12. Seamus Ennis & Michael Folan
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Below you can find Seamus Ennis playing (on tin whistle) along with fiddle player Michael Folan of Connemara. This music was recorded by Ralph Rinzler in the early 1960s in New York and held in the Smithsonian Institution.
Ralph Rinzler (1934-1994) was born in Passaic, New Jersey, and was interested in music at an early age. He was given a collection of ethnographic recordings from the Archive of Folk Song of the Library of Congress by his uncle, Harvard University ballad scholar George Lyman Kittredge, and they soon became his favorites. He became actively involved in the Folk Revival while attending Swarthmore College, organizing an annual festival on campus. He received his B.A. in 1956 and did graduate work at Middlebury College and the Sorbonne in French literature and language. Upon his return to the United States, he played mandolin for four years with the Greenbriar Boys, at times touring with singer Joan Baez. During the 1960s, he also studied, recorded, and worked with performers of traditional music, such as Doc Watson and Bill Monroe, both of whom gained international recognition in part through his efforts. In 1964, Rinzler accepted the position of Director of Field Programs at the Newport Folk Foundation, which involved the planning and programming of the Newport Folk Festival. Rinzler came to the Smithsonian in 1967 as co-founder of the Festival of American Folklife (now the Smithsonian Folklife Festival) with James Morris in what was then the Smithsonian's Division of Performing Arts. After the 1976 Bicentennial Festival, Rinzler became the founding director of the Office of Folklife Programs (now the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage) to establish a center for research, publication, and presentation of programs in American culture and tradition. As Director, he initiated Smithsonian Folklife Studies, a publication series, and did research for the Celebration exhibit, which opened at the Renwick Gallery in 1982. Rinzler was appointed Assistant Secretary for Public Service in 1983 and Assistant Secretary Emeritus in 1990. Ralph Rinzler died on July 2, 1994. Seamus Ennis travelled to America in the early 1960s, making several appearances throughout the country including New York, Chicago and Asti, California. While in New York, he met up with fiddle player Michael Folan (MicheálÓ Cualain), whom Ennis originally met back in Connemara in the early 1940s while collecting songs and music for the Irish Folklore Commission. On my recent visit to Ireland, I met with Sean McKiernan who kindly introduced me to the Folan family in Carna. We spent a wonderful afternoon in the good company of Ciaran (Michael Folan’s nephew), and his wife Sally, who shared photographs and family history. The Folan family were very musical, playing piano, fiddle and accordion and at one stage the children formed a ceili band, performing at local events and house parties in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Michael, along with his brother Ciaran, emigrated from Ireland to New York in 1947. |
(l-r) Sean McKiernan & Richie Piggott
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Photographs by Kelly Hart; © Northwestern University. Courtesy of Berkeley Folk Music Festival Archive, Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University Libraries.
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My sincere thanks to Cecilia Peterson, Digital Projects Archivist at the Smithsonian Institution, for the digitized music and to Scott Krafft, Chief Curator of the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University Libraries Illinois, for the photographs of Seamus Ennis at the Asti Folk Music Festival in California in 1964. The review of the Bevier Hall, Chicago performance by Ennis, published in the Daily Illini by F. K. Plous Jr., paints a wonderful picture of Ennis in full command of his music, storytelling and his audience that evening. |
200 Watch Irish Tale-teller Daily Illini, Oct. 9th, 1964
Ennis Stars in Folksing
By F.K. Plous Jr.
Anyone who might have walked unprepared into 180 Bevier Hall last night got what he deserved.
The casual visitor, like the 200 members of the Campus Folksong Club assembled there would have been quickly reduced to jabbering and delighted admiration by the talents of Seamus Ennis, the Irish tale teller and musician who held the spotlight at the Club’s first membership concert of the season.
Ennis regaled the rapt audience with his Uilleann bagpipe tunes, his dazzling hornpipes and jigs played on the penny whistle, his ballads and comic songs and – most delightful of all- his rambling Celtic humor, a collection of anecdotes, observations, recollections, innuendos, philosophizing and other asserted drolleries, all of which come under the heading of what the Irish call blarney and the Americans call something else, and which the audience apparently, never got enough of.
If Ennis achieved anything distinctive at Thursday night’s concert of traditional Irish music, it must have been the way in which he demonstrated how folk music and folklore run together to produce a real folk entertainer. It was difficult to determine just where a song ended and a story began, since every musical number seemed to have a story to go with it. Ennis successfully wove his music and his lore together into one evening-long unit.
The reviewer was captivated by the fast Irish dances which Ennis brought out of his little brass penny whistle – the hornpipes, slip-jigs and reels which tax the musician as much as the dancer. The audience seemed to realize the difficulty of these works, but at the same time acknowledged their beauty. There were a great many feet tapping in Bevier Hall Thursday night.
As for the tales – it is doubtful that the Club has ever presented an artist who could spin such delightful yarns with such apparent ease as Ennis. Of course, the talent for tales si supposed to be one traditional with the Irish, but it still is hard to imagine even another Irishman surpassing Ennis’ gift of fancy gab and outrageously silly stories.
It is difficult for a man to carry on for two hours with his tongue in his cheek and not injure himself; Ennis did it. His audience loved it.
Perhaps they were warned of what was coming by the merry twinkle which Ennis could banish from his eye, or perhaps (and this is the whole theory behind the telling of such tales), people just like to be deliberately bamboozled with fantasy and fancy words. If so, men like Ennis are just what is needed to cater for such harmless and delightful lust.
The casual visitor, like the 200 members of the Campus Folksong Club assembled there would have been quickly reduced to jabbering and delighted admiration by the talents of Seamus Ennis, the Irish tale teller and musician who held the spotlight at the Club’s first membership concert of the season.
Ennis regaled the rapt audience with his Uilleann bagpipe tunes, his dazzling hornpipes and jigs played on the penny whistle, his ballads and comic songs and – most delightful of all- his rambling Celtic humor, a collection of anecdotes, observations, recollections, innuendos, philosophizing and other asserted drolleries, all of which come under the heading of what the Irish call blarney and the Americans call something else, and which the audience apparently, never got enough of.
If Ennis achieved anything distinctive at Thursday night’s concert of traditional Irish music, it must have been the way in which he demonstrated how folk music and folklore run together to produce a real folk entertainer. It was difficult to determine just where a song ended and a story began, since every musical number seemed to have a story to go with it. Ennis successfully wove his music and his lore together into one evening-long unit.
The reviewer was captivated by the fast Irish dances which Ennis brought out of his little brass penny whistle – the hornpipes, slip-jigs and reels which tax the musician as much as the dancer. The audience seemed to realize the difficulty of these works, but at the same time acknowledged their beauty. There were a great many feet tapping in Bevier Hall Thursday night.
As for the tales – it is doubtful that the Club has ever presented an artist who could spin such delightful yarns with such apparent ease as Ennis. Of course, the talent for tales si supposed to be one traditional with the Irish, but it still is hard to imagine even another Irishman surpassing Ennis’ gift of fancy gab and outrageously silly stories.
It is difficult for a man to carry on for two hours with his tongue in his cheek and not injure himself; Ennis did it. His audience loved it.
Perhaps they were warned of what was coming by the merry twinkle which Ennis could banish from his eye, or perhaps (and this is the whole theory behind the telling of such tales), people just like to be deliberately bamboozled with fantasy and fancy words. If so, men like Ennis are just what is needed to cater for such harmless and delightful lust.