by John Hoban
They sank a few schooners,
and midis of blue,
strong tae for the teetotallers,
of which there were few.
No hurry, no worry,
we’ll bite Kitty O’Shea,
for the sake of the wren,
on this Stephen’s day.
It was there our wren boys
and wren girls had fun.
With Jim on the box,
Anne on the drum,
Brian in the Lancers,
showed Margaret the way,
and the buck from Mayo
was made king for the day.
The last house to visit was in Chippendale,
they march’d down Paddington,
and once more set to sail,
to the Thurless Castle,
to Pat and Maureen,
where they called it a day,
and sank the dreoilín.
So, lads and lassies listen to me,
a chailín, alanna, a stór, mo chroí.
I’m just a wee bird,
but the king of them all.
On each Stephen’s day, please answer my call.
The wren, the wren,
the king of all birds,
St. Stephen’s day,
got caught in the furze,
up with the kettle,
down with the pan,
give us a dollar,
to bury the wren!
Notes on the song:
Acting in my role of ambassador and teacher of all things Irish in Australia, I decided to educate the folks about the ancient Irish custom known as ‘The Wren on St. Stephen’s Day’. A few natives like the ‘Banner Beauties’ and Eilis O’Connor knew the craic. Donning a disguise, dressing like mummers/strawboys, off we went to beg for money to help us give the poor wee bird a proper sendoff. We had a wonderful day. Sweatin’ bullets, singing and dancing. Sydney never saw the likes of it. It was so inspiring that after hearing me sing this song in San Francisco in 1992, a bunch of exiles decided to revive/start the custom in California.
THE OLD QUARTER
(John Hoban)
In Texas tonite,
there shines this strange light.
A wonder to behold,
as I once more give up the fight.
All is deadly silent,
not even the lonesome cricket sound,
confused, content, connected,
today in Houston town, Texas.
What about this weird world we live in,
full of beauty so rare.
For those free gifts of creation,
how little we care.
Oil and the dollar rule the roost,
profit, not people,
everything to lose.
Confused, content, connected,
today in Houston town, Texas.
Rainbows and robins,
self will run riot.
Green fields and yellow corn,
adios Mexico.
Listening to Townes Van Zandt,
Lightning Hopkins and Freddy Fender,
wasted days and wasted nights.
All my short life,
listening with my heart,
at the Old Quarter,
today in Houston town, Texas.
Notes on the song:
A strange little poem/song written about a hot summer’s evening while my wife Isabela and I were visiting her family, who at the time, where living in Houston, Texas. Just thoughts really, about hummingbirds, crickets, Townes Van Zandt, and a few other things. Adios Mexico.
Chapter 10
TURTLE ISLAND – USA
It was great to arrive in New Mexico.
To be met off the bus by a gent from Mayo.
We made music for cowboys and the Indians too,
we ‘saddled the pony’ for the Navajo and Sioux.
(‘Knight of the Road’, John Hoban)
Where to begin with the USA? With a song maybe? So many, too many to sing. Woody Guthrie’s ‘Do, Re, Mi’, perhaps? I have such a connection with this country, in so many different ways. Many of my relatives, on my father’s side, travelled west from Cobh in Cork and Rinanna in County Clare to find themselves in Idlewild, New York, and on Ellis Island. After these first stops, they spread out further to places such as the Carolinas, Cleveland, Ohio and God knows where else, roasting and freezing, and diggin’ for gold perhaps.
We always had Yanks as visitors when we were small. Brooklyn was more real to me than Ballina. Bing Crosby and Al Jolson songs were more popular than our own native songs, ‘The songs our fathers loved’, as The Walton’s radio show used to announce. Most of my father’s people headed for the USA, but some stayed at home. His brothers Tommy, Thady and Johnny were priests in Brooklyn, one other brother, Josie, was an engineer in Dublin. His sister Mary B. was a nun, a Reverend Mother in North Carolina, I believe. Another sister, Patricia, was a nurse in New York, and another, Sally, kept the home fires burning in Carrabán, Westport. So every now and then the Yanks would dock at ‘Belmont’, even the name of our house was called after a spot in the Carolinas, where the Mercy Convent was located. Oh Mercy! When they arrived, we traded gifts. A parcel of the latest US fashion, usually pyjamas for the kids. The kids would then be brought into the parlour to sing our little hearts out. We sang a rebel song or ‘The West’s Awake’ (I had no idea what it was about), ‘Hail Glorious Saint Patrick’, or maybe a hymn. A tear or two might fall onto the red carpet. The air smelled of brandy and Lucky Strikes. I enjoyed the wee gig. When the TV arrived in the late ’60s, I was able to see where it was all happening and where all the Yanks lived. I never felt any connection to the Irish-American world of the Kennedys, The Quiet Man, Maureen and the Duke, despite how they inspired such respect and enthusiasm from most of the Irish Diaspora in that part of the world.
My experience of New York felt the same as my experience of learning music – there was no learning needed, just the fingers needed to toughen up and find their way. I once asked my friend, James O’Malley, how he learned music. He told me he listened really close to the song over a long period of time until it came into his fingers. It works the same way for me.
Listening is the key to learning music. A lot of people don’t actually listen to music anymore, they just sort of hear music with the radio on in the background, in traffic, Midwest or Lyric FM, and all stations in between. Droning away. Actually listening to music is a totally different experience. It’s about feeling the music, moving with it internally, trying to understand it emotionally, clearing the mind to allow the sounds and the voice to work their magic. No thought process, no criticism. It’s a beautiful way to learn music. It’s quite difficult, but it must be developed in order to learn music, and certainly in order to join in with other people in music. It’s all about respecting music for itself. Respecting and wondering about the gift of music. I’ve seen great musicians do this and they are great listeners.
As a youngster I heard this song,
From the New York Island
to the gulf stream waters.
From the Redwood forest in California,
this land was made for you and me.
(‘This land is your land’, Woodie Guthrie)
I also heard about Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian immigrants who were wrongly executed, in a song by Woody Guthrie. I heard the songs ‘Deportees’ and ‘Dust Bowl Refugees’. Around this same time, LPs by The Weavers and the Almanac Singers made their way to me. I remember hearing Alan Lomax’s interview with Woody Guthrie in Oklahoma in the ’40s. It was so funny to me. Every sentence started with ‘Well...’
My education in American music continued during every step of my journey in the States. My very good friend and neighbour, Noah Shapiro, introduced me to Lower and Upper Manhattan. We went to see Snooks Eaglin, Ruben Gonzales, Bob Dylan, Booker T and the M.G.s, and many more. We had many’s the great nosh/feeds together in Chinatown and in Kenny Shopsin’s, Greenwich Village. The Beat Scene, the folk
scene, the ’60s art scene, you name it, it was all there. I love the eerie inner silence I experience in New York. I am sure New York is alive. It is like a personal friend, an addict, a refugee, a power of senses and sights. A heavenly father, perhaps.
People from every corner of the world come to Manhattan Island, the Lower East Side. All outsiders. All trying to live in New York. I feel like I am an original in New York, never afraid, never sure, always a blast or a blas (taste) of a song coming to me:
My feet are here on Broadway, this blessed harvest morn…
(‘The Old Bog Road’, Traditional)
One night, many moons ago, I went to hear Andy McGann play in Tom Reilly’s bar on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan. I was pushed up onstage to play and sing a few songs with my bouzouki which I bought in the Humbert Inn, Castlebar. I sang and played, and Andy invited me to play the next weekend there with him. I was over the moon. It went really well apart from the crowd showing us no appreciation. Andy loved when I launched into a Jimmy Rodgers’ song, ‘Rough and Rowdy’. He laughed and played wonderful fiddle music. I heard everything I needed, or dreamed of, when hearing him playing, including the music of poor Michael Coleman. Coleman left Ireland in 1914 having learned music in his native Sligo from neighbours like Philip O’Beirne, P.J. McDermott, and Johnny Gorman, a travelling piper from Roscommon. His recordings of traditional music influenced and changed Irish music at home and abroad. He died in 1945 and is buried in the Bronx. Andy learned from Coleman when he was a young boy growing up in New York. It was a huge privilege being included in the lineage of Coleman’s greatness. I never met Andy after those nights, but I hear his music always, forever I would say.
I also came across Pete Seeger in upstate New York, dancing a half-set with his wife and another couple on board The Woody Guthrie, a sort of tug boat on the Hudson River. I met Doc Watson and his son Merle in the Bottom Line bar, I had a good drink with Merle that night. I saw Patti Smith and Lou Reed in the Village hanging out. I heard Kerouac, Ginsberg and Co. on McDougal Street, and even thought I heard the Clancy Brothers, Brendan Behan and Dylan Thomas belting out ‘The Croppy Boy’ in the White Horse bar on Hudson Street. Perhaps it was a dream, an illusion.
I always love the spirit of New York. I love the humour and the honesty of the people. Most of all I love the sheer sense of music that I feel whenever I am privileged to be in the middle of it, just walking through the city and listening. When we got the black and white television in 1966, one of the first programmes to make its way into our sitting room was Car 54 – the tale of two New York cops, Toody and Muldoon, and their escapades. It was a howl. The words in the theme song went like this, ‘There’s a traffic jam in Harlem that’s backed-up to Jackson Heights. Car 54, where are you?’ As kids, we used to go around the house singing this refrain.
My friend Noah told me a story about witnessing a woman freaking out on a bus one day, poor crayture. Noah told me that the bus driver turned to her and said very kindly, “There is no point in going bananas in the big apple. You will only end up in the fruit bowl.” That line should be in a song. New York, start spreading the news, so good they named it twice, as Mr. Frank Sinatra said.
New York is one of my favourite places on this planet. I love to be there. Very often, I think of myself, musically and in other ways, as being somewhere between Lower Manhattan, and Clare Island. Both places have a similar effect on me, a kindred music quality or inspiration. A very powerful sense of silence comes over me in New York, a silence that transcends the noise of the living city. This sensation helps me to gain an understanding of just how and why all this great music, art, and people-culture evolve here on this island. Silence is the foundation of all music. I feel sure the Native people who lived on Manhattan Island gave this place a wonderful music-life because I can still hear it. I feel a sense of certainty of my place in the big picture when I walk and sing and listen in New York. I go there as often as I can. It’s a yearly pilgrimage for me, and more if I can manage it.
San Francisco is another wonderful place for me to visit because of the sea and The Mission district. I love to think of what it was like in the ’50s with the Beat stuff in North Beach, and the ’60s with the Summer of Love, The Grateful Dead and Haight Ashbury. I visit my friends all over the city, High Noon, The Dry Dock, The Skid Row, Tenderloin, these are all places in San Francisco. The city is divided into districts of all kinds of diversity, cultures and people. I recorded a song in Hyde Street Studio, and then I lost it, so I don’t really know what it sounded like.
I am happy to report that we managed to revive the custom of ‘The Wren’ in San Francisco in much the same way we did in Sydney. We started it in 1992, dressed to kill, disguised, singing and dancing in various locations in San Francisco. The ‘Doc’, Noel Gantly, was made king for the day.
For the first ten minutes keep it on the ground
as we make our way ’round ’Frisco town.
The Wren, the wren, king of all birds,
St. Stephen’s day got caught in the furze.
Up with the kettle, down with the pan,
give us a dollar to bury the wren!
(‘The Wren’, John Hoban)
I love the song Hank Snow sings – ‘I’ve Been Everywhere’ – because that’s what it feels like at times. I continue my songline/ journey to the town of Detroit. This is where the most important thing in my life happened – I met my wife Isabela on Thanksgiving Day 1995, right there, in downtown Detroit, in Motown. We met at a party and we became instant friends. We started ‘walking out’, as they say in Ireland, and we were married in Castlebar in 1999. We are living happily ever after, that’s the truth. She is the best artist I have ever met, and we now play music together, which is a total joy and expression of everything that is new and old. Peru is her home country. We have visited there, and we have felt the music, the dance and the language in a very profound, homely and beautiful way. When we landed in Lima, I felt at home immediately. I absolutely loved the feel, the vibe, and the look of both Lima and the Andes.
Detroit itself is a marvel. It is also a contradiction such as the American Dream, huge wealth and massive poverty side by side, the racial tensions and all that. I will never forget the feeling I got when I first stood in the Motown recording studio. My whole body was shaking as I remembered my childhood in Mayo listening to all the great stars who recorded their songs on this very spot: Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, The Vandellas, The Supremes, The Miracles, The Jackson family, Aretha Franklin, such talent. They all came from the Projects – poorer housing – around the corner from the Motown recording studio, all local kids.
I have a huge interest in music history, where the people were at, where the inspiration came from, how they lived. I have yet to visit Memphis, Tennessee, and Parchment Farm, Mississippi State penitentary where Eddie James, known as Son House, was living for a while. I don’t know how I first got to hear about Son House, but I am a real fan of his music, have been all my life.
Muddy Waters said that when he was growing up in music, Son House was the king. Muddy reckoned that if it wasn’t for Son House he wouldn’t have played music. ‘Preachin’ the Blues’, ‘Dry Spell Blues’, ‘Low Down Dirty Dog blues...’ I used to think about that, imagine Muddy Waters not playing music, I’d have the blues forever.
I also thought a lot about how Django Reinhardt badly damaged two of his fingers in a caravan fire when he was eighteen years old. He then went on to learn the guitar all over again, but even better than before, using only two fingers for solos. Both Django and Grapelli were Aquarians, water carriers. Grapelli was an aristocrat (whatever that is when it’s at home) and Django, a gypsy, who has no home. I met a first cousin of Django’s in a jazz club in Bonn, Germany in the early ’80s. He could make the guitar talk. We got on famously, had a few, then parted ways. He was an amazing singer as well as guitar virtuoso. He knew all about Ireland, horses and blacksmiths. I often wonder what became of him. He is in a great movie that I have seen quite a
few times, Latcho Drom. The movie had a huge impact on me. It was made by Tony Gaitlif and it told the tale of the journey of Roma from India to Europe, represented in various music forms.
I seem to have a connection with this film because I have also met and played the mandocello with another man who appears in the movie. He too is a gypsy who earns his living playing in Istanbul with his son, who is an extraordinary singer and drummer. The man plays the fiddle and he sings. I met the two of them busking in a café under the Galatian Bridge, performing for a band of locals who listened closely, while drinking raki, and sang along. It was awesome. We had no words that we could exchange, but for about an hour and a half, we played a very strange and wonderful brand of ceol/music. We were friends straight away. We felt safe; we felt at home. I have always felt sure that music comes from the gypsy world, from the nomadic, rather than from the world of settlers.
My friend Tony and I went to Istanbul to visit Johnny Mulhern, his wife Cathy, and family Dara, Ruth and Brendan. We had a great holiday, especially playing music in the amphitheatre in Efes, and playing to curious Japanese tourists, and a few Turks also. We ended up being stranded in Kuşadasi because the airline that carried us out went broke and out of business. Mayo was playing Cork in the All-Ireland football final, they were beat, of course. But I wrote a song for Willie Joe, the foot-baller, one of the finest sons of Mayo, and sang it for him once in his pub in Castlebar. We got home eventually, it all worked out in the end, as it always does.
The Turks are a pious people,
they pray five times a day.
We met the twelve Apostles
gutting fish along the quay.
In a Turkish bath, a ‘hammam’,
we were scrubbed from head to toe.
We were the two cleanest lads
that ever left Mayo.
I don’t know, maybe so,
but no one here has heard of Willie Joe!
(‘Willie Joe’, John Hoban 1989)
Johnny and his good friend Wally Page, are the two finest songwriters and singers I have ever met. They are also great blokes. They play a brand of music that I would always follow, I’d stand in the snow to hear them play. Long may they sing those songs. It’s no harm to let them at it, as the saying goes.
