Recordings
Joe Heaney - "Say A Song"

The Music of Joe Heaney
James R. Cowdery

Joe Heaney was fond of telling a story about the time that the American television host Merv Griffin visited Ireland. At a local pub, Griffin was astonished to see a particular photograph on the wall. "That's my doorman!" he exclaimed. "That," the bartender solemnly declared, "is Ireland's greatest traditional musician."

Seosamh Ó hÉanaí, known to the English-speaking world as Joe Heaney, was both. Heir to the majestic sean-nós ("old-style") singing tradition of west Galway through his father and other outstanding local singers, Joe emigrated to England as a young man. By the time I met him in 1979, he had moved to New York City and was working as a doorman at a posh apartment building. It was not until the last years of his life that he would find a position worthy of his art, as a teacher of Irish traditional singing at the University of Washington in Seattle. Like Griffin's bartender, many Irish music lovers considered him the finest living exponent of sean-nós singing, and even people who preferred a different local style invariably acknowledged him as one of the greatest masters of traditional song. No one could surpass his genius for giving a song just the right mixture of dignified elegance and emotional expression to create an artistic communication of extraordinary depth. His intricate vocal ornamentations were never gratuitous: "There's some places you want to hold on more than other places, that's when you put the grace notes there, you know. So that takes out the full depth and meaning of the song, you know, and you hold on to that particular place. . . .I love it so much that I don't want to leave it. I just want to hold on to it as long as I can while I'm singing it. That's the way to treat a good song."

These recordings offer a rare opportunity to hear Joe's music in its proper context, as a gift given to an audience. He recalled the customary shyness of many sean-nós singers--"they sat down like that, you know, this is the way they used to sit [sits slouched and hunched, eyes closed]. Always. And they had the cap pulled out, you know [mimes pulling a cap over his eyes]. . . Wouldn't face the crowd at all, that's it. And beautiful songs came out, you know"--but Joe's own style of delivery was stunningly direct. Hearing these recordings, I can see him again: standing tall and straight as a tree, almost glaring at the audience, his rugged features hardening fiercely as he decried the enforced poverty of "The Rocks of Bawn" or softening into the profoundest compassion as he sang of the Virgin Mary's grief in "Caoineadh na dTrí Muire." "I respect an audience," he told me, "I always have done. . .What they say at home: abair amhrán, inis scéal, say a song, tell a story. They don't tell you to sing a song. Say a song. . .that means you're telling a story--in a nice way. And without the story, the song is lost; and without putting the story over in the song, the song is lost on an audience. . . That's the whole thing, to 'put the song over,' as they say. It's no good singing a song unless you put it over." At last, this collection provides a chance to hear Joe "putting it over" in the situation which allowed the fullest flowering of his artistry: live performance.

Some of Joe's deepest songs are here. The magnificent Eileanóir a Rúin, composed by the eighteenth-century Irish poet Carroll Ó Dálaigh, was one of the songs closest to Joe's heart, with its ringing declaration of "my love to you at first sight." Róisín Dubh is an outstanding example of Ireland's tradition of camouflaging anticolonialist defiance in what appears to be a love song: Ireland is characterized as a "dear dark rose" whose suffering will be ended one day. In Óró Sé do Bheatha ´Bhaile! a woman released from bondage represents a free Ireland. Another example of this genre is the starkly haunting An Raibh Tú ar an gCarraig? with its unusual question-and-answer structure. In this song, everything is a symbol for an illegal celebration of the Catholic Mass under Protestant rule: "the rock" is the hidden forest site of the gathering, "my love" and "the beautiful woman" are the Virgin Mary, and so on. An Tiarna Randal is an unusual Gaelic version of the British ballad "Lord Randall," a primal tale of murder which also is set in a question-and-answer format, between a mother and her dying adult son. Bean Dubh an Ghleanna is a classic expression of the pain of passionate obsession, with a sweeping melody which is often played as a "slow air" by instrumentalists. The wryly touching An Buinneán Buí was composed by the eighteenth-century Irish poet Cathal Buídhe Mac Giolla Guna; seeing a dead bittern on a frozen lake, he imagined that it had died of thirst--a fate which the poet did not fear, given his prolific drinking. Joe's signature song for many years, The Rocks of Bawn is a passionate indictment of the absentee landlord system which pushed Irish farmers from the richest agricultural areas to the barren, rocky land of the west coast, forcing them to work endlessly to pay rent to British landowners whom they would never even meet. We see "gallant Sweeney" rising in the morning to try once again to till his impossibly rocky field, only to give up in despair as the landlord's agent curses him. In the wrenching final verse, Sweeney's hopelessness and desperation finally drive him to seek the only possible future left for him: a career in the English army, valiantly imagining that he will be fighting "for Ireland's glory" rather than for the continued imperialism of his own oppressors.

Although Joe seldom openly professed any religious affiliation, the rare religious songs in his repertory were very dear to him, and especially moving to his audiences. Oíche Nollag tells the story of the Nativity, but with much more gravity than most Christmas songs: for half the song, the child Jesus is prophesying to his mother, telling her of his future suffering. The Good Friday story is told in Caoineadh na dTrí Muire (Lament of the Three Marys) from the viewpoint of the lamenting women who must watch Jesus's death. "Amhrán na Páise," a song that tells the Resurrection story, formed a triumvirate with these two; it can be heard on Joe's Gael-Linn recording, Ó Mo Dhúchas, Sraith 2 (CEF 051). Unlike most of his songs, Joe associated these with his mother, and he poured all of his expressive power into singing them.

Joe recalled from his boyhood the custom of the "American wake" and the music associated with it. Held in honor of a person about to emigrate to America, this event embodied both the solemnity and the gaiety which characterized the traditional Irish wake for the recently deceased. The funereal quality was real: all present knew that there was a good chance they would never see this person again. This collective mourning was often expressed in song with the poignant A Stór mo Chroí (Dearest of My Heart). But these gatherings always ended with an affirmation of life through dance, and certain dance tunes were given pride of place due to their titles: My Love, She's in America and Off to California. Joe sings these tunes using a practice known as "lilting," a vocal imitation of instrumental playing. (He remembered whole evenings of delightful social dancing in poor communities, where lilting was the only musical accompaniment.)

The light songs are here too, and rightly so: Joe cannily understood the need to intersperse his richer songs with less demanding ones, for the sake of both his voice and his audience. Songs like The Galway Shawl, The Wife of the Bold Tenant Farmer, Red is the Rose, I Wish I Had Someone to Love Me, The Claddagh Ring, and Will You Come Over the Mountain? provided resting places in his concerts and, sometimes, opportunities for the audience to sing along. As these recordings attest, Joe always sang such songs with sincere feeling, bringing out their more universal themes and staunchly avoiding oversentimentality.

And finally, there are the tender Seoithín Seó, Óró mo Bháidín, and Coochenanty, songs for soothing little children. When Joe sang such songs he almost seemed transformed into a child himself: evidence that his formidable artistic power was so complete that he could even relinquish it and communicate simply, directly, and deeply to the child within each of us.

James Cowdery, Ph.D., is a composer and ethnomusicologist and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. He is the author of The Melodic Tradition of Ireland (Kent State University Press, 1990).

Joe Heaney in the Pacific Northwest
Sean Williams

One of my first questions to Joe Heaney after he moved to Seattle in the early 1980s, was how he felt about our perennially soggy weather. "It reminds me of home, don't you know," he answered. "The soft rain in the afternoon, and the colors of the sky reflecting on the waters." He sometimes owned umbrellas, usually gifts from his students, but he either left them behind or did not use them. "At home I simply ran between the drops, and I'll be doing it here, too." During the next several years, he frequently remarked about the similarities between west Galway and the Pacific Northwest, and about how right he felt about living in Seattle. He lived in a small basement apartment but was frequently outside and en route to or from the University of Washington, the neighborhood bakery (La Boulangerie, which he referred to as "Bouge-bouge"), or any one of the local shops where he was known as a regular. As a visiting artist in the University of Washington Ethnomusicology Department, he worked closely with dozens of graduate students. He also spent a considerable amount of time during his final year in Seattle doing residencies at local schools, giving public concerts, teaching adult education classes, and performing at a number of rural Northwest libraries.

I was a graduate student in the ethnomusicology program at the University of Washington when Joe arrived in 1981. Because I had studied Irish for several years prior to meeting him, we concentrated almost exclusively on the older songs in Irish. I was a young scholar with little experience, but my studies were drawn quickly into focus by Joe's profound knowledge of his art, his strong opinions on everything from tea bags to guitars, and his stunning ability to make the distant Irish past come sharply into the present time and place. Other Northwest musicians and singers report similar experiences. Mary Molloy, a vocalist and fiddler who was in Seattle during the late 1970s, mentions that she found in Joe a type of "musical grandfather." Her own grandfather was from the same region of Ireland as Joe; a great singer according to family legend, he had passed away just prior to Joe's arrival in Seattle. Mary has felt both a strong connection and a lasting influence from Joe on her own music.

Joe Heaney has continued to have a considerable impact upon singers, musicians and others since his death from emphysema in 1984. As his illness became increasingly serious, he called upon me to substitute for him in classes. At one point, in the hospital, he clasped my hand (after telling the nurse that I was his daughter) and said, "You'll have to carry it on for me, dear." I took his words and his intent seriously. Now, several dozen American students who sing in sean-nós style consider themselves to be Joe's "grandchildren." They have listened carefully to Joe's singing, discussed the meaning of the songs and the traditional context for them, and have come to an understanding of sean-nós. These students are largely of Irish descent, and several have traveled to Ireland and brought not only the knowledge of some of the grandest songs of the west Galway tradition with them, but a deep respect for the tradition. Sean Johnson, a student who visited Joe's burial place in Ireland after studying with me, feels that there has been no deeper way to tap in to the spirit of his Irish ancestors than singing Joe's songs. Learning sean-nós has helped him and others to build a connection with an older Ireland. Joe would be proud to know that his songs and the memories of his performances are still strong in the Pacific Northwest, and it would very likely please him to know that people are still learning to perform sean-nós singing from his recordings, years after his death.

Sean Williams, Ph.D., is an ethnomusicologist on the faculty at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.