be the right songs and who would be the right people to sing them? The Rocky Road to Dublin is a 60's ballad, a Dubliners type of folk signing. Lisa O'Neil then with The Galway Shawl was representative of the English-language traditional singing in Ireland, and then Michael O'Chonfhlaola with the sean nós. Three different types of music all in the one venue. I think that was very accurate of that time in 1967. You would have had The Dubliners in O'Donoghue's. You would have had Joe Heaney and The Dubliners, You would have had Margaret Barry, a folk-singer from Cork in O'Donoghue's too. That pub scene is set in Dublin. It's set between the Glasgow and London scenes so people often wonder if it's in Glasgow or London. But it's actually in Dublin. It's meant to be in O'Donoghue's, but it's not important. It's modelled on O'Donoghue's in 1965. Margaret Barry used to say about singing in Irish pubs in London in the 1960's that there was no difference to an pub in Ireland. That the outside world that surrounded the pub was almost completely irrelevant. You might as well be in Ireland as in an Irish pub, it was like being at home. Maybe more Irish than the pubs at home.
Towards the end of his life you can see that Heaney was anxious to return home so as not to die in a foreign land surrounded by foreigners.
He was surrounded by people, by students of the university in Seattle where he was a lecturer, but he was anxious to get home. He was actively looking for work back home. On the west coast of America, in Seattle, he was very far away from home. It's the classic Irish thing in a way. He was teaching in a university in America. He was teaching about Irish singing and he couldn't get that job in Ireland. That drove him from a young man. He was in an awkward spot. He was in a place where his art was appreciated but to make it commercial, to make a living out of it, he had to go away. Lillis Ó Laoire and Sean Williams wrote a book on Joe Heaney called The Bright Star of the West, and they say that in essence he invented sean nós as an art-form. What they say is kind of right, but it might be controversial to say it, but he did take sean nós to the Newport Folk Festival and he did record several albums for Gael-Linn and Topic Records. He did take it on to an international stage in a way that hadn't been done before.
36 CinÉireann / December 2017