Blarney Pilgrims Irish Music Podcast

Mandolin and banjo player Jimmy Dalton of Waterford joins us this week to talk about leaving Ireland, foundry work, Cardiff sessions and leaving your banjo at home. Oh, and Bush Bands, mandolins and marches.

Jimmy runs a monthly session in Geelong at the Sir Charles Hotham. To find out more about this session shoot us a message and we'll pass your details on to Jimmy.

Once again, thanks so much for your time and tunes Jimmy, it was a pleasure.

Enjoy!
Darren & Dom

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Dom's notes:

As I mention in the intro to today's episode, Jimmy Dalton was at one of the first house sessions I was invited to when I moved to Australia. He was sitting at the end of a long kitchen table with a mandolin, a mandola, a banjo, and a glint in his eye. He is, as they might say in Co. Antrim, a wile man for the music. He was also one of our first interviews for The Blarney Pilgrims, and we touch on quite a few of the ideas that we explore in other episodes.

As I also mention in the intro, he knows scads of tunes, and when he's playing you can often see him feel his way into a set, like a car merging into traffic,his eyes fixed on some distant destination. It's very cool to watch - or hear, more accurately.

He invited me to play the mandola one night at a session, and as I was finding my way around trying to accompany the jigs that we were playing, I got to thinking about that instrument. I used to play a mandola when I was a teenager. At least, that's what the guy in Owen's music shop in Ballymoney told me it was. He also told me it was tuned G - D - A - C or something, and so for a good few months I was contorting myself into all sorts of shapes until I realised I could just tune it like a mandolin and it'd be a lot less painful for everybody concerned. That mandola was a gift from my mum and dad, who could ill afford it I know now, but who took me over to Ballymoney anyway with the promise of a complicated stringed instrument of some sort. Ultimately it came down to a choice between the mandola and a hammer dulcimer. Who knew there would be a hammer dulcimer tucked away in a dusty corner of a music shop in Ballymoney of all places...where did it come from? How did it get there? Anyway, I went for the mandola because that's what Andy Irvine played, and the only things I knew about the hammer dulcimer was that it was the instrument in the Ask The Family theme tune, and that it featured on one of my brothers' albums, Nana Mouskouri Live In Athens.

Ballymoney was where we drove to drop off and pick up brothers and sisters heading home from, or back up to, The City (Belfast). It was where the train left from - a freezing railway station with excessively dynamic weather patterns on Platform 1 and a great bar attached that was owned by the legendary motorcycle champion (road racing) Joey Dunlop. A bar where I once witnessed the second most epic spillage of pints I've ever seen - 8 pints of Guinness on two trays hitting the floor simultaneously (the most epic spillage being in The Blue Moon in Seattle - 4 pitchers of Manny's IPA on a packed Friday evening). It always seemed unimaginably dreary to me when I was a child, Ballymoney, and yet there was a mandola AND a hammer dulcimer there, in that music shop. Alongside the latest albums by Victor Gregg, The Singing Barber, and John Watt, The Singing Farmer. So maybe it wasn't that bad after all.

My dad drove there to work every day for about thirty-five or forty years. I often wonder what he thought about on that half hour drive each morning and evening. If he ever wondered about the trajectory of his life, about destiny, about mortality. Or if he was really just glad of a bit of time to himself in the car. Respite from a house full of weans, one of them ploinking away on a mis-tuned, eight stringed mandola. 'Thank God we didn't get him the dulcimer.'

Thanks again, Jimmy, for taking the time to play for us, to chat, and for the chance to have a shot on your accurately tuned mandola.

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If you liked this episode and think you got some worth from it, then please pledge $2 over at www.patreon.com/blarneypilgrims.

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Thank you so much to David Game for your time and lovely tunes. Also a huge thanks to the Guildford Corner Store for the use of your back room to record in.

The tunes played in this episode are:

The Mountain Road (Trad)
The Rose in the Heather (Trad)
Paddy's Trip to Scotland (Trad)
Mullingar Races (Trad)

For more info on the Canberra Irish Club go here: https://www.irishclub.com.au/
For more info on Comhaltas Canberra go here: https://www.facebook.com/Comhaltas-Canberra-580450142467295/

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Dom's notes:

I really love this conversation. We very easily found our way into the stuff that gets me going - the ephemeral nature of the experience of playing music, the naming and honoring of players we used to listen to, and - of all things - The Brass Fiddle.

I have no certain memory of how I came across that CD of Donegal fiddle music that we talk about. But on first listening to it, I remember I was blown away by its elemental nature. It's not just that the recordings are plain and true. It's that the playing itself is completely unfussy and unafraid. In fact, what it is, now that I think about it, is authentic. It IS what it is.

Doodley Doodley Dank is the Con Cassidy track David hums, I think. I thought I was cool having that rarity of a CD that I got from who knows where, but as if to prove our point about how you can get everything everywhere now, you can listen to The Brass Fiddle on Spotify. So I'm slightly less cool now. Anyway, check it out.

Since we started the Blarney Pilgrims, one of the revelations me and Darren have had is that the fiddle is an intensely physical instrument. The music is born of friction, which goes some way to explain the appeal of the instrument maybe, and the seemingly endless variety that's audibly apparent between different players. Even if they share the same background, draw on the same regional style of playing, no two people sound the same. And I wonder is it my imagination, or is the fiddle unique in how it allows players to express themselves with such individuality, because as Chris Fitzgerald says, playing it is a wrestling match. And then I wonder if other bowed instruments have the same quality. And I'm thinking about Jordi Savall, the amazing Catalan musician who plays the viola da gamba. If you've never heard that guy's music, you're missing out. His 1988 album Les Voix Humaines will blow your mind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylpOO-7cyt0

I was introduced to this by two great friends, Jon and Mary Pritchard, when they lived in London, I lived in Scotland and we would spend every weekend we could manage hanging around drinking, eating and just having a completely beautiful time. As I did with Darren at the Banjo Jamboree in Guildford, Victoria.

David, thanks for taking time out from the festival to talk to us.

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If you liked this episode and think you got some worth from it, then please pledge $2 over at www.patreon.com/blarneypilgrims.

Of course, you don't have to become a patron to listen, but we guarantee you'll enjoy each episode more because you'll be safe in the knowledge that you're a deadset legend.

If you can't afford to pledge on Patreon, and we totally understand if you can't, all is not lost. You can still support the show by sharing it on your socials, posting about it in your favourite forums or simply by telling your mates about it down the pub.

Till next time.
Darren & Dom

www.patreon.com/blarneypilgrims
www.blarneypilgrims.com
facebook.com/BlarneyPilgrimsPodcast
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Cameron Mather's a Sydney based banjo player and singer. He joined us down the line to talk about the strange, difficult moment we're all facing. About isolation and its challenges; his love of Irish music; hardcore training to compete in the Fleadh; the Sydney session scene and the beauty of being a teacher.

In this episode Cameron plays:
Fredd Finn's / Brady's (Brady's from the playing of John Williams)
Peach Blossoms (Barn Dance)
The First Pint / The Flying Wheelchair (two jigs, from the playing of Kevin Crawford)
Fergal O’Gara’s / The Bag of Spuds / The Boys of ‘45

To follow Cameron on Facebook go here: https://www.facebook.com/tenorbanjocam
To follow Cameron's Sydney Irish music group go here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/435901279930266/
And to follow the Gaelic Club go here: https://www.facebook.com/gaelicclubsydney/

As always, the episode is free to listen and download online or from all podcast apps:

Our Website: https://blarneypilgrims.fireside.fm/44
Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2VdCZMu
Google Podcasts: http://bit.ly/3cPTkis
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3aTHAKH

Right that's it, enjoy!
Darren & Dom

...

Well, it's a tough time, so we hope you can hang in there with us, and we'll do the same for you. So if you liked this episode and think you got some worth from it, then please pledge at any level over at www.patreon.com/blarneypilgrims.

If you can't afford to pledge on Patreon, and we totally understand if you can't, all is not lost. You can still support the show by sharing it on your socials, posting about it in your favourite forums or simply by telling your mates about it down the pub.

www.patreon.com/blarneypilgrims
www.blarneypilgrims.com
www.facebook.com/BlarneyPilgrimsPodcast
@BlarneyPilgrimsPodcast

An unexpected journey in the company of Darren, Dom, Dom's Uncle Leo, Sean Matthews and the bean an tí in Carberry's, Drogheda.

With the world full of strangeness at the minute, it seems apt that we'd find ourselves chatting about all sorts of unexpected things in this week's episode: unaccompanied singing as Mount Kilimanjaro; the people who gave us our first taste of Irish music; searching for your own voice; Take The Floor, Bowie, Aztec Camera and The Raggle Taggle Gypsy. Sneaking the remote control away from your dozing dad. And probably the greatest heckle ever, from an Oban bar on New Years Night circa 1997.

As we mention in the second intro after our first intro to this episode, we welcome any suggestions for cool ways to keep talking to musicians over the next few months. So please drop us a line via Facebook or Patreon and we'll get right back to you. And as always, thanks to everybody for continuing to listen.

Keep in touch, and watch yourselves,

Darren and Dom

'I could play reels all night if I knew enough of them.' Country Sligo in the '50s and '60s, to London then Sydney. Father, mother and uncle playing the fiddle, learning at country house dances and 'having a go myself.' Ceili House on Radio Athlone, and looking forward to Friday night house dances. Falling in love with the accordion. Listening to the greats of the London scene; learning the box, digging trenches and labouring; Kentish Town and Holloway Road. Plenty of work in Sydney, and getting out and about playing for dancers.

In this episode Jimmy plays:

George White's and The Galway Rambler
The Haunted House Set
The Stone of Destiny
The Sally Gardens and The Sligo Maid
('...two of the old favourites I learned when I was growing up...')

The picture of Jimmy that we're using for this episode was taken by Ian Stewart - thanks for permission to use it, Ian.

The players you can hear on the audio recorded at Tangambalanga are Jimmy, Joe Fitzgerald, Jamie Molloy, Jody Moran, Gerry McKeague, Edel McBride, Kit Joyce, Declan Simpson, John Joe Noonan, Paul Gallagher, Ian Stewart and others. Apologies to anybody I've missed - it was that kind of weekend.

To listen, stream or download simply click a link below:

Our website: https://blarneypilgrims.com
iTunes: https://apple.co/2A6tUPm
Google Podcasts: http://bit.ly/3cPTkis
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3eIwBFy

Or alternatively, simply search your favourite podcast app for the Blarney Pilgrims.

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Darren & Dom

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