 11/2 (2002), pp.123-144
Lucy Green, Music, Gender, Education (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997)
Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1988)
Ruth Ellen Gruber, Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in
Europe (London: University of California Press, 2002)
Denis Gwynn, ‘The Irish Immigration’, in The English Catholics 1850-
1950 ed., by George Andrew Beck (London: Burns Oates, 1950)
pp.265-290
198 Bibliography

Reg Hall, Irish Music and Dance in London 1870-1970 (PhD Thesis,
University of Sussex, 1994)
Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies’, in The
Cultural Studies Reader, ed., by Simon During (London: Routledge,
1993), pp.97-109
—. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London:
Macmillan, 1978)
Ben Harker, Class Act: The Cultural and Political Life of Ewan MacColl
(London: Pluto Press, 2007)
Mary J. Hickman, Religion, Class and Identity (Hampshire: Avebury,
1995)
B. Gerald Hodgson, ‘The Irish in Britain’, The Furrow, 5 (1954), p.226
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialetic of Enlightenment,
trans. by John Cumming (London: Allen Lane, 1973)
Hy. R. Hough, ‘The Revival of the War Pipes’, Journal of the Irish Folk
Song Society, 12 (1912), pp.31-35
Marjorie Howes, Yeats’s Nations: Gender, Class, and Irishness
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
Brad Hurley, ‘An Interview with Catherine McEvoy’, A Guide to the Irish
Flute <http://www.firescribble.net/flute/mcevoy.html> [accessed 2
September 2009]
Colin Irwin, In Search of the Craic: One Man’s Pub Crawl Through Irish
Music (London: Andre Deutsch Ltd., 2004)
John Archer Jackson, The Irish in Britain (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1963)
Alexander Norman Jeffares, A New Commentary on the Poems of W.B.
Yeats (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968)
Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, ‘Dismantling Irena: The Sexualizing
of Ireland in Early Modern England’, in Nationalisms and Sexualities,
eds., by Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer and Patricia
Yaeger (London: Routledge, 1992) pp.157-171
Vince Jordan, ‘Normandy Landing’, Treoir, 40 (2008), p.46
Vincent Jordan, ‘Carmel a Star with Birmingham’, Treoir, 25 (1993), p.14
—. ‘South Birmingham Celebration’, Treoir, 26 (1994), p.23
John Joyce, ‘The Globalization of Music: Expanding Spheres of
Influence’, The Global History Reader, eds., by Bruce Mazlish and
Akira Iriye (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp.222-231
Jane Gladden Kelton, ‘New York City St Patrick’s Day Parade: Invention
of Contention and Consensus’, The Drama Review, 29 (1985), pp.93-
105
 Irish Music Abroad: Diasporic Sounds in Birmingham 199

J. Kennedy, ‘Christy Moore/Cindy Lee Berryhill: Birmingham Town

Hall’, Folk Roots, 79 (1990), pp.87-88
Baz Kershaw, The Radical in Performance: Between Brecht and
Baudrillard (London: Routledge, 1999)
Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995)
Adam Krims, Music and Urban Geography (London: Routledge, 2007)
Andrew Kuntz, ‘The Fiddler’s Companion: Kathleen Lawrie’s Wedding’
<www.ibiblio.org/fiddles/KA.htm> [accessed 28 November 2007]
Sharon Lambert, Irish Women in Lancashire, 1922-60: Their Story,
(Lancaster: University of Lancaster, 2001)
Mary Lennon, Marie McAdam and Joanne O’Brien, Across the Water:
Irish Women’s Lives in Britain (London: Virago Press, 1988)
Richard Leppert, ‘Sexual Identity, Death, and the Female Piano’,
Nineteenth-Century Music, 16 (1992), pp.105-128
Gudrun Limbrick, A Great Day: Celebrating St Patrick’s Day in
Birmingham (Birmingham: Westpoint, 2007)
Amy Lind and Stephanie Brzuzy, Battleground: Women, Gender and
Sexuality, Volume I (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001)
Albert L. Lloyd, Folk Song in England (London: Lawrence and Wishart,
1967)
David Lloyd, Ireland After History (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999)
Paul Long, Only in the Common People: The Aesthetics of Class in Post-
War Britain (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008)
W.J. Lowe, The Irish in Mid-Victorian Lancashire: The Shaping of a
Working-Class Community (New York: Lang, 1989)
Jane Lyons, ‘The Wren Boys (Part I)’, From Ireland: Irish Genealogy and
Family History <http://www.from-ireland.net/custom/The-Wren-Boys-
(Part-I)> [accessed 11 April 2011]
Dónall MacAmhlaigh, An Irish Navvy: The Diary of an Exile, trans. by
Valentin Iremonger (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1964)
Jim McLaughlin, ‘The Historical Background to ‘New Wave’ Irish
Emigration’, in Location and Dislocation in Contemporary Irish
Society: Emigration and Irish Identities, ed., by Jim MacLaughlin
(Cork: Cork University Press, 1997), pp.5-29
Donald M. MacRaild, Culture, Conflict and Migration: The Irish in
Victorian Cumbria (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998)
—. Irish Migrants in Modern Britain, 1750-1922 (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1999)
May McCann, ‘Music and Politics in Ireland: the Specificity of the Folk
Revival in Belfast’, British Journal of Ethnomusicology, 4 (1995),
pp.51-76
200 Bibliography

Marie McCarthy, Passing it On: Transmission of Music (Cork: Cork

University Press, 1999)
Michael McDowell, ‘Monaghan Troubadour & Mountainy Man’, Treoir,
40 (2008), pp.25-27
Kevin McManus, Céilís, Jigs and Ballads: Irish Music in Liverpool
(Liverpool: University of Liverpool, 1994)
David McWilliams, The Generation Game: Boom, Bust and Ireland’s
Economic Miracle (London: Macmillan, 2008)
Martin Melhuish, Celtic Tides: Traditional Music in a New Age (Texas:
Quarry Press, 1998)
Frank Molloy, “‘The Sigh of the Harp Shall be Sent O’er the Deep”: the
Influence of Thomas Moore in Australia’, in The Creative Migrant ed.,
by Patrick O’Sullivan (London: Leicester University Press, 1994),
pp.115-132
Thomas Moore, ‘A Prefatory Letter to the Marchioness Dowager of D’ in
A Selection of Irish Melodies, eds., by Thomas Moore and Sir John
Stevenson (London: J. Powers, 1810)
James Moran, Irish-Birmingham: A History (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 2010)
Christopher Morash, A History of the Media in Ireland (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010)
Chris Mullin, Error of Judgment: The Birmingham Bombs (Dublin:
Poolbeg Press, 1987)
‘Music and the Holocaust’,
<http://holocaustmusic.ort.org/places/camps/music-early-
camps/moorsoldatenlied/> [accessed 3 May 2011]
John Nagle, ‘“Everybody is Irish on St Paddy’s”: Ambivalence and
Alterity at London’s St Patrick’s Day 2002’, Identities: Global Studies
in Culture and Power, 12/4 (2005), pp.563-583
Frank Neal, Sectarian Violence: The Liverpool Experience, 1819-1914: An
Aspect of Anglo-Irish History (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1988)
Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History’, Representations, 26 (1989),
pp.7-25
Seán O’Baoill, ‘Traditional Singing in English – The Ulster Dimension’,
Treoir, 6 (1974), p.8
Sean O’Casey, Sunset and Evening Star (London: Macmillan, 1954)
Jacki O’Connor, ‘The Best of the West’, Treoir, 40 (2008), p.19
Nuala O’Connor, Bringing It All Back Home (Somerset: Butler and Tanner
Ltd., 1991)
 Irish Music Abroad: Diasporic Sounds in Birmingham 201

—. ‘Ireland: Dancing at the Virtual Crossroads’, in World Music The

Rough Guide: Africa, Europe and the Middle East, eds., by Mark
Ellingham, Orla Duane and Vanessa Dowel (London: Rough Guides,
1999-2000), pp.170-188
John O’Flynn, The Irishness of Irish Music (Surrey: Ashgate, 2009)
Anne O’Grady, Irish Migration to London in the 1940s and 50s (London:
PNL Press, 1988)
Francis O’Neill, Irish Folk Music: A Fascinating Hobby (East Ardsley: EP
Publishing, 1973)
Seán Ó Riada, Our Musical Heritage (Portlaoise: Fundúireacht an
Riadaigh i gcomhar Le Dolmen Press, 1982)
Barra Ó Séaghdha, ‘Crash Course’, Graph: Irish Cultural Review, 3
(1999), p.29
Helen O’Shea, The Making of Irish Traditional Music (Cork: Cork
University Press, 2008)
Patrick O’Sullivan, ‘Introduction: the Creative Migrant’, in The Creative
Migrant ed., by Patrick O’Sullivan (London: Leicester University
Press, 1994), pp.1-27
Margaret Odrowaz-Sypniewska, ‘The British Isles: Their Genealogy,
History and Heraldry’
<http://www.angelfire.com/mi4/polcrt/Celtic.html>
[accessed 4 November 2010]
‘Origin of ‘Jingle Bells’ Song is Debated’
<http://www.redorbit.com/news/general/33969/origin_of_jingle_bells_
song_is_debated/index.html> [accessed 5 November 2009]
Juhani Pallasma, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses
(Chichester: Wiley, 2008)
‘Pat Cooksey: Biography’ <http://www.patcooksey.com/biography.html>
[accessed 14 January 2010]
Rob Partridge, ‘Brum Beat: New Musical Express 1974’, The Move
Online <http://www.themoveonline.com/archive_os.html> [accessed
30 September 2008]
Kathleen Paul, Whitewashing Britain (London: Cornell University Press,
1997)
Pádriac Pearse, Collected Works of Pádraic H. Pearse: Plays, Stories,
Poems (New York: AMS Press, 1978)
Gareth Peirce, ‘The Birmingham Six: Have We Learned from our
Disgraceful Past?’, The Guardian, March 12 2011
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2011/mar/12/gareth-peirce-
birmingham-six> [accessed 12 May 2011]
202 Bibliography

Lance Pettitt, Screening Ireland: Film and Television Representation

(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000)
Rob Pickard, Funding the Architectural Heritage: A Guide to Policies and
Examples (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 2009)
Pie and Bovril
<http://www.pieandbovril.com/forum/index.php/topic/124703-crap-
football-songs/page__st__25> [accessed 10 February 2012]
Domenico Pietropaolo, ‘Spectacular Literacy and the Topology of
Significance: The Processional Mode’, in Petrarch’s Triumphs:
Allegory and Spectacle, eds., by Konrad Eisenbichler and Amilcare A.
Ianucci (Otawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1990), pp.359-368
‘RamblingHouse: Luke Kelly’
<http://homepages.iol.ie/~ronolan/luke_kelly> [accessed 30 September
2008]
Tina Ramnarine, ‘Musical Performance in the Diaspora: Introduction’,
Ethnomusicology Forum, 16 (2007), pp.1-17
Scott Reiss, ‘Tradition and Imaginary: Irish Traditional Music and the
Celtic Phenomenon’, in Celtic Modern: Music at the Global Fringe,
eds. by Martin Stokes and Philip Bohlman (Maryland: Scarecrow
Press, 2003), pp.145-169
John Rex and Robert Moore, Race, Community and Conflict; A Study of
Sparkbrook (London: Oxford University Press, 1967)
William Ryan, Assimilation of Irish Immigrants, (PhD Thesis, University
of St Louis, 1973)
Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (Pennsylvania:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985)
George Scott, The R.Cs: A Report on Roman Catholics in Britain Today
(London: Hutchinson, 1967)
Mark Slobin, Fiddler on the Move: Exploring the Klezmer World (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000)
—. ‘Micromusics of the West: A Comparative Approach,
Ethnomusicology, 36 (1992), pp.1-87
—. ‘The Destiny of the “Diaspora” in Ethnomusicology’, in The Cultural
Study of Music eds., by Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert and Richard
Middleton (London: Routledge, 2003), pp.284-296
Graeme Smith, ‘Celtic Australia: Bush Bands, Irish Music, Folk Music,
and the New Nationalism’, in Celtic Modern: Music at the Global
Fringe eds., by Stokes and Bohlman (Maryland: Scarecrow Press Inc.,
2003), pp.73-92
 Irish Music Abroad: Diasporic Sounds in Birmingham 203

—. ‘My Love is in America: Migration and Irish Music’, in The Creative

Migrant, ed., by Patrick O’Sullivan (London: Leicester University
Press, 1994), pp.221-236
Gerry Smyth, Noisy Island: A Short History of Irish Popular Music (Cork:
Cork University Press, 2005)
South Birmingham College, ‘Birmingham St Patrick’s Day 2009’,
<www.sbc.ac.uk> [accessed 3 April 2009]
Manfred B. Steger, Globalization: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009)
Carol Stern and Bruce Henderson, Performance: Texts and Contexts (New
York: White Plains, 1992)
Graham Stevenson, ‘George Thomson’
<http://www.grahamstevenson.me.uk/index.php?option=com_content
&view=article&id=576:george-thompson-&catid=20:t&Itemid=128>
[accessed 16 April 2011]
Martin Stokes, ‘Introduction’, in Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The
Musical Construction of Place ed., by Martin Stokes (Oxford: Berg
Publishers, 1994), pp.1-28
—. ‘Music and the Global Order’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 33
(2004), pp.47-72
—. ‘Place, Exchange and Meaning: Black Sea Musicians in the West of
Ireland’, in Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of
Place ed., by Martin Stokes (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1994), pp.97-
116
Martin Stokes and Philip Bohlman, ‘Introduction’, in Celtic Modern:
Music at the Global Fringe eds., by Stokes and Bohlman (Maryland:
Scarecrow Press Inc., 2003), pp.1-26
Carl Swanson, ‘Wonderful Work Sam’
<http://www.harpcolumn.com/blogs/one-entry?entry_id=50189>
[accessed 27 November 2010]
Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley, ‘Introduction’, in The Irish in Victorian
Britain, eds., by Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley (Dublin: Four Courts
Press, 1999)
Peter Symon, ‘“You Cannae Take Your Music Stand Into a Pub”: A
Conversation with Stan Reeves about Traditional Music Education’, in
Celtic Modern: Music at the Global Fringe eds., by Martin Stokes and
Philip Bohlman (Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2003), pp.257-274
Seamus Tansey, ‘Irish Traditional Music – The Melody of Ireland’s Soul:
It’s [sic] Evolution from the Environment, Land and People’, in
Crosbhealach an Cheoil: The Crossroads Conference eds., Fintan
204 Bibliography

Vallely, Hammy Hamilton, Eithne Vallely and Liz Doherty (Dublin:

Whinstone Music, 1999), pp.211-213
‘The Rocky Road From Dublin: 50 Years of The Dubliners’
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01blk01> [accessed May 9
2012]
Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and
Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994)
Jeff Todd Titon, ‘Knowing Fieldwork’ in Shadows in the Field eds., by
Gregory F. Barz and Timothy J. Cooley (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1977), pp.25-41
David Toop, Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener (New
York: Continuum, 2010)
Johanne Devlin Trew, ‘Diasporic Legacies: Place, Politics, and Music
Among the Ottawa Valley Irish’, in Celtic Modern: Music at the
Global Fringe eds., by Martin Stokes and Philip Bohlman (Maryland:
Scarecrow Press, 2003), pp.93-117
Thomas Turino, ‘Are We Global Yet? Globalist Discourse, Cultural
Formations and the Study of Zimbabwean Popular Music’, British
Journal of Ethnomusicology, 12 (2003), pp.51-79
Victor Turner, The Anthropology of Experience (New York: PAJ, 1986)
Fintan Vallely, ‘The Apollos of Shamrockery’, in Celtic Modern: Music at
the Global Fringe eds., by Martin Stokes and Philip Bohlman
(Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2003), pp.201-217
‘Virtual Sheet Music: Jingle Bells’
<http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/christmas.htm> [accessed 5
November 2009]
Sylvia Walby, ‘Woman and Nation’, in Mapping the Nation ed., by Gopal
Balakrishnan (London: Verso, 1996), pp.235-254
Bronwen Walter, Outsiders Inside: Whiteness, Place and Irish Women
((London: Routledge, 2001)
Deborah Weagel, Words and Music: Camus, Beckett, Cage, Gould (New
York: Peter Lang, 2010)
Richard Weight, Patriots: National Identity in Britain 1940-2000
(London: Pan, 2003)
Harry White, The Progress of Music in Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts
Press, 2005)
John Henry Whyte, Church and State in Modern Ireland, 1923-1970
(Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1971)
David Wiles, A Short History of Western Performance Space (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003)
 Irish Music Abroad: Diasporic Sounds in Birmingham 205

Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan, The Anthology of Ireland (New

York: Berg, 2006)
‘Winds of Change at St Patricks Festival’, An Craic, 136 (2009), p.35
Mina Yang, ‘East Meets West in the Concert Hall: Asians and Classical
Music in the Century of Imperialism, Post-Colonialism, and
Multiculturalism’, Asian Music 38 (2007), pp.1-30
Kaja Irene Ziesler, The Irish in Birmingham 1830-1970 (PhD Thesis,
University of Birmingham, 1989)

Newspaper Sources
‘The Auld Lang Syne Controversy: Rab or Will?’ <http://www.swalwell-
online.co.uk/auld_lang_syne.htm> [accessed 5 November 2009]
‘Ballad singer Luke Kelly, a member of the internationally acclaimed
Dubliners died in a Dublin hospital on Jan 30’, Irish Echo, 11 February
1984, in Nick Guida, ‘It’s the Dubliners: Luke Kelly’
<http://itsthedubliners.com> [accessed 14 January 2010]
Bev Bevan, ‘The Night we Opened for The Beatles – and McCartney Said
I was Better than Ringo’, Sunday Mercury, 15 August 2008
<http://blogs.sundaymercury.net/bev-bevan/2008/08/the-night-we-
opened-for-the-be.html> [accessed 4 July 2009]
‘Big Plans for St Patrick’s Day Parade and Ceili’, Irish Post, 14 March
1970, p.5
‘Birmingham all set for big parade’, Irish Post, 16 March 1996, p.32
Pat Bolton, ‘Is There Green in her Eye?’, Midlands Catholic Pictorial,
January 1960, p.2
Carl Chinn, ‘The Irish in Birmingham: Celebrating St Patrick’s Day’,
Harp, April 2012, p.21
Andy Coleman, ‘Folk: Singer Paul O’Brien performs in Birmingham this
weekend’, Birmingham Mail, 27 November 2009
<http://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+folk+singer+who+nearly+gave+i
t+all+up-a0213045761> [accessed 13 February 2010]
‘The Catholics and Dr Barnes’, Birmingham Post, 18 March 1929, p.13
Martin Davies, ‘The Flow is Slowing Down’, Birmingham Mail, 27
October 1965, p.2
Brendan Farrell, ‘Irish music mourns loss of Comhaltas stalwart’, Irish
Post, 7 September 2005, p.14
Steve Jones, ‘Rap Music Feud Behind Gun Violence in Birmingham’,
Birmingham Mercury, 20 Sunday June 2010
<http://thegrimereport.blogspot.com/2010/06/rap-music-feud-behind-
gun-violence-in.html> [accessed 8 November 2010]
206 Bibliography

Peter Kennedy, ‘Lá le Padraig at home and abroad’, Irish Post, 16 March
1974, p.7
Susan Lynch, ‘Comhaltas Loses One of its Founder Members’, Harp,
October 2005, p.4
Brendan MacLua, ‘The Irish in Britain are not Using their Political
Strength’, Irish Post, 13 February 1970, pp.1-2
Sarfraz Manzoor, ‘Bradford reflects on many shades of Englishness’, The
Observer Review, 5 July 2009, pp.4-5
‘Mass Offered As “Act of Reparation”’, Birmingham Post, 10 April 1928,
p.9.
Patsy McGarry, ‘Irish do not ‘shop around’ for religion, conference told’,
Irish Times, 31 October 2009, p.8
Adam Sherwin, ‘Nation divided in quest for perfect beat’, The Times, 5
February 2008, p.9
‘With the Irish in Birmingham’, Irish Post, 13 February 1970, p.3
‘10,000 March in Historic City March’, Birmingham Gazette, 17 March
1952, p.5
‘80,000 Flock to Birmingham’s St Patrick’s Day Parade’, Birmingham
Mail, 15 March 2009 <http://www.birminghammail.net/news/top-
stories/2009/03/15/80-000-flock-to-birmingham-s-st-patrick-s-day-
parade-97319-23151794/> [accessed 22 April 2009]

Library Collections
Birmingham Corporate Statistician, Ethnic Origins of Birmingham Children
1966-81, Birmingham: Birmingham Central Library, Birmingham
Central Statistical Office, LF 40-41
Charles Parker Archive, Birmingham: Birmingham Central Library, CPA
MS4000
John Daniels, ‘If Birmingham’s Irish Think Big’, in Joe McKenna, The
Irish in Birmingham: A Scrapbook, Birmingham, Birmingham Central
Library, Birmingham Collection, 21.7, fol.46
102 report of UK migrant workers, 3 August 1955, Public Record Office,
Kew, Cabinet Office 129/77, pp.1-2

Census Information Sources

Census of England and Wales, 1921, County of Warwick (London: Her
Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1923)
Census of England and Wales 1931, General Tables: Comprising
Population, Institutions, Ages and Marital Conditions, Birthplace and
 Irish Music Abroad: Diasporic Sounds in Birmingham 207

Nationality, Welsh Language (London, Her Majesty’s Stationery

Office, 1935)
Census of England and Wales 1951, County Report, Warwickshire
(London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1954)
Census of England and Wales 1961, County Report, Warwickshire
(London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1963)

Discography
Birmingham Irish Community Forum, Birmingham St Patrick’s Day
Parade (Birmingham Irish Community Forum, 1998-1999) [on VCR]
Boyce and Stanley, Age to Age 1—Songs for a Pilgrim People (CJM
Music, 2009) [on CD]
Boyce and Stanley, In the Company of Angels (CJM Music, 2000) [on
CD]
The Chieftains, The Wide World Over (RCA, 2003) [on CD]
CJM, And Again I say Rejoice (CJM Music, 1995) [on CD]
—. Earth Calling Heaven (CJM Music, 1993) [on cassette]
The Clancy Brothers with Tommy Makem, Wrap the Green Flag Round
Me Boys (Sony, 2002) [on CD]
Shirley Collins and the Albion Country Band, No Roses (Pegasus, 1971)
[on LP]
The Corrs, Home (Atlantic, 2005) [on CD]
Bing Crosby, When Irish Eyes are Smiling (Decca, 1952) [on LP]
Damien Dempsey, Seize the Day (Sony, 2003) [on CD]
Dexy’s Midnight Runners, Searching for the Young Soul Rebels (EMI,
1980) [on LP]
—. second album, Too-Rye-Ay (Mercury, 1982) [on LP]
The Dubliners, 25 Years Celebration (Celtic Collections, 2003) [on CD]
—. 40 Years (Baycourt, 2002) [on CD]
—. 40 Years Live from the Gaiety (Celtic Collections, 2003) [on VCR]
—. Double Dubliners (EMI, 1972) [on LP]
—. Drinkin’ and Courtin’ (Major Minor, 1968) [on LP]
—. The Dubliners (Transatlantic, 1964) [on LP]
—. Finnegan Wakes (Transatlantic Records, 1966) [on LP]
—. In Concert (Transatlantic Records, 1965) [on LP]
—. In Session (Hallmark Records, 1970) [on LP]
—. Live (Ritz, 1991) [on VCR]
—. Luke’s Legacy (Chyme, 1989) [on CD]
—. Plain and Simple (Polydor, 1973) [on LP]
—. Revolution (EMI, 1970) [on LP]
208 Bibliography

Enya, Shepherd Moons (Warner Music, 1988) [on CD]

BP Fallon Interview with The Pogues,
<www.pogues.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=9639> [accessed 4
May 2010]
The Farriers and Kempton, Brummagem Ballads (Broadside, 2003) [on
CD]
The Flying Column, Four Green Fields (Emerald Gem, 1971) [on LP]
The Ian Campbell Folk Group, Ian Campbell and the Ian Campbell Folk
Group with Dave Swarbrick (Music for Pleasure, 1969) [on LP].
Irish Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus et al, Faith of Our Fathers
(Enigma, 1997) [on CD]
Luke Kelly, The Best of Luke Kelly (Celtic Airs, 2002) [on CD]
The Late Late Show Tribute to The Dubliners (RTÉ, 1988) [on VCR]
Luke Kelly The Performer (Celtic Airs, 2006) [on DVD]
Joe Lynch, A Lot of Irish Laughter…And a Few Irish Tears (Hallmark,
1968) [on LP]
Eleanor McEvoy, Out There (Moscodisc, 2006) [on CD]
Christy Moore, Live at the Point (Sony, 2006) [on CD]
—. Smoke and Strong Whiskey (Newberry, 1991) [on CD]
—. This is the Day (Columbia, 2001) [on CD]
Marcus Ó Murchú, Ó Bhéal go Béal (Cló Iar-Chonnachta, 1997) [on CD]
Moving Hearts, Dark End of the Street (WEA, 2000) [on CD]
Paul O’Brien, Plastic (SOCAN, 2008) [on CD]
Joan Osborne, Relish (Mercury, 1999) [on CD]
Itzhak Perlman In the Fiddler’s House (EMI, 1995) [on VCR]
The Pogues, If I Should Fall From Grace With God (WEA, 1994) [on CD]
The Pogues, The Very Best of the Pogues (Rhino, 2001) [on CD]
The Saw Doctors, Play it Again Sham (Shamtown, 2003) [on CD]
U2, War (Mercury Records, 2005) [on CD]
The Wolfe Tones, Greatest Hits (Celtic Collections, 2001) [on CD]
 INDEX
America (US), 1-2, 7, 13, 29, 35-36,
38, 47, 50-52, 55, 76, 81-82, 89,
98, 101-102, 106, 117, 130, 134,
138, 152, 171, 180-81, 191
Arrowsmith, Aidan, 37, 140
Aston Villa FC, 19, 139-41, 173
Australia, 117, 173, 181-84
ballad, 32, 51-52, 56, 71, 74, 102,
106, 109, 117, 126, 162, 184
balladeer, 89, 102, 147
Birmingham Clarion Singers, 92,
100-102, 104, 109, 114, 116
Birmingham Comhaltas, 59-62, 64-
67, 69-72, 74-86, 115, 132, 134,
176-77
Birmingham Irish Centre, 21, 23,
32-33, 37, 46, 50, 51, 68, 86, 94,
127, 146, 148, 151, 171, 187
Birmingham Six, 33-35, 148, 152
Birmingham Symphony Hall, 56,
149, 173, 175-76, 190
Birmingham Town Hall, 16, 21-23,
53, 55-58, 65, 85, 90-91, 114,
117, 148, 153
Bishop Barnes, 121-23
Bohlman, Philip, 3, 15, 150, 155,
181-82
Bourke, Ciarán, 22, 89, 114, 116
Boyce, Joanne, 19, 129-32, 143,
150, 180
Campbell, Ian, 23, 101-102, 113-15,
148, 183
The Clancy Brothers, 1, 12, 35, 98
Catholic Church, 18, 57, 60, 81-82,
117, 120, 127, 129, 132-33,
136-38, 143-45, 177
Catholic Young Men's Society, 121-
22
Catholicism, 18, 33, 120, 126, 132-
33, 138, 142-43, 165
Celtic globalisation, 35, 190
Celtic music, 10, 176, 180-83, 186-
87
chronotope, 38, 68, 48
Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, 17,
58-62, 64-73, 75-78, 82-86, 90,
95, 103-104, 114, 116, 120, 133,
137
Communist, 89, 91, 94, 97-98, 100,
105
The Critics' Group, 106-107, 109-
14, 116, 141, 148, 157, 184
dance halls, 16, 78, 82, 133-34, 136-
38, 142-43, 145-46, 164, 170,
178, 186
Dance Hall Act, 57, 81, 133
De Valera, Éamon, 53, 117-20, 126,
133, 138, 143-44, 150, 187
Dempsey, Damien, 71
Dempsey, Tommy, 56, 114
Dexy’s Midnight Runners, 35-36,
138, 178, 180-82
Digbeth, 21, 30, 37, 83, 94, 114,
127, 169
Downes, Andrew, 16, 47-49, 52
Drew, Ronnie, 22, 57-58, 89, 106,
114, 116
Dublin, 17, 30-31, 42, 57-58, 65, 71,
80, 86, 89-92, 95-96, 99, 104-
105, 114-16, 119, 136, 140, 143,
145, 147, 152, 178, 184, 189
Dublin in the Rare Auld Times, 23,
42, 93
The Dubliners, 17-18, 21-23, 47,
52-53, 74, 89-93, 99, 101-106,
108, 111, 113-17, 137, 140-41,
148, 154
Easter Monday Men's Mass, 120-24,
126, 129, 144
ethnomusicology, 10-11, 14, 47
210
Faith of our Fathers, 123-24, 141
Finnegan, Ruth, 11, 15, 40, 45, 176
folk music, 48, 89-90, 94, 96-97, 99,
106, 111-13, 127
football, 19, 85, 139-42
Four Green Fields, 124, 126, 156
Gary Owen, 49-50
globalisation, 6, 190-91
The Grey Cock Folk Club, 94, 107,
184
Handsworth, 17, 19, 50, 55, 60-61,
65, 67, 69-72, 77-79, 85, 103,
115, 136, 142, 145, 177, 186
Handsworth Riots, 25, 77
harp, 13, 73-76, 137
hip-hop, 81, 101
Irish diaspora, 1, 4-5, 10, 20, 26, 38,
55, 65, 82, 117, 176, 180, 182,
188, 190
Jewish music, 32, 38, 187
Jordan, Vince, 65, 67, 83
Jug O' Punch Folk Club, 63, 107,
114
Kershaw, Baz, 16, 40-41, 51
Lawrie, Kathleen, 32, 61, 64, 66-67,
71-72, 76, 79, 83, 86, 185
Lawrie, Lily, 17, 55, 59-64, 66-68,
70-72, 74, 76, 79-86, 89, 115-
16, 120, 132, 134, 186
Liverpool, 1, 19, 24, 29, 38, 44, 46,
61, 171, 179, 183
Lloyd, Albert, 94, 96, 159
London, 1, 9, 26, 36, 38, 65, 68, 92,
28, 100, 115, 134, 150-51, 161,
166, 171, 179, 183-84
Lord of the Dance, 117, 141-42
Kelly, Luke, 17-18, 22-23, 89-93,
97, 99, 100-101, 106, 112, 114,
115, 116, 117, 120, 125, 140,
147-49, 156, 180, 184
MacColl, Ewan, 2, 18, 90, 93-95,
98-99, 103-104, 106-10, 112-16,
139, 147, 185
MacGowan, Shane, 33-35, 41, 51,
147
The Mayfair Club, 135, 146-47
Index
McEvoy, Catherine, 32, 59, 64, 69,
71, 79
McGrath,Paul, 140, 172
McKenna, Barney, 22, 53, 74, 89,
106
Mid-Day Mantra, 175-76, 190
migration, 1-2, 4-6, 9-10, 13-14, 16,
23, 25-26, 29-31, 38-41, 47, 52,
58-59, 62, 85, 91-92, 94, 101,
105-106, 109, 118, 120, 123,
133-35, 143, 145-47, 160, 191
Moran, James, 38, 162, 165
Moore, Christy, 147-49, 158, 173
Moore, Thomas, 48, 163, 173
MTV, 180, 186
Mulreadys, 104-106, 112, 116, 136
Nora, Pierre, 8
O’Brien, Paul, 4, 7, 16, 37-38, 41-
42, 111, 186
Ó Riada, Seán, 27, 75, 82, 179
Parker, Charles, 27, 102, 106-107,
116, 145, 157
Pearse, Pádraic, 123, 125, 163, 173
piano, 6, 74-78, 82, 176
Pietropaolo, Domenico, 19, 153-156
The Pogues, 21, 33-36, 51, 147
pop music, 2, 21, 33, 35, 38, 123,
130, 170, 176, 180, 182
pub bombings, 10, 32-33, 35, 85,
151, 167
Ramnarine, Tina, 65, 189
Regans, 47, 49-52, 147
Roscommon, 17, 62-63, 66-70, 79-
80, 115, 125, 141, 145, 177
Schechner, Richard, 16, 43-44, 52
Scotland, 2, 92, 94, 115, 176
second-generation Irish, 4, 34, 36,
67, 132, 135, 163, 168, 185
Seeger, Peggy, 90, 94, 103, 106-
107, 148
The Shamrock Club, 30, 135-36,
146-47, 151, 176
Sheahan, John, 22, 91, 104
Slobin, Mark, 38
Smyth, Gerry, 5, 178
South Birmingham College, 169-70
 Irish Music Abroad: Diasporic Sounds in Birmingham
South Birmingham Comhaltas, 56,
60, 65, 67, 83, 86, 128, 178
St Anne’s, Digbeth, 59, 79, 119,
127, 150, 162, 172
St Catherine’s, Horsefair, 59, 127,
150
St Chad’s Cathedral, 119-27, 132,
142-44, 150, 162, 176, 187
St Patrick’s Day, 1, 21-23, 47, 91,
117, 120, 127, 135, 142, 150-54,
160-61, 170, 173, 176
St Patrick’s Parade, 19, 26, 43, 55,
83, 127, 149-52, 154-67, 17-74,
186-87
Stanley, Mike, 19, 129-31, 150
211
Stokes, Martin, 2, 10, 131, 165,
181-82, 188
Thomson, George, 89, 92, 100, 105,
107, 112, 116
The Troubles, 19, 26, 66, 112, 167,
185, 189
uilleann pipes, 37, 73, 185
urban, 1, 5, 7, 9, 10-11, 14, 17, 27-
29, 36, 41-43, 52, 54-55, 57, 60,
69, 76, 78-79, 84-85, 97-98,
101, 109, 111, 135-36, 138, 141,
144, 159, 178, 184, 186, 189
Wild Rover, 114, 141, 172, 189
Yeats, William Butler, 1, 48-49, 52,
68, 170
Ziesler, Kaja Irene, 4-5, 120, 151