Concert Review—

Irish Music So Good, Even Baseball Fans Took Note

By Andrew Carey

When John Hoban was at primary school in Castlebar, County Mayo, Ireland during the early 1960s, Brother Augustus, the music master, said, “You’re not musical,” and put him on the bass drum in the school marching band.

“‘And years later, when we met again, he said he was wrong and I agreed,” Mr Hoban told the audience that had filled Newtown Meeting House last weekend for a concert by the multi-talented musician. Having just heard Mr Hoban rip through the double jig “Cherish the Ladies” on tenor (four-string) banjo, no one in the audience could understand how the Brother could have thought such a thing in the first place.

Many of Mr Hoban’s songs are about roaming people, “tinkers and travelers.” The 18th Century “Banks of the Bann,” about a wanderer in love with a rich man’s daughter, stood nicely next to his own “A Day in Sligo.” The latter song tells of how, after a morning of busking (playing street music) in Sligo Town, Mr Hoban met an old man in a pub who hummed the jig “The Bold Dougherty,” to which the song is set, and recited a poem which serves as the chorus: “I am a bold tinker and my name it is Riley/ I’ve worked at my trade and it’s very well known/ That working cold metal makes a man very thirsty/ Or else I’d leave drinking forever alone.”

Putting down the mandocello with which he’d accompanied the songs, Mr Hoban picked up his fiddle for the reel “The Yellow Tinker.” Next came a jig of his own, “Sruthán,” the title track of his 2002 instrumental CD. Meaning “an underground stream,” this is the old name of the street, now called Davitt’s Terrace, where Mr Hoban and his wife, Isabella, live in Castlebar.

“When I go to play these tunes,” he said, “it’s like when you have to get from here to – I don’t know the area well – say from here to Bridgeport. You have a thousand different ways to get there, and you might take any of them.”

Switching back to the mandocello, Mr Hoban sang “Knights of the Road,” a song written while he was living the roving life himself in Australia. He dedicated it to Fairfield singer Molly Wilson, a Dubliner whose father, from whom she has her songs, was Australian.

“Matty,” written by Mr Hoban’s friend John Mulhearn, is an eerie-comical song about a man who met himself one night coming to and going from the pub. At the second meeting he tried to “grab hold of his likeness” and was found dead on the railroad tracks the next morning. The jig “Deoraí” (“Exile”), another of Mr Hoban’s own tunes, ended the first half of the show.

The second half opened with three waltzes on the fiddle: “I’ll Remember You, Love, in my Prayers,” “Mrs. Kenny” and “Men of the

West.” The first was learnt by Mr Hoban over the telephone from a friend, and the second and third were originally paired by the legendary Sligo-born fiddler Michael Coleman. Many traditional musicians avoid waltzes in favor of the faster and more driving jigs and reels, and it was nice to hear these so sweetly played.

“Castle Lane” tells of Mr Hoban’s childhood street, where shops sold “everything from a needle to an anchor” and the men from the local FCA (the Irish army) unit marched to a restaurant for dinner after Mass. Today, alas, the street is run down and Castlebar has “unisex hair salons that have never heard of Brylcreem.”

Next, Mr Hoban skipped westward across the ocean and the better part of a continent to Lubbock, Texas, where Butch Hancock wrote “Babe, You’re Just a Wave, You’re Not the Water.”

During a workshop he had offered in Fairfield earlier that afternoon (sponsored, like the evening concert in Newtown, by Shamrock Traditional Irish Music Society), several students had played tunes by the harper Turlough O’Carolan. So, Mr Hoban said, he’d been inspired to play “O’Carolan’s Concerto” and “Planxty Johnson.”

The airs are seldom rendered on the banjo, and it was a great testament to Mr Hoban that they sounded as natural and proper on that plangent instrument as on the brass-strung harp for which they were originally composed.

Switching to the fiddle, Mr Hoban next played the tunes “The Blackbird,” a jig and a hornpipe. Some musicians might have crammed them together in a forced and awkward fashion, but Mr Hoban’s natural and unassuming approach, pausing for a beat between as one might in a casual session, put them comfortably side by side.

The slow air “Michael Davitt” was made by Séamus Duffy as the melody to his song about the leader of the Land League, founded in Castlebar, which successfully, and non-violently, agitated for the right of small farmers to reclaim their homes from the big absentee landlords. Mr Hoban’s rendition on the whistle was fluid and lovely, showing the heights which this simple and inexpensive instrument can reach.

In performing “The White Feather,” Mr Hoban takes a rather macho verse from the tradition and turns it round into a song about having the courage to be oneself. “To show the white feather” means to back down from a challenge, and Mr Hoban’s song points out that sometimes refusing a fight is the braver and more difficult thing.

For an encore, Mr Hoban took up the whistle again to play “The Job of Journeywork,” one of the first tunes he learned. After another burst of applause, the audience crowded to the back, not to rush home to the television and the first game of the World Series, but to buy Mr Hoban’s CDs. Perhaps this, even more than the applause, was proof of their great appreciation for John Hoban and his sterling music.