How far back in history were there sessions?
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Here’s something that might help: http://chiffboard.mati.ca/viewtopic.php?t=40020
Sessions as I take it you mean them (in pubs, music played for the sake of playing music) fifty years or so. People would have sat down to play a few tunes together before that to amuse themselves or their neighbours or play for dances before that.
I seem to recall an episode of The Flintstones in which Fred and Barney hopped into the foot-powered car and, much to the consternation of Wilma and Betty who were being left at home to keep BamBam from bambamming Pebbles into a pile of small stones, headed off to the Newgrange Pub for the weekly session craic. Sadly, when they got there they discovered it was the one day of the year when the publican found it more profitable to rent out his premises for use as a tanning salon. Unfortunately, it being a typical “soft” Irish day, no one showed up to catch the rays there that day. Sadly, that was the writing on the wall for yer man and he went bankrupt shortly thereafter, and the pub has been shuttered ever since. But the writing on the wall has been preserved, and I hear that the odd tourist now comes by to check it out. Fred and Barney were told that they pulled a nice pint at the bar of the Poulnabrone over in Clare, but being that it was basically just an outdoor beer garden and a long drive to boot, they never made it there and in fact gave up Irish music altogether shortly thereafter.
I think this episode is fairly obscure and may not have made it into wide syndication, but my conclusion from it is that sessions have been around since dinosaurs roamed the earth.
I seem to remember reading or hearing on RTE Radio1, there’s a rather interesting history of where and under what circumstances music has been allowed to be performed in Ireland that has shaped the patterns of playing in kitchens, pubs, etc., and if I remember correctly, was the driving influence for the creation ceili bands.
If someone can post the details of this or can link to a description, I would be very appreciative.
Best wishes,
Jerry
This one is not from The Flintstones.
The Irish Dance Halls Act of circa 1930 is widely credited as being the force that moved traditional Irish dancing from the cottages and crossroads into the larger community halls. The impetus for the act was the government’s desire to get its taxable due out of its citizens’ attempts at enjoyment by moving them out of the sacred confines of their homes and into a public place where the taxman could keep a keen eye on the goings-on. The real power behind the government in those days, i.e. the bishops, are often accused of wanting to move the near occasion of sin known as dancing out of the dark alleyways and tight living quarters and into much more spacious and well-lit premises where, again, a keen eye could be kept on the goings-on. When the dancing moved, the music had to follow. Whereas in the living room/kitchen of the small Irish cottage one musician was all that was needed to dance to, in the larger halls more volume was required. In the days before amplification (and indeed before rural electrification in the west of Ireland), the solution to more volume was more musicians, and the ceili band as we know it today was born.
But as I’ve said, this was all driven by the dancing. I don’t believe this would have had any effect at all on sessions as we know them today, because at the time of this act sessions did not really exist in Ireland. Which is not to say that two or more musicians never sat down and played with each other then. Of course they did. But as far as I know, the concept of a session as we understand it today (i.e. most often if not always in a public house) originated among the Irish expatriates living and working in London post-WW II.
In the rural west of Ireland, though, the music and dance were always tightly coupled, and this Dance Halls Act is certainly part of the crackdown by the clergy that Junior Crehan said nearly killed the music in the dark days of the 1930s and '40s.
In the US, I think it is 1900 for sessions in the major Irish-American cities (Boston, Chicago, NY).
The movie Cavemen with Ringo Starr, a Quaid brother and Shelley Long, among others, has a cute scene where music is invented while the tribe is sitting bored around the campfire. They start out bumping on logs and end up sounding like a Broadway production number.
My old family history in Oz from as far back as 1890 has it that it was the custom for the family to book a hall with a piano somewhere in the valley for reunions.
These events were primarily music and dancing in which it was obligatory to bring some food and an instrument and join in - fiddle, banjo, trumpet, whatever even if it was just the spoons.
While a good deal of the tunes played were Irish, it was also common to render anything that was popular at the time including stuff heard on the radio. As irish mixed with english and other traditions, london music-hall stuff got played and sung as well.
The last one I recall as an ankle-biter scurrying around under the tressels with the other kiddies was in 1965. The irish component was still there, but much more music hall and pop-tunes from the radio.
It’s nice to see the session tradition taking hold in more and more places - it’s sad that the sense of familly has been displaced in the general drift of our times. Still, I’d rather see the resulting vacuum occupied by ITM rather than hamberger joints and “the entertainment industry”.
Well said Mitch.
One event that started to replace traditional Irish music in America was piano (and its sheet music) in the homes, 1890s through the 1950s. So, we get many Irish-American standards recalling Dear Old Ireland and it definitely was a ‘gather round, dad’s at the piano’ kind of event. Pre-radio, pre-tv, pre-cable, pre-professional sports leagues (at least to the level of today).
The sheet music system kept it affordable and timely/current for everyone. One of the last pieces of piano sheet music that my grandmother bought was ‘Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head’.
An Irish tune if there ever was one…
Jim, what evidence do you have for this statement? Not challenging it, necessarily, just curious. And in light of subsequent comments on this thread by yourself and others, I’d like to draw a distinction between sessions and house parties/hooleys/etc. I would say those are two different things, myself. Sessions, as I and I think many others would define them, are regular or semi-regular gatherings in a public place (more often than not a pub) specifically for the purpose of playing Irish traditional music (jigs, reels, hornpipes, etc). (Which is not to say that other music or songs don’t occasionally creep in. But even if they do, the primary purpose of the session is to play the dance music.) Hooleys, house parties and the like, on the other hand, are ad hoc gatherings where the goal is to party, be social, have a good time, perhaps celebrate an occasion like a wedding, wake, leave-taking, good harvest, etc. Although dance tunes might end up being a part (even a big part) of such gatherings, they aren’t the driving force behind them. Looked at another way, the people attending sessions would be players of ITM, whereas the people attending house parties/hooleys would be people who want to party, some of whom might have ITM as their “party piece”, but not nearly all of them.
Given that, based on all I’ve ever heard, sessions as we know them started in London in the 1940s/50s as I said earlier. Of course, people have been getting together for house parties or hooleys for time immemorial, and probably ITM has been a part of such gatherings for as long as ITM has been around - which is several hundred years. But as I’ve said, those gatherings aren’t sessions. The point of intersection of these two things is house parties made up of a group of mainly ITM players, which have also ended up being called sessions in common usage. Hence the confusion.
Comments?
Oh, and now that I think of it, here’s another argument for why sessions probably weren’t happening in cities like New York as early as you say. Jack Coen, who came to NYC in 1949 or thereabouts, has often spoken about how when he arrived there the music was at a low ebb, almost an underground thing. He wasn’t playing at all until his path happened to cross with the few others that were. Mike Rafferty tells similar stories, and has even said that the main gathering once the revival of ITM in NYC got underway was at the annual feis, not at sessions. In Boston, Joe Derrane - who came of age as musician as a teenager in the 1940s - speaks often of his days playing at the dance halls on Dudley Street, but not of sessions. Granted, there were Irish musicians in those cities and in Chicago as well from the late 1800s on, with major recording taking place of the likes of Coleman, Morrison, etc. One would think that if there were actually sessions taking place in those cities in the first half of the 20th century, today’s old-timers such as Coen, Rafferty and Derrane would have heard talk of them from the old-timers of their own youth. Yet I’ve never heard or heard of any of them mentioning anything like that, and it seems that if sessions really were happening that long ago they would be mentioning them along with all their other talk of the old days, doesn’t it?
Has anyone out there read Chief O’Neill’s writings? (I haven’t.) His heyday was in Chicago in the late 1800s and the first third of the 20th century. Do his writings contain any mention of sessions or gatherings that sound like sessions, even if they’re not called by that name?
I have spent a lot of time sorting O’Neill and mainly the pipers in Chicago. There were weekly sessions, where general people were ‘invited’, at several homes. There is virtually no connection to the musicians of O’Neill’s time and the later immigrants (mostly in the 1920s). FON’s friends and musical associates were old or gone. I spoke with several folks who emigrate at that time and they never thought to look up O’Neill or the others that were still around. They emigrated with their music and just picked it up in Chicago at a new location. Those people, arriving in the 20s during the 1920s, never really connected wtih Francis O’Neill (d. 1936) or James O’Neill (d. 1949) or William McCormick (d. 1948). The 1920s saw dance halls emerge as part of pubs - an upstairs room with its own bar area. But again, Irish pubs/dance halls are part of the scene for 50 years previous to that.
Johnny McGreevy, born here in Chicago in 1919, never met James O’Neill but was actively playing in the 1930s. Eleanor Neary, born here about the same year, never bought a copy of O’Neills even though the pile had been marked down to 5c at the place she worked, Lyon & Healy. She was absent the day that Francis O’Neill visited the Irish Village at the 1934 Worlds Fair with his entourage - all present, including Joe Shannon, were presented with copies of IM&M. Joe, in Chicago from Mayo from 1927, had never heard of Francis O’Neill before that - the buzz came through that the former Chief of Police O’Neill wanted to meet the piper. FOM asked Joe to play a couple of tunes for him. Joe played two hornpipes and O’Neill inscribed a copy to Joe - ‘To the youngest left handed piper since Patsy Touhey’ and signed it.
An old air from Ireland, it was previously known as ‘It’s a soft day - again - I’ll guess I’ll head for the pub.’
The 1920s and 1930s dance halls in Chicago were full of dancers and people. Musicians were engaged to play for them - sometimes for modest cash and free drink. They definitely would play for themselves and for good amounts of time late in the evening but definitely for several hours.
Irish folks left Ireland in almost every year. Some of the ‘main’ patterns for the groups of musicians that turned up in Chicago are 1865 thru 1890, 1920s, 1950s - notable missing blocks for emigration are WWI, the Great Depression (some folks went home to Ireland due to lack of work here), and WWII.