County Sligo is situated in the far northwest of Ireland, in the province of Connaught. It is a wondrously beautiful area, with seascapes and picturesque mountains and valleys in the north, and hundreds of beautiful lakes dotting the interior. It has a profusion of small towns and villages. The biggest urban area is the town of Sligo, but historically most of the people have made their living in the rural areas.

In the 1990s, the good times that the whole of Ireland enjoyed transformed the local economy. Jobs became plentiful and wages soared. The county now bustles with newfound prosperity, and tourism is flourishing, as visitors flock to the area in huge numbers to view a matchless variety of megalithic monuments and enjoy the native culture.

It’s a far cry from the Sligo of the late 1840s when local young men and women began an exodus that was to last for decades. Small subsistence farming was the staple life of most people at that time. The ravages of famine were keenly felt throughout rural Ireland, and the memory of poor tenant farmers of north Sligo—evicted and forced to emigrate to North America by big landowners like Lord Palmerston, the owner of Mullaghmore Castle— was still alive in the area, in an oral tradition filled with stories of history, myth, and legend, which captivated the young William Butler Yeats and inspired much of his early poetry.

The mysterious world of traditional Irish music largely eluded Yeats. His time was spent in the big houses of the landed gentry, and he didn’t have a ready entrée to the world of the poor farmers who nurtured and sustained this tradition. From a distance, he admired what he could make out of it and wrote eloquently of it in his famous poem “The Fiddler of Dooney.”

Poverty and unemployment drove most emigrants to seek a better life in America. More than 85,000 left for good between the end of the famine in 1849 and the early decades of the 20th century. Among them were some of the finest traditional fiddlers in the history of Irish music. The two main instruments in Sligo music of the late 19th and early 20th century were the flute and the fiddle, with the latter predominating.

The major names associated with Sligo-style fiddling in the United States in the early 1900s are Michael Coleman (1891–1945), James Morrison (1893–1947), Paddy Sweeney (1894–1974), and Paddy Killoran (1904–1965). All were born and raised in south Sligo and emigrated to the United States between 1915 and 1925. They inherited a virtuoso fiddling tradition that was well established by the time they were children.

Regional styles and repertoires of Irish traditional music are generally associated with gifted individuals who leave an indelible imprint on their community, and indeed, several fiddlemasters’ names are still well known among Sligo traditional music performers and aficionados—names such as blind Tom Healy and his pupils Jamesy Gannon, Thomas Gilmartin, Pat Mannion, and Kipeen Scanlon.

They had a major impact on the musical development of the next generation of fiddlers. Coleman, Killoran, and Morrison ended up becoming the most famous of this generation. Though they all became brilliant and prolific recording artists, they had very different careers. Killoran and Morrison formed orchestras that played on radio and in Irish-American dance halls. Both played and recorded traditional tunes, but with their orchestras they performed a mixture of traditional and more modern material for diverse immigrant and
native-born dance hall audiences.

Coleman flirted briefly with the vaudeville stage, where he developed an act that had him dancing to his own fiddling, foreshadowing by more than 40 years the dancing Cape Breton fiddlers Natalie MacMaster and Ashley MacIsaac and the late Nashville multi-instrumentalist John Hartford! But Coleman didn’t like the drudgery of playing for dances, so he became a semi-reclusive figure, legendary more for recordings than live performances. He made more than 80 commercial recordings, 10 transcription disks made for radio, and a small number of private discs.

They were filled with memorable virtuoso playing, famous for the embellishments, ornamentations, and variations that with apparent effortlessness he introduced into almost every rendering. Nobody will ever know for sure if these variations arose spontaneously in the studio or whether he had them “mapped out” beforehand. Either way, they’ve served ever since as an exemplary stylistic reference point for countless fiddlers.

James Morrison too recorded over 80 sides, many solo and others with his orchestra. He was a master dance teacher and music teacher and practiced both trades in New York, where he arrived in 1915. He called himself and was known as “The Professor.” He recorded for a variety of labels, including Columbia, Gennet, New Republic, Okeh, and Vocalion. His virtuosity enabled him to play in difficult and unusual keys for Irish music.

Paddy Killoran, one of Morrison’s pupils, arrived from Ballymote in south Sligo in the early 1920s and went on to form several orchestras that played for dancing. The most prominent, The Pride of Erin Orchestra, played on ships going back and forth between Ireland and America in the 1930s. Killoran recorded traditional music and more commercial material with orchestras that he organized over the years. He left a memorable legacy of solo and duet
recordings, some of the latter performed with his south Sligo friend and fellow-fiddler Paddy Sweeney and some with flute player Mike Flynn.

The impact of all these recordings on traditional music in the home country was profound. Not only did they serve as classic exemplars of style—particularly among fiddlers—but they also helped create a national repertoire of tunes many of which are still played in sessions, often in the same order as they were recorded. Session playing, as it is known today in Irish traditional music, is probably only of mid-20th-century origin, and the common stock of tunes played by all Irish musicians has been markedly influenced by commercial recordings.

Michael Gorman (1885–1970), another great Sligo fiddler of the same era as Coleman, Morrison, and Killoran, emigrated to England rather than America and made wonderful recordings there between the 1950s and the 1970s. More than 60 of these are reissued on a Topic CD, Michael Gorman: The Sligo Champion. He performed extensively in the London area for years with the great and colorful singer and 5-string-banjo traveling woman Margaret Barry.

He was a music teacher before he left Sligo, and among his pupils was another brilliant Sligo fiddler, John Vesey, who emigrated to Philadelphia in 1949. Vesey often played with another great immigrant Sligo musician in the Philadelphia area, flute player Eddie Cahill, who recorded one LP for Shanachie which is unfortunately no longer available. Eddie was one of several great Sligo-style flute players who emigrated to the United States; the others were Tom Morrison and the incomparable, Leitrim-born John McKenna in New York in the 1920s, Mike Flynn in New York in the late 1940s, Kevin Henry, who came over to Chicago in the 1950s, and Mayo’s Dermot Grogan, who arrived in New York in the late 1990s.

The Sligo style was carried into the next generation by New York fiddlers, including Andy McGann, who’d known and played with Coleman as a youth; Paddy Reynolds; Martin Wynne; and James “Lad” O&146;Beirne. Other prominent fiddlers were John Vesey in Philadelphia and Johnny McGreevy in Chicago. Musicologist Miles Krassen, in the introduction to his 1976 edited reissue of Capt. Francis O’Neill’s Music of Ireland, maintained that McGreevy and Vesey “probably best represent the Old Sligo style of fiddling” in the United States.
This raises the question of what exactly the Sligo style is, but surprisingly, musicians disagree little about who is a Sligo-style player and who isn’t.

Each great Sligo-style player has a unique voice, but certain general features are associated with the style, and they operate at rhythmic and melodic levels. Ornamentation of melodic lines usually involves complex and often unpredictable mixtures of triplets, single and double grace notes, and short and long rolls. Fiddlers make liberal use of double stopping and freely alternate between short and long bowing, emphasizing the latter.

Variation is a striking feature, with all the top players introducing in almost every performance subtle innovations that go beyond ornamentation. Sligo-style music usually has a distinctively pulsating lift and swing, evident in the flute playing, perhaps even more than in fiddling. And of course there’s the repertoire of regional tunes handed down from generation to generation of musicians from Sligo and the Leitrim and Roscommon border areas, close to south Sligo. All this constitutes the foundation of great art and historical connections that today’s traditional musicians, such as Brian Conway, his longtime friend and fellow-fiddler Tony DeMarco, and Brian’s protégé Patrick Mangan, build upon to form a unique mode of musical expression.

Back in Ireland, after a period of postcolonial funk, when almost every aspect of the native heritage was held in low esteem, traditional music is more than ever a major part of Sligo’s cultural expression. It’s right up there with literature in the popular imagination: literary aficionados refer to the area as “Yeats country,” while music devotees invariably call it “Coleman country.” The world-famous group Dervish is based in Sligo, and brilliant musicians such as John Carty, Seamus O’Donnell, and Gregory Daly play nationwide with a strong Sligo flavor. As long as there are legendary musicians like Peter Horan, Andy McGann in 1991the McGowans in Gurteen, and the irrepressible Seamus Tansey, the local tradition will flourish. Brian Conway’s recording is an important contribution to this musical culture, in part because of its artistic excellence, but also because, as local musical scholar Gregory Daly has noted over and over, in recent times in Sligo music the fiddle has taken a back seat to the flute. All lovers of Sligo music would agree that it’s imperative to maintain the balance between these two instruments, and Brian’s recording is very timely.

—New York City, April 2002

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