In the previous chapter, and again in the television documentary described above, we met East Galway accordion player Billy Moran (b. 1928), who toured England with the Aughrim Slopes Ceilidh Band in the 1940s and later returned there to work alongside other Irish men on post-war reconstruction projects. In 1950, Billy
migrated to Australia, where he again worked on major construction projects. While he continued to play his accordion, swapping tunes with European and
Scandinavian co-workers, Billy found ‘very, very, very little’ Irish music in Australia. Settling in Melbourne in the 1960s, he began to play at Irish dances and for step- dancing competitions. By the end of that decade, further migration from Ireland and the expansion of an Irish immigrant social network had brought more Irish musicians to Melbourne (including East Clare accordion player Paddy Fitzgerald). The music scene was still small, however, and a far cry from the London pubs where, Billy recalls, ‘There was music seven nights a week: the finest of music!’ (Billy Moran, interview, 19 December 1999)
As part of this expansion of Irish immigrant socializing, in 1970 a number of Irish musicians formed a Melbourne branch of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann (CCÉ) and
began to teach Irish traditional music to their children, some of whom went on to play in sessions, in ballad bands performing Irish traditional music and songs, and in ‘bush bands’, which combined the style of the Irish ballad band with Australian songs and Irish tunes (Smith, G. 1994a). When bush bands declined in the mid- 1980s, some of these musicians continued to play in ballad bands in pubs that attracted an Irish immigrant crowd. In the late 1990s, the new Irish theme pubs attracted a broader audience and ballad bands were again in demand.
The Dan O’Connell Hotel was a focus for all these musical activities. In the 1970s it was the venue for a folk club, bush bands, rock bands and Irish traditional music sessions, thus providing opportunities for both audiences and musicians to
participate in overlapping musical scenes. As in Ireland, the beginning of the 1970s saw the gradual acceptance of women in bars and the commercial success of pubs that provided live music for mixed audiences. Of particular significance was the interplay between musicians who had learned traditional music from their Irish parents and other musicians attracted by the Irish music sessions and bands. My own participation in this scene dates from that period. Billy Moran recalls sessions at the Dan O’Connell in the 1970s:
They were nearly all Australians. I was going down there for years … they used to have the band in the back and we used to have the session in the bar … all the young lads. The Tramways [Hotel] was the next one. There wasn’t many Irish pubs around then, there was only one or two that you could have the music in. It’s the opposite now, it’s all Irish pubs and no Irish music! (Billy Moran, interview)
At the Dan O’Connell‘s Saturday afternoon sessions there was a core of strong players, surrounded by others learning and listening. Solo songs punctuated the sets of dance tunes. Apart from Billy Moran and occasionally Clare immigrants Paddy and Joe Fitzgerald, the musicians were young Australians. The musical and social nucleus was a band formed in the mid-1970s by young Irish immigrants, and later including local musicians as they acquired a repertoire of Irish dance music on fiddle, accordion and banjo. The most enthusiastic and capable of the young musicians quickly amassed a large common repertoire of tunes that would allow them to play for hours without repeating a tune. They were all self-taught musicians, picking up tunes and techniques from one another and from records imported from Ireland of such inspirational bands as Planxty, the Bothy Band and De Dannan. There were no women in the bands and only a handful of Australian women playing music, although many of the listeners were young women. It was a vibrant musical
and social scene, but there was little contact between the young Australians playing Irish music and Irish immigrant networks.
During the 1980s, the scene moved to other pubs where publicans paid one or more musicians to lead sessions. Musicians, even those being paid, were aware that this made a fundamental difference to the nature of the gathering. Billy Moran shares a view held by many musicians in Australia, and in Ireland, even though he now rarely plays in sessions where he is not the paid leader:
The money has everything ruined. You’d come into a session one time, and that was it, you played, and you enjoyed it. The money came into it then and if anyone comes in they say, ‘Well, if he’s getting paid and she’s getting paid, why amn’t I getting paid?’ That’s the attitude. (Billy Moran, interview) The distinction between amateurs and professionals is not always clear, however.6
Session leaders often try to conceal the fact that they are paid and conduct the session as if it were a meeting of amateurs, while some musicians who call themselves professionals perform only seasonally on the festival circuit.
In 1999, there were five or six pub sessions in Melbourne, most with paid leaders. These resembled in many ways those of postwar England discussed in the previous chapter: people of various ages seated around a table crowded with drinks and ashtrays, playing instruments that probably included fiddles, flutes and accordions; the music fast, high-pitched and rhythmic; musicians playing without scores,
tapping their feet in time and listening intently as they play. By the 1990s, however, the instruments included many more accompanying instruments: the bodhrán, guitar, mandola and bouzouki. Most of the musicians were from the urban middle class and to them, playing Irish traditional music was a discovery of their
adolescent or young adult years rather than continuous since childhood. The session was part of that discovery, and they adapted it to their own ideas about music, friendship and community.
The number of Irish-born musicians in Melbourne sessions, including short-term visitors, was relatively small, while the musician children of Irish immigrants
participated almost exclusively as professionals in ballad bands. Those without any recent Irish connection played in sessions, occasionally in their own bands playing Irish traditional music (mainly at festivals), but not in the ballad or ‘plastic Paddy’
6 This coincides with Ruth Finnegan’s findings in her study of musical ‘worlds’ in an English town (Finnegan 1989).
bands, as they called them. While men predominated among paid session leaders and band performers, there were many more proficient women musicians than in the 1970s. Musicians arriving from Ireland were accorded a higher status than local Australian musicians and those on one-year ‘backpacker’ visas (about 16,000 annually) often found temporary work in bands or as session leaders, stimulating sessions and introducing new tunes. The following discussion identifies the
musicians who formed one subset of the overlapping circles of musical friends who made up Melbourne’s Irish music scene in 1999.