It seems to have been a while since the banjo mandolin figured in any discussion here. Rather than revive an earlier one, I’m starting afresh.
The purpose of this initial comment is to call attention to a recent article that reviews the use of the instrument in Irish traditional music through the first six decades of the 20th century. It concludes that Tom Kiley, who Francis O’Neill described as a mandolin whiz kid, played a banjo mandolin on the wax cylinder recordings the two of them made together with the fiddler, Edward Cronin, circa 1905.
I recently played a Gibson banjolin in a local music shop and was really surprised at how nice it sounded. Any I’ve heard before have had that god awful combination of plink and ping that have given them their reputation. But in fairness, this one actually sounded very much like a mandolin, only louder and with a slightly “shallower” tone if that makes sense.
Didn’t like it enough to buy it or inflict it on anyone else, but that is one instrument I could actually see fitting into an ensemble or session.
Although I didn’t realize what it was at the time, my grandfather gave me a four-string banjo mandolin over 70 years ago (egad!). It was a top-of-the line Epiphone. The folks at the local music store told me it was a soprano banjo, as used in the heyday of the banjo bands, and that I should tune it an octave higher than a tenor banjo. I played it that way for several years before moving on to a 5-string.
A follow-up article to the one cited at the outset of this discussion is now online. It follows the banjo mandolin into the 1960s, when it began to relinquish its role in ITM. The developments precipitating this are discussed, as is the position held all along by the ordinary mandolin.
I had a quick look over of the new article, admittedly not reading close enough to comment in any detail. There are a few general thoughts that came to mind.
I somehow feel since the later part of the 20th century the mandolin is more associated with the folk and ballad boom and appears very rarely in traditional music. I always think the distinction between ‘folk’ and ‘traditional’ is a useful one to make, even if there is an obvious grey area/overlap between the two. Anecdotally, of the hundreds and hundreds of traditional musicians I have heard over the last few decades, only one mandolinplayer immediately comes to mind, Declan Corey, who plays often with the Josephine Marsh band. For the life of me, I can’t think of another, certainly not outside performing (folk-ish) bands. No doubt there will be more but I never come across them. All this to say it is not an instrument that has a very noticeable presence in traditional music circles.
There’s mention fiddle, pipes and flute are sometimes considered ‘the big three’ instruments. In today’s context I think that is a grossly underestimating of the role of free reeds in the field of traditional dance music. In the west of Ireland certainly, the accordion is ever present and concertina has grown its role over the past few decades and is extremely popular these days, enough to merit at least a mention (in numbers at least both the accordion and concertina way outrank the pipes )
This is admittedly anecdotal, but I know quite a few banjo players who own a mandolin and play it occasionally. The usual reason given for not doing so more often is the issue of volume; any more than a handful of instruments, or punters for that matter, and the mandolin often fades into the background. I do wonder how many “hidden” mandolin players there are in this fashion, people who just don’t bring it out much given the banjo’s much louder volume (and more accepted nature in trad).
There’s a local bouzouki player/maker who also makes mandolins and such, this has piqued my interest to ask him the next time I see him what his ratio is of orders of each instrument. I’ll note that the only time I’ve seen him or his wife play mandolin is with a microphone in front, so again I wonder if the volume/projection issue is a deciding factor. Presumably he at least likes the instrument if he makes them!
I somehow suspect you’re thinking of Macdara there. He makes a nice mandolin. And there are other very fine luthiers making CBOM instruments ,still, I think there are few mandolins visible in traditional music. Volume can be an issue although I remember playing with a visitor, Stan Scott, who had a Gibson and being surprised at the time how loud he was (and we were a concertina and pipes but playing in a kitchen without distractions or noise).
I also remember Rens van der Zalm telling me during the early nineties he was travelling to Stephan Sobell with Andy Irvine to pick up a bunch of instruments for both of them for an upcoming tour. I remember the mandolin he had a s capable of a good volume (as well as crystal clear whisper like subtlety).
Yes, Macdara does make nice instruments. Probably helps that he is an excellent player himself and therefore knows the ins and outs of the instrument. I’ve gotten a chance to try a few of his instruments as he takes them out to sessions, and they certainly feel like “player’s instruments” in a good way.
The mandolin seems to fit in the same vein as the whistle, in that the volume and “cutting” power can be perceived very differently. On the few occasions I’ve played mandolin in sessions, I have found it hard to hear myself, but on the other hand have usually heard others playing the mandolin. While living in the southern US bluegrass jams were fairly popular, and mandolins can be heard above a multitude of banjos and guitars in those.
This changes though in dance hall settings with the clatter of feet and a much wider space to fill, which seems to have been the real use back in the day. It’s interesting to think that the piccolo and banjo mandolin, mentioned in the above articles, have suffered a similar fate from their (relative) heyday in the days before amplification. Not sure I’d be one to try to “revive” either of them (out of respect for those sitting next to me!), but they can make for an interesting sound in certain situations.
That’s for sure! Interesting things can also happen in the grey area. In the present case, though, the folk stuff on one side of it and the traditional stuff on the other, are both facets of Irish music.
Barney McKenna played the mandolin both with The Dubliners (seen in two video examples in the text under discussion) and in The Green Linnet production with Tony MacMahon from 1979. Although there is certainly a difference in the puredroppiness of the two contexts, McKenna is a tradition-bearing mandolinist playing that instrument in both.
Also, how does the set Declan Corey plays with the Josephine Marsh Bandhere count any differently than the one with Paul Brady on the mandolin, again embedded in the text?
It’s easy enough to list others playing mandolin in the same style. I’ll gladly concede that their numbers may be smaller than on the folk side, but do feel Mick Moloney to be particularly worth mentioning. He was in The Johnstons together with Paul Brady. However that group might be ranked on the folk/trad spectrum, Moloney’s skill on the mandolin as demonstrated in this reel strikes me as being no less credible than the best of the others cited in this discussion so far.
Barney McKenna straddled different sides of the aisle, probably more than I would possibly have given him credit for in the past. Recently a cache of recordings surfaced locally of him playing with Willie Clancy, for example.
Most banjo players easily switch to mandolin. I’ll leave it at that
Surely, you can.. Although most you have mentioned so far are ones that came out of the ballad boom. I was more thinking from my day to day experiences, living players encountered in real life. And they are few, to say the least.
I don’t understand how having done a stint in balladry taints a mandolin player’s ability or value in other contexts, nor what the audible signals of such corruption might be.
But recursively — so what?
The main point the two articles that triggered this discussion strive to make, is that the unqualified label mandolin was used to designate both the ordinary instrument and the banjo mandolin from O’Neill’s c.1905 wax cylinder recordings, through to the 1957 recordings of the All-Ireland championship competition in the miscellaneous category, which was won by a banjo mandolinist.
This does lead to a question about why Comhaltas subsequently established a category specifically for the mandolin if only handful of people were playing it.
There’s another question from the deeper historical perspective, about why Francis Roche placed the mandolin in parity with the fiddle, flute, and pipes in both the 1912 and 1927 editions of his Collection of Irish Airs, Marches and Dance Tunes Compiled and Arranged for Violin, Mandoline, Flute, or Pipes, if there were hardly any mandolin players to speak of in his day, either.
It doesn’t taint them but it severely dates them. A generation that are now either octogenarians or dead. My observation about the dearth of visible mandolin players concerned the situation, on the ground if you like, as it exists today.
That second link with the interview with Enda Scahill was really interesting. Thanks for sharing that!
If I might attempt to answer your question, in that video Enda does seem to directly, and explicitly, support what Mr Gumby and bigscotia said earlier. Paraphrasing crudely, he says that it is, and was, rare for him to encounter mandolin players in sessions in Ireland, and that this was likely because of the volume. But he also says that banjo players often have mandolins which they treat as a second instrument. Superficially, this sounds contradictory, but I don’t think it is. Basically, he seems to be saying that if you can play Irish tenor banjo, you can probably also play mandolin quite easily, and for this reason you might own both. But when you go to play with others, you likely take your banjo because it is louder and more commonly accepted.
The volume issue isn’t really as relevant if you are performing in a group with amplification.
The discussion later in the video about the differences in pick choices between bluegrass and ITM, and the technique for playing triplets and playing fast was also interesting and, I think, relevant to the issue of volume. There are a lot of mandolins in bluegrass, and they can be heard in noisy sessions, but those mandolins are louder, partly by design and partly by the use of heavier picks and associated picking techniques (more forearm movement and less wrist). However, these are not quite conducive to achieving the subtle rhythmical effects and nyah that is critical in traditional Irish music. I liked Enda’s discussion of those issues later in the video.
Well, thats my take on it. I have a mandolin and a tenor banjo, but I’m a relative novice on both, being primarily a flute player.
Agreed, thanks for that. Covered a lot of points in half an hour.
Listening the Enda Scahill demonstrate the mandolin as would have been available in Ireland played with a light pick gives me concern that it might be hard to distinguish from a banjolin in old recordings with other instruments.
One of the intended purposes of the GDAE tuning of tenor banjos was to make that instrument more readily accessible to mandolin players. Hand in hand with it, the mandolin became an easy alternate instrument for banjo players who had switched to the lower tuning. Many use the mandolin as such, which speaks to a perception of it being well suited to traditional Irish dance tunes.
There is a counterpart to the present discussion on The Session, where mandolinists comment on the banjo mandolin as an alternative to the ordinary instrument. A filmed session lead by Kitty Hayes has Quentin Cooper on the mandolin, in a textbook situation that I don’t believe would collapse musically if the mics were removed.
The banjo mandolin’s days were numbered by the advent of the GDAE tenor banjo. The double-strung instrument retains period interest but the normal attitude of session players toward it is one of disfavor. At the other end of its biography, the banjo mandolin marked the introduction of the flatpick to the realm of banjos. Prior to then, all flavors of that instrument were played with bare fingertips or with fingerpicks (discussed in another article).
This is a central topic in any discussion about bluegrass-style vs. Irish-style mandolin playing. Marla Fibish is prominent in the latter camp, and comments on picks in an interview with David Benedict (who also interviewed Enda Scahill). It is very much worth watching all the way through, but I’ve linked directly to the segment about picks.
