Well here in the South Downs March did indeed come in like a Lion.
A very angry Lion.
Storm force 11 tree felling, roof lifting, banshee howling winds.
Field flooding, roof rattling, better build your Ark now! torrential rain.
Still, we hunkered down, turned the Hi Fi high and the lights down low and emerged blinking into the revelation of a sunny day.
And, here at The Jukebox March always ushers in another celebration of Ireland’s stupendous contribution to art and culture.
So, without further ado let’s call up the majestic voice of Dolores Keane and surrender to her Emotional Force 12 version of, ‘Teddy O’Neill’.
… The pain in my heart was too deep to conceal …
You would think after hearing Dolores sing in such an imperious manner that no other singer would dare to take on Teddy O’Neill.
But, true artists, and Maura O’Connell is a true artist, know that the best compliment you can pay a giant presence in your own field is to admire, reflect and then do otherwise.
Listen to Maura’s miraculous glowing vocal, here with Folk Legends De Dannan.
There is a dying ember tenderness that deeply stirs the heart.
… All dark and silent … no piper … no reel …
Ah, Teddy, Teddy, to have stirred such dreams.
Such Dreams.
Our opening tip of the hat to Ireland’s poetic treasury is from Michael Hartnett who previously featured here with his mystic, ‘Necklace of Wrens’.
When the wren landed on Michael his grandmother soberly told him that this was a sign he was going to be a Poet.
When it comes to Poetry many are called but very few are chosen.
Michael Hartnett heard and responded full heartedly to his call and the rich harvest of his works demonstrate that he was indeed chosen.
Inchicore Haiku was a return to the English Language after many years of writing solely in Irish.
Songs by Maura O’ Connell (Helpless Heart) & SÍOMHA (July Red Sky)
A Poetry reading by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin (Studying The Language).
A Painting by Lilian Lucy Davidson (1879-1954) : Wicklow Goats.
A Paul Brady song sung by Maura O’Connell – it really doesn’t get any better.
Maura inhabits a song, finds its essence and then using all the considerable craft at her command sets it free to bloom in our imaginations.
There is a repertoire of traditional songs and modern folk classics that generations of Irish Women singers have returned to over and over again seeking to release and reveal the wisdom and mystery these masterworks contain.
Time after time I find it is to the Maura O’Connell versions I turn to first and last because these songs shine brightest and settle deeper in the heart when she sings them.
There is reverie and rapture here.
Reverie and rapture.
And, the video clip is enormously nostalgic!
Our painting today comes from Lilian Davidson who was born in Bray, County Wicklow.
Her work shows she was aware of movements in European Art and had secure painterly skills.
I am struck by the vivacity of the light and colour in her paintings which seem to gleam before the viewer.
In addition to her paintings she also wrote plays, poems and short stories under the name Ulick Burke.
The National Gallery of Ireland keeps her portrait of W B Yeats.
Our Poetry reading today comes from Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin.
For almost half a century now she has been adding magical poems to the cairn of Irish poetry and the global word hoard.
In her poems language is thrillingly allusive and alive.
It is in the testing of thought and belief through charged engagement with language that Poetry is made.
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin has said that her Poems emerge out of her desire, need, to question – Is this true? Do I really believe this? Do I really feel this?
If the Poem lives the question is answered.
Often in ways that could not have been anticipated.
True Poetry is always surprising both to the Poet and the reader.
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin has written many true poems.
SÍOMHA (Brock) is, in her music, wholly Irish and wholly international.
She draws deeply on the traditions of traditional music, folk music, chanson and gypsy jazz to create an alluring synthesis.
On stage she has an energy, expertise and magnetism in her singing and guitar playing which wins and holds audiences.
We are all going to hear a lot more from SÍOMHA!
This post in memory of Mary O’Sullivan and Nora McElligott.
If you enjoyed this post and know anyone who is Irish or of Irish heritage (and you do!) share it with them and ask them to share it further.
Christmas is a time to allow Mystery its proper place at the centre of our being.
There is no master chart for our lives.
That is life’s beauty and its terror.
The older I get the more I believe that the essence of intellectual and spiritual maturity is to understand that each of us is a Mystery surrounded by the Mystery.
We live catching glimpses, if we would but look, of harmonies within Mysteries.
Mystery is a Gift awaiting acceptance.
In deep valleys and high peaks and on grey suburban streets the door to Mystery waits to be opened.
Reports of the Mystery often come from the daydreamers; the madcaps, the geeks with the alchemist’s stone.
In meditation and madness and holy merriment they can hear the grass grow and the heartbeat of the squirrel.
They bring back reports from the other side of silence.
One such voyager is Jimmy MacCarthy, an Irish songwriter steeped in The Mystery.
His song, ‘Bright Blue Rose’ is an invitation to and an invocation of The Mystery.
And it is a holy thing and it is a precious time.
Forget-me-nots among the snow.
It’s always been and so it goes.
For all of you who would discover.
For all of you who seek to understand.
Strike out on your own path.
You’ll find a very special hand.
One bright blue Rose.
Two thousand years and still it grows.
Life and Death Eternally.
One bright Blue Rose.
One bright Blue Rose.
Now, if you want to find a singer who can invoke The Mystery, who can make a song a Holy and precious thing, you need look no further than Maura O’ Connell.
She has a voice that can with spare elegance illuminate the Forget-me-nots among the snow.
She has a voice that can with proper discretion usher us towards the bloom of one bright Blue Rose.
One bright Blue Rose.
Two thousand years and still it grows.
One bright Blue Rose.
The Series continues on 19 and 21 December – Don’t Miss One!
Christmas. New Years Day. Spring Solstice. Easter. Midsummer Day. First leaf fall. First fall of snow.
Way markers of the passing year. Each new feast chiming with all those that have gone before in the quickening parade of our lives.
And, if you are Irish, or of Irish stock, St Patrick’s Day.
On my twitter account (@thomhickey55 – sign up now if you’re not signed up already!) I describe myself, among other things, as, ‘Almost Irish’. That’s because though I was not born in Ireland both my parents and all my forebears were.
So, I unhesitatingly believe that whatever literary or rhetorical gifts I possess are drawn from a deep Celtic well. My mother told me a million stories and taught me how to tell them too. My Dad taught me how to listen to the important things that are always said in silences.
Stories and silences. Silences and stories. Of such things are true songs and poems made. By singers and poets who have listened, learned and dwelt in the silences surrounding the stories they offer up to us.
So, for the week that’s in it, I’m going to feature on The Immortal Jukebox some of the Irish singers, musicians and poets who have told the stories, sung the songs and made the poems that have touched my heart and lifted the spirits as the parade of my own life has passed by.
There are many stars in the firmament of Irish roots/traditional music and the nation has been particularly blessed by a generation of luminously talented women singers including Dolores Keane and Mary Black.
But, for me, the singer who has always shone the brightest and heartrendingly illuminated the miraculous combination of power, poetry, joy and tragedy contained within a really great song is Maura O’ Connell.
Some mysterious quality in her voice, which frequently brings me to tears, seems to bring out the truth that, ‘behind every beautiful thing there’s some kind of pain’. I can’t think of another singer who marries the story and the silence with such delicate grace as Maura O’Connell.
Her ability to find and reveal the beating heart of a song after searching within herself for the truest way to offer up its gifts, without histrionics or affectation, is achingly exemplified in, ‘When You and I Were Young Maggie’.
There is no grandstanding when Maura O’Connell sings. She once said that, ‘My intention was to just sing the song clearly. I just wanted to be there to serve the song, rather than to show off a particular vocal style’.
She seems to me to have perfected the art of sifting a song for the precious metal at its core. Through instinct and craft she finds the stillness and silence within a song. Then, with respect, discretion and measured emotion using all the resources of her vocal talent and personal presence; the very essence of her being – she sings. And we encounter a true artist.
Maura O’Connell knows that a true song though anchored in the time and culture of its creation will, if performed with a true heart and true art, live on into the future and speak to peoples never imagined by its author.
In W. B Yeats, ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’ Maura found such a song. Though thousands of singers have sung this song it’s Maura O’Connell who sounds the deepest depths of Yeats’ incantatory cadences. Surrender, with gratitude, to the spell she and Yeats have cast.
Now a poem from a true inheritor of Yeats’ bardic role in the life of Ireland and the life of poetry, Seamus Heaney. The sudden manner of his death was a profound shock for Ireland and the world wide poetic community. Yet, while acknowledging our grief we draw sustenance from the poems which will surely continue to speak of the human condition down the ages as do the poems of Homer, Virgil and Yeats.
In his wonderfully vigorous poetry we are brought into imaginative contact with earthed lightning. And, sometimes we are guided to a realm that is usually just out of our vision, though always there.
A place where known and strange things pass right in front of us and the world is made anew. Seamus Heaney made poetry which caught our hearts off guard and blew them open.
Postscript
And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightening of flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully-grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park or capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open
Dedicated to Peg Brosnan, Mikey Brosnan (RIP) and Kevin and Nora McElligott (RIP).
The Immortal Jukebox 