Scattered Musics

Martha I. Chew Sánchez, David Henderson, Martha I. Chew Sánchez, David Henderson

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781496832351, 9781496832368
• eBook ISBN: 9781496832375
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

Contributions by Nilanjana Bhattacharjya, Benjamin Burkhart, Ivy Chevers, Martha I. Chew Sánchez, Athena Elafros, William García-Medina, Sara Goek, David Henderson, Eyvind Kang, Junko Oba, Juan David Rubio Restrepo, and Gareth Dylan SmithIn Scattered Musics, editors Martha I. Chew Sánchez and David Henderson, along with a range of authors from a variety of scholarly backgrounds, consider the musics that diaspora and migrant populations are inspired to create, how musics and musicians travel, and how they change in transit. The authors cover a lot of ground: cumbia in Mexico, música sertaneja in Japan, hip-hop in Canada, Irish music in the US and the UK, reggae and dancehall in Germany, and more. Diasporic groups transform the musical expressions of their home countries as well as those in their host communities. The studies collected here show how these transformations are ways of grappling with ever-changing patterns of movement. Different diasporas hold their homelands in different regards. Some communities try to re-create home away from home in musical performances, while others use music to critique and redefine their senses of home. Through music, people seek to reconstruct and refine collective memory and a collective sense of place.The essays in this volume—by sociologists, historians, ethnomusicologists, and others—explore these questions in ways that are theoretically sophisticated yet readable, making evident the complexities of musical and social phenomena in diaspora and migrant populations. As the opening paragraph of the introduction to the volume observes, "What remains when people have been scattered apart is a strong urge to gather together, to collect." At few times in our lives has that ever been more apparent than right now.

1

“AN IRELAND OVER THERE”?

Dance Halls and Traditional Music in the Irish Diaspora, 1945–70

SARA S. GOEK

Over many generations migrants have carried Ireland’s traditional music to all corners of the globe, adapting themselves and it to new contexts. Among the Irish populations in British and American cities after World War II, dance halls took primacy as social venues that featured the historically rural music alongside more modern, urban forms. Fiddler Kevin Burke grew up in London’s Irish community and reflects:

There was great music and great dancing, but it wasn’t couched in terms of culture, it was a commercial venture—some Irish guy opened a dance hall, put Irish bands in there, attracted an Irish audience, and they were just by definition fostering Irish music and culture. But that wasn’t their intention. They wanted to make some money and this was the best way they knew of how to do it—open a dance hall, get some Irish music in there, and it’ll attract a bunch of Irish people and they’ll pay to get in and I’ll make some money. And of course, like anywhere else, the better the music you have or the better setup you have, the more people want to come, so the more people come and the more money made. So a lot of the places that had a great effect in that line of fostering Irish culture didn’t have that as their intention. But it happened anyway, I think.¹

Despite their commercial function, dance halls became informal community centers that figured prominently in migrants’ lives. The fact that so many ethnic venues thrived in the postwar era reflected the recognition that participation in Irish cultural practice—in this case, music and dance—served as a mechanism of adjustment in an unfamiliar milieu. By dancing to Irish music while surrounded by familiar Irish voices and faces, migrants enacted a connection to “home” (Collins 2010; Morrison 2001). It helped them displace feelings of marginalization, while the adapted settings, style, and format of the music also evinced their new situation and needs.

This chapter draws on original and archival oral histories collected from traditional musicians who left Ireland for the United States and Great Britain between 1945 and 1970. They were part of a postwar exodus of over 665,000 people, 22.5 percent of the Irish population in 1945 (CSO 2007; NESC 1991, 55).² The majority were young and from rural areas, particularly from Ireland’s western counties where traditional culture remained strongest. As immigrants they tended to settle in ethnic enclaves in urban areas. As the public face of their culture, musicians and performers found themselves at the front lines of the conflict between varying conceptions of Irishness across the diaspora. Their narratives reflect how they negotiated the disparities. However, the process was not uniform, and comparative historical analysis of Irish music in three cities—London, New York, and Boston—shows that while similarities existed in the nature of musical performances, local trends resulted in different experiences over time. Comparison mitigates the otherwise homogenizing effects of diaspora studies (Kenny 2003). Historical and cultural analysis of Irish music in dance halls serves as a case study that highlights the symbiotic relationship between place and diasporic identities. This chapter argues that the apparent tension between old roots and new in musical practices reveals how Irish identity was negotiated and contested, interpreted and performed. Both cohesion and diversity emerged from the mix.

IRISH TRADITIONS

The background of the postwar migrant generation—the society they left and the cultural traditions they took with them—is crucial to understanding their experiences in the diaspora. They came of age in Ireland between 1930 and 1960, an era of economic stagnation. Singer Liam Clancy recalls, “my memories of those years are the sizzling of wet turf, wet logs, constant rain, depression, everybody leaving, no work, ration books, the slow reemergence.”³ While historians have argued against this dreary characterization, asserting instead that the era laid the foundation for changes to come (Fallon 1998; Kennedy 1989), any economic merit it possessed failed to stem the flow of the nation’s children overseas.

Despite the harsh environment, oral histories and memoirs also emphasize positive values associated with strong social networks and culture. In rural Ireland, social gatherings with music, dance, song, and storytelling took place for any and all occasions: christenings, weddings, harvests, charitable benefits, religious holidays, or simply social evenings during long winter nights. Friends, relatives, and neighbors would gather in a house with space for dancing on the kitchen flagstones or at a barn or crossroads. Fiddle player Junior Crehan from County Clare recalls, “The country house was the center of all social activity in those days. It was not only a place of entertainment, it was also a school where the traditions of music-making, story-telling and dancing were passed on from one generation to the next” (1977, 72). Though the interviewees in this study come from all parts of Ireland, those from rural areas describe similar patterns of socializing (Goek 2015, 68–71). Fiddle player Connie O’Connell recalls attending house dances with his mother, who played melodeon:

In where I come from, Cill na Martra [near Ballyvourney, Co. Cork], there was a tradition of house dances when I was young, when I was very young, and my mother used to play for these house dances. You’d go into the kitchen and you’d sit down and you’d play for sets. Probably there’d be only room for one set on the floor, just barely on the floor of a kitchen; farmhouses were bigger. They danced sets and I was listening to this music and watching them dance sets as well, as just a kid sitting in the corner until a certain hour of the night, then probably be taken home or whatever. I’d say the dancing went on much later. They used to have occasions such as threshings, things like that, and weddings of course. Weddings were in the houses at that time as well, not in hotels like they are nowadays. They’d be dancing mainly sets and the music for those. I was listening to it as a kid so I think it is from there it grew in me that I started playing music.⁴

Like Crehan, he refers to the importance of these gatherings for musical transmission across generations, repeatedly referencing his vantage point “as just a kid sitting in the corner.” Through house dances, along with other types of informal music making, musicians learned their trade—the tunes and local inflections that define their repertoire. This supports Crehan’s statement that the country house served not only as a social venue but also as a “school” of the tradition.

However, these events somewhat inadvertently fell under scrutiny in the early years of the Irish Free State (established 1922). A fear of “jazz” (a catchall term used for all modern dancing) and its perceived immoralities resulted in a movement to regulate dancing (Duffy 2009; Finnane 2001; Ó hAllmhuráin 2016, 108–9; Smyth 1993). In response, the government established the Carrigan Committee in 1930–31 to inquire into the moral state of the country. The subsequent Public Dance Halls Act of 1935 stipulated that all public dances must have a license, which only a person of “good character” could obtain from a district justice. Failure to comply could result in prosecution. Though intended to apply to unlicensed dance halls rather than house dances, many parish priests (often colluding with the local police) took matters into their own hands and “misapplied” it in an inconsistent fashion (Ó hAllmhuráin 2005, 11–13). Flute player Kevin Henry recalls being pulled by the ear out of an “illegal” dance at the age of eight (ca. 1937) and the detrimental effect such measures had on informal charitable fundraisers in his community.⁵ The clergy also realized that holding dances in parish halls would enable them to both collect an entry fee and supervise the proceedings. Consequently, in the late 1930s a dance hall “building boom” took place (Ó hAllmhuráin 2005, 17).

This development is relevant to music in the diaspora because it signaled a parallel shift from private to public spaces occurring on both sides of the Atlantic. That shift affected styles of music and dancing. Country house dances had featured set dancing, often to the tune of a single musician. In the parish halls the clergy promoted what became known as céilí dances and, to suit the larger venues, céilí bands. Set dancing varies across Ireland, but it is characterized by loose body posture and footwork, with between one and four couples dancing a series of figures. In céilí dancing, by contrast, dancers hold their bodies more rigidly and the dances are usually done in bigger groups. The céilí itself is a product of the diaspora: the Gaelic League developed the standardized and formalized dances to suit large crowds and venues in London in the 1890s (Cullinane 1994, 197). Parish dances in the 1950s featured céilí standards such as the “Siege of Ennis” as well as waltzes, polkas, quicksteps, and foxtrots.⁶ Céilí bands—a designation also first used in London—consist of five to ten musicians, with melody instruments playing in unison accompanied by piano and drums (Ó hAllmhuráin 2016, 166). The format was also subject to standardization: Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann [Irish Musicians’ Association], founded in 1951, started an annual traditional music competition, the All-Ireland Fleadh Cheoil, which from its inception had a category for céilí bands.⁷ The change in musical forms that emerged with dance halls thus resulted from the intersection of political, religious, and cultural structures. While country house dances continued to take place, these external factors shaped traditional music and the perceptions of it that migrants took with them when they left Ireland.

DANCING IN THE DIASPORA

In the United States and Great Britain, dance halls had established themselves as popular commercial leisure venues in the first decades of the twentieth century, furthered by the introduction of radio, records, and jazz. Ethnic dance halls grew with them (McBee 2000; Moloney 1992, 1998). After World War II they continued to function as one of the most important social institutions in the Irish migrant community in both Britain and America: you were sure to meet someone you knew from home, someone who knew where you could get a job, someone who could find you lodgings, or even a nice young man or woman to court (Delaney 2007, 170–71; Goek 2015, 124–35, 182–89). Away from the watchful eyes of parents or parish priests, the widespread adoption of this form of leisure highlights ways women in particular experienced “greater economic independence and personal freedom” outside Ireland (Sheridan 2012, 96). As one woman recalled, “Dance Halls [sic] were the main way of meeting people, and most Irish people met their future husband or wife there, and made many friends too.”⁸ A scattered population drew together in these ethnic venues. Music, adapted to a modern urban setting, served as a “bonding mechanism,” but one with a “wider social and cultural role” (Lee and Casey 2006, 29; Ní Fhuartháin 1993, 132). As the backdrop for these functions, dance halls featured a hybrid mix of music styles, something between the old world and the new. They became both cultural centers and liminal spaces. While they served to cement the Irish community, they simultaneously separated it from the wider society, occupying a position between the two.

Within the dance halls, patrons were predominantly (though not exclusively) Irish-born or second-generation. The halls were often located in Irish-dominated neighborhoods. In Boston all five main dance halls in the 1950s were situated in Dudley Square in Roxbury, an Irish area, and also near the terminus for the city’s tram lines, so anyone living or working anywhere in the city could get there. In London and New York the halls had a wider geographical spread, as did those cities’ Irish populations. In London at least twenty may have existed at any one time in the postwar era (more than twice as many as in Boston or New York).⁹ Most dance halls did not serve alcohol until at least the midsixties, but a pub was never far away, and many men stopped there before the dance. Migrants would hardly have expected a replica of what they knew at home, but the halls offered enough of the familiar (in music, dancing, and patrons) to make them feel comfortable, and enough that differed (a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: “An Ireland over There”?: Dance Halls and Traditional Music in the Irish Diaspora, 1945–70
• Chapter 2: Cumbias y Rebajadas: Aurality, Race, and Class in Monterrey’s “Colombia” Culture
• Chapter 3: Cubatón’s Transnational Creolizations
• Chapter 4: Letter to Gautam Gupta
• Chapter 5: Connecting Identity: The Rasta Reggae Diaspora in Columbus, Ohio
• Chapter 6: Michie Mee: Rap Music, Cultural Representations, Identity, and the Caribbean Diaspora in Toronto
• Chapter 7: Journey to Jah: The Discourse of Internationalization in German Reggae and Dancehall Media
• Chapter 8: “We’re Called Neck, and We Play: Psycho-Ceilídh—It Goes Something Like This …”
• Chapter 9: Reworking the Brasilidade Narrative: Dekassegui, Música Sertaneja, and the Performance of Identity in the Japanese Brazilian Expatriate Community
• Chapter 10: La Música Ranchera in the Reconfiguration of Hispanismo and Mexicanidad in Musical Exchanges between Spain and Mexico
• Chapter 11: British Asian Culture and Its Margins in East London
• About the Authors