VARIOUS ARTISTS: “I’m Leaving Tipperary” (Globestyle Irish)

IRISH MUSIC may pride itself on its devotion to tradition but it’s strangely short on easily accessible compilations that chart its history. In any specialist record shop, there’s a surfeit of blues, country, jazz and rockabilly primers but a dearth of collections that can be confidently recommended to anyone who’s bought their first Altan or Sharon Shannon album and wants to explore further.

Well, I’m Leaving Tipperary definitively fills one gap. Released through Globestyle Irish, Ted Carroll and Roger Armstrong’s London-Irish label, it concentrates on one culturally obscure and endlessly fascinating era – Irish music recorded in America in the Twenties and Thirties.

This was mongrel music. For over twenty years, Irish music has preferred to distance itself from all aesthetically unpalatable notions of paddywhackery, shamrockery and sentimental balladry. As such, Irish-American music could go unesteemed although De Danann used it as the inspiration for The Star-Spangled Molly.

Certainly it was a rogue and rude beast. Sometimes the only spit and polish must have been on the performers’ brogues while the piano accompaniments often seem to owe more to silent movies and the Keystone Cops than the Chicago Police Chief O’Neill’s bible, The Dance Music Of Ireland.

Even more unsettling for the purist, these performers overlapped with vaudeville and minstrelry. The songs aren’t sean-nós and a singer like John McGettigan was quite happy to saddle up a tarnished warhorse like ‘The Stone Outside Dan Murphy’s Door’, which later generations have long since consigned to the knacker’s yard.

And yet due to the misfortunate lack of any similar compilation of homegrown recordings of the era. I’m Leaving Tipperary is unique, since it documents Irish music’s first encounter with the recording studio, the urban experience and mass communications and it isn’t too far-fetched to suggest that its leaders like the Flanagan Brothers can now sound like the Irish equivalents of equally influential and transitional figures in country and black music – Bob Wills and Louis Jordan.

America definitely uplifted these emigrants’ spirits. As reflected on I’m Leaving Tipperary, this is not a music of lament. Instead there’s a sense of people remaking their music in a New World of opportunity. Far beyond the forced jollity of the entertainer, there’s a jauntiness that reflects the experience of people who’ve exchanged bitter and hopeless rural poverty for a new life in Amerikay.

Besides, as Ron Kavana’s excellent sleeve notes explain, the original 78s also found their way back to Ireland where they exercised a powerful influence in renewing a tradition under threat from the grim and puritan clergy of those years.

Even now, the impact is still detectable. Someone like John McGettigan might border on stage Oirishry but echoes of him and his ilk can be heard in Inishbofin singer, Geraldine King.

Add in the Flanagan Brothers’ originals of the title track and ‘My Irish Molly-O’ (itself written by Schwartz and Jerome) and you’ll realise these contacts aren’t defunct. An essential Irish record in this or any other year.

• Bill Graham