Tony MacMahon image

COME WEST ALONG THE ROAD
the video

by Fintan Vallelly

The Irish Times, September 1994, & The Guide to Irish Traditional Music, Gill & MacMillan, 2001

Sitting in Tony Mac Mahon’s editing room in RTÉ must be the closest thing witnessing God at work. A tape of The Pure Drop is running, it has to be shortened to fit a certain time slot. Singer Maighréad Ní Dhomhnaill is forwarded, reversed, forwarded again - her neck moves like an arthritic’s, her smile closes and opens like the Stepford Wives mannequin; Michael Davitt lunges and gesticulates in zig-zag jerks like the Star Wars golden robot. Maighréad is moved forward twenty minutes in time, Gabriel is excised from history, and presenter Paddy Glackin is invented from the future to smooth the transition.

Josef Stalin would be thrilled: on today’s television it is expected and accepted that all images be manipulated. For producer Mac Mahon this is both a profession and a dedicated labour of love. His raw material for all his working life has been the people, the personalities, the sounds and background scenery of Traditional music, his politics have been its aesthetics, style, history, regions, age-group, gender and instrumentation.

Such control has not always been so easy. But in the Come West Along the Road video, a series of RTÉ Traditional Music Archive cuts are availble publicly. In it we can witness the progress of Traditional music in tandem with TV technical innovation. Come West is drawn from RTÉ’s first 21 years (1961-1982), and are researched by Nicholas Carolan and Sadhbh Ní Ionnraic of the Traditional Music Archive in Merrion Square.

Presented by Carolan, these extend almost a fairy-story opportunity to get an out-of-body look at and listen to our very own past. Witness a sweep across thronged, ecstatic Fleadh Cheoil masses: flute, fiddle and pipes players bursting with pride and joy, almost tearful at their new-found confidence in the early-sixties regeneration and recognition of their art. Here too is Willie Clancy with his long, lonely gaze - so real and yet so far away; there a stoic Peadar O’Loughlin (still in his music prime), and a straight-backed Ted Furey miming fiddle to the pipes and guitar of his ridiculously-young sons Finbar and Eddie. A childlike Dolores Keane is visited through the window of her aunts’ thatched house - singing with them in chilling note-for-note precision an allegory for the video series: ‘‘I’m thinking, ever thinking, of those green hills far away.’’ The young Planxty squint through their long locks, Ronnie Drew struts like a Greek God; Sean O’Murchu breathlessly reintroduces himself from the ‘far side’ with the old Tulla ceili band. Migrants like Clareman John Kelly are pursued to Dublin and on their peregrinations around the developing music patterns.

Then Mac Mahon’s Time machine is in Enniscorthy, 1967, where as a youth he himself joins in playing for that most remarkable sean-nós dancer, the late Paddy Ban O Broin. This is heart-wrenching: Paddy charming and radiant in the good suit and shiny shoes, jubilant and appreciative of the potential of the device recording him; a delicate sweep of the toe, a wiggle of the hips, studying his feet in the fancy steps as if treading a marsh path, beaming and inviting as he ends on a mock ballet bow. Jim Donoghue on Clarke whistle, Josie McDermott and Paddy Carty on flutes, singer Mary Ann Carolan, fiddler Sean Ryan, sean nós singer Seosamh O hEanai, piper and singer Seamus Ennis, piper Leo Rowsome, Desi O’Connor on whistle, Luke Kelly, fiddler Denis Murphy and composer Sean O’Riada are all here in this ultimate ‘night-visit’ song, The McCusker’s ceili band from Armagh, Donegal source-singer Neili Ní Dhomhnaill and those who have just got older are here too for the viewer who can take the surprise and pain of the memories their images release. If cassette tapes democratised music, video does that for the visual past. Come West returns the music memories to the people who produced them.

Fintan Vallely

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