{"id":170,"date":"2008-10-05T10:30:17","date_gmt":"2008-10-05T10:30:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shadowplays.com\/blog\/?p=170"},"modified":"2008-10-14T11:06:19","modified_gmt":"2008-10-14T11:06:19","slug":"what-in-the-world-reading-rory-gallaghers-blues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shadowplays.com\/blog\/?p=170","title":{"rendered":"What in the World: Reading Rory Gallagher’s Blues"},"content":{"rendered":"Tweet<\/a>

\"\"As promised in a previous post, the following is the essay written by Eamonn Wall titled, “What in the World”: Reading Rory Gallagher’s Blues,<\/em> that was delivered as the first Lawrence W. McBride Lecture for the American Conference for Irish Studies. This article was published in the Fall\/Winter edition of An Sionnach<\/a> in 2005. Thanks once again to Eamonn, and An Sionnach<\/a> for allowing me to post this essay.<\/p>\n

What in the World: Reading Rory Gallagher’s Blues<\/h3>\n

Rory Galagher died, aged forty-seven, at London’s King’s College Hospital on June 14, 1995, at 10:44 A.M., from complications following a liver transplant. Although the transplant had been a success, and the patient was near the point in his recovery where his doctors were ready to move him from the transplant center back to Cromwell Hospital, near his brother’s and manager’s home, two days before the anticipated transfer Gallagher caught a virus that, due to a ravaged immune system, he was unable to fight. It has been estimated that his funeral mass and burial in Cork attracted four thousand mourners, many of whom had traveled from throughout Europe to be present. This large attendance included members of The Dubliners, U2, Martin Carthy, and many of the musicians Gallagher had played with over the years (Coghe 168-77). His death was big news in Ireland; photographs from his funeral dominated the front pages of the Cork Examiner, Daily Mirror,<\/em> and other newspapers. On November 8, a memorial mass was held in London, followed by a reception at the Irish embassy attended by Bob Geldof, Van Morrison, and others (Coghe 179). today, to celebrate his music and commemorate his life, Cork boasts a Rory Gallagher Place, and the Cork City Library has opened a Rory Gallagher Wing, while Paris claims a Rue de Rory Gallagher. Since his brother’s death, Donal Gallagher has overseen the remastering and reissue of Gallagher’s back-catalog, and these ranked second in sales in CDs reissued by BMG Music during the first quarter of the reissue program (Harper 222). Only Elvis Presley’s back-catalog sold more during this period, a sure testament to the continued popularity of Gallagher’s music among those who had witnessed his concerts or owned his records or who had first discovered Gallagher’s music in the years after he had passed away.<\/p>\n

My purpose will be to enumerate and examine Gallagher’s recordings with particular focus on work produced during the period 1970-76, considered by many critics to be the most important phase of his career. I’ll trace his development as a musician, noting the importance of the grounding he received during his early years in Cork, where he played in show-bands and founded Taste, and the significance of his early forays to Belfast, at that time the center of Irish rock ‘n’ roll. To find the roots of his music and to better understand what he sought to achieve, it will be necessary to look at what he learned inherited, and borrowed from the blues musicians and songwriters of the Mississippi Delta and Chicago. Then, to balance his achievement against the difficult circumstances of his personal life, I’ll probe his final decade, when his popularity, confidence, and health had begun to spiral downward.<\/p>\n

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But in advance of these objectives, I want to pay some attention to recent commentaries that examine the role and place of popular music in academic scholarship. I take this path out of uncertainty — as someone who teaches writing and literature, I am better able to speak of popular music as a fan than as an expert, enthusiasm representing but one part of what the scholar brings to his or her material. At the same time, given what I do, it is vital that I understand something of a music that is such an important part of contemporary Irish life and literature — the songs, lyrics, and names being frequently referenced by many of our best known writers form Patrick McCabe to Paul Muldoon to Paula Meehan to Roddy Doyle. Muldoon’s poem “Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man” is a particularly good example of the interaction that exists between poets and songwriters or between what might be called “high” and “low” culture:<\/p>\n

When I turn up the rickety old gramophone
\nthe wow and flutter from the scratched LP
\nsummons up white walls, the table, the single bed<\/p>\n

Where Lydia Languish will meet her Le Fanu:<\/p>\n

his songs have meant far more to me
\nthan most of the so-called poems I’ve read. (46)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n

Recently, a form of music that was once demonized has, for cultural and economic reasons, been afforded the status once exclusively reserved for what might once have been referred to as high culture. Speaking at a meeting of the Irish Music Rights Organization in 1998, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern claimed:<\/p>\n

Music and writing have always played a central role in the social and cultural life of Ireland. Not alone as a source of entertainment, but also as an effective way of recording Irish history and communicating its stories widely throughout the country and the world. In addition to the historical function of music and song, they also play an important role in defining the identity of a nation and its people. They help to tell us who we are, to express our hopes and aspirations, our trials and tribulations, in a way that makes us uniquely Irish. Internationally, the Irish nation is perceived very much through the medium of its music. (Smyth 2)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To Ahern what has once seemed disparate and untidy has now become an organic voice and, if one were to take a cynical view, the cultural cog in the Irish success story and a solid component of the Irish brand. Ahern’s embrace of a music that has been imported exists in sharp contrast to Douglas Hyde’s complaint of “being menaced by the German band and the barrel organ” in his call for the de-Anglicizing of Irish music (2). In Ahern’s view, the Irish cultural project should be seen as level, democratic, and populist, depending on one’s perspective, and this has been translated into official government policy through the medium of the Arts Council. In this brave new world, determined by voice rather than be genre or individual artistic calling, value is spread in a level, interdisciplinary manner — “The Municipal Gallery Revisited” beds down with “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” “Anna Liffey” with “going to My Home Town,” and “Guests of the Nation” with The Crying Game<\/em>. Of course, there is a danger in such an approach — arguably so many that it might take a lifetime to enumerate them all — perhaps the most notable being that it might lead to a situation where nothing will be examined on its own terms, or according to the rules or topoi<\/em> that underline its particular aesthetic structures. In Irish poetry, this mixing and matching has been seen by some to have diluted craft and led, as a backlash, to the revival of a harsh, formalist poetics.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Simon Frith’s 1992 essay “The Cultural Study of Popular Music” is frequently cited by scholars who have written on popular music. Frith points out that whereas in the U.S., popular music is approached from the angle of cultural studies, in the U.K. it is more usually researched and written about from the perspective of social anthropology and sociology, and he notes that his own research owes much to the work of Kick Hebdige and Raymond Williams. British scholars are more concerned with band culture, social class, race, and gender issues than with the music itself. this is not to say that these issues are not important but to indicate the often tangential value of the music itself in such analysis. Frith notes that the “academic myth of popular culture is still haunted by, even determined by, terms drawn from high cultural theory. Writing on popular music, in particular, still rests on the way in which the high cultural distinction between “seriousness” (the aesthetic) and “fun” (the hedonistic) is read as a distinction between mind and body” (180). Therefore, if the rules of the game preclude the scholar from writing about such a frivolous subject as pop music with high seriousness, he or she is let to shuffle around with the various phenomena surrounding it. Martin Scorcese’s otherwise splendid No Direction Home<\/em> demonstrates how “serious” looks at popular music shy away from the music itself. The documentary pays little attention to the forms, structures, and aesthetics of Dylan’s songs and instead focuses on how they have been received and perceived because of their cultural and Iconic significance, thus proving the truth of Frith’s contention that even the most sympathetic interpreter of popular music is hamstrung by a received, and ultimately negative, backhanded world view. Of course, theory does provide somewhat dubious entry points for the scholar where by music can be engaged on the scholar’s and not the musician’s terms.<\/p>\n

One cannot assume that for bedside reading Bertie Ahern turns to works on critical theory. What his remarks to the IMRO may indicate is a desire to see that barrier-breaking — in north-south relations, Ireland-U.K. relations, labor-management relations — be part of a continuum that spreads into all fields of enterprise, including the arts. The Taoiseach collapses the artificial barrier Frith finds between the “aesthetic” and the “hedonistic.” Gerry Smyth reminds us in Noisy Island: A Short History of Irish Popular Music<\/em> that “Ahern’s speech should be considered in the context of the revival of economic fortunes during the 1990s, and the concomitant recognition of music’s role in, and contribution to, that revival” (3). He notes:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Contemporary Irish popular music represents a set of enormously successful cultural and economic practices. Much in the same way that Irish literature was felt to have produced an inordinate number of geniuses throughout the last century, so the island seems capable of issuing forth an endless supply of successful pop and rock acts. (1)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The standing army of Irish poets has been joined by the standing army of rock ‘n’ rollers. Following the ideology of French music theorist Jacques Attali, Smyth is certain that the study of popular must become a central part of the Irish Studies curriculum because, according to Attali, music is “prophesy. Its styles and economic organization are ahead of the rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code” (7). As Smyth points out<\/p>\n

music is the most sensitive indicator of social change… Because of its intensively dialectical nature — in which economics and aesthetics are so closely enmeshed — music registers and engages change before other aesthetic forms: its dilemmas will be ours, so, to, its negotiations and compromises. In this way, Attali shifts music, and more importantly the analysis of music, to the centre of the academic stage, for it’s there that the future is in a sense taking place. (7)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Theodor Adorno divided sound into high music and low noise whereas Attali eschewing what Smyth refers to as Adorno’s “bourgeois classification of sound’ believes that “now we learn to judge a society more by its sounds, by its art, and by its festivals, than by its statistics” (6). For the beleaguered parent in Ireland trying to listen to the news on RTE, the loud blues, punk, or hip-hop bursting forth from his or her teenager’s room is both a nuisance, threat, and, perhaps, a harbinger of a new barbarism. For Smyth, it is from Bono or Conor Deasy that one hears the real<\/em> news and not from Anne Doyle on RTE. What was once noise, is now prophesy.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Fittingly, Rory Gallagher was born in the Rock Hospital in Ballyshannon, Co. Donegal, on March 2, 1948, and later christened at the Rock Church. His father was a musician and Gallagher was given his first guitar when he was eight years old, after the family had moved to Cork, his mother’s birthplace. Quickly, he mastered his instrument, and his taste progressed from the ballads and traditional music so beloved by his mother to the skiffle of Lonnie Donegan, who was Gallagher’s musical idol as a child. He was also in the process of discovering the music of Elvis Presley, Eddie Cochran, Buddy Holly, Gene Vincent, and Chuck Berry. In 1963, at the age of fifteen, he entered Michael Crowley’s music store–memorialized in Tony Palmer’s film, Rory Gallagher’s Irish Tour 1974<\/em>–and bought the brown Fender Stratocaster 61 that would become one of the most famous electric guitars in the history of popular music. It cost \u00a3100, a small fortune to a teenager at that time. Without his parents’ prior knowledge, Gallagher negotiated a hire-purchase agreement with Crowley, who insisted that Mrs. Monica Gallagher be added as a signee to the agreement. (Her signature was duly forged.) By this time, Gallagher was already playing professionally with The Fontana [Showband], an outfit, according to Colin Harper and Trevor Hodgett, that was one small part of the frenetic showband entertainment machine of the era:<\/p>\n

At its peak, there were said to be around six hundred matching-suited acts shuttling up and down the island, packing them in on a vast circuit of rural ballrooms (fourteen of which were owned by future Irish prime minister Albert Reynolds) with grueling five-hour shows encompassing UK chart covers, comedy, Elvis and Jim Reeves… In joining The Fontana [Showband], later updating its name to The Impact, Rory was simply one of many creative souls obliged to learn their craft in a mohair suit. (226)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

According to his fellow Irish guitarist and contemporary, Henry McCullough, Gallagher was the first of the showband musicians to successfully make the break from the showband circuit to the beat scene, which was achieved when he founded Taste, originally called The Taste, with bassist Eric Kitteringham and drummer Norman D’Amery, in Cork in 1966 (Harper 227). This was the beginning of a journey that would culminate in Gallagher being labeled “The First Irish Rock Star.” He set out to write, play, and record his own compositions and the blues of the Mississippi Delta and Chicago. At that time in Ireland, Belfast was the center of the Irish R & B scene and Taste arrived there in early 1967 to play such venues as the Maritime Hotel. The hotel had acquired legendary status in Ireland as the venue where Van Morrison and Them had played before becoming famous. It was there that they were taken under the wing of Eddie Kennedy, a former ballroom dancer who booked bands for the Maritime. In May 1968, Kennedy took Taste to England where they quickly secured gigs backing such well-known performers as Captain Beefheart and playing guest spots on John Peel’s Top Gear,<\/em> until Peel’s recent death the most influential source of new music in the U.K. After Kitteringham and D’Amery were replaced by Richard “Charlie” McCracken and John Wilson, Taste recorded two albums, Taste<\/em> (1969) and On the Boards<\/em> (1970). In a short space of time, the band became enormously successful: they played throughout Europe and North America, where they toured in support of blind Faith, supported Cream at their farewell Royal Albert Hall concert, and played at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival alongside The Doors, The Who, Joni Mitchell, Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis, and many others. In hindsight, one can see Taste’s and Gallagher’s presence at this festival (he was barely twenty-two years of age) as a landmark–first, the emergence of Van Morrison and, second, the arrival of Gallagher had emphasized the fact that the Irish would insist that they had a role to play in the shaping of modern rock ‘n’ roll (Coghe 48-51). For emerging musicians in Ireland, particularly in the Republic, present and future, Gallagher’s success secured permission, to borrow Eavan Boland’s term, for them to find their paths in music (Boland xii).<\/p>\n

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After the Isle of Wight Festival, Gallagher decided to disband Taste and embark on a solo career. According to Harper and Hodgett, “Taste were the victims of their own rapid success and inexperience. Eddie Kennedy had steered them from a fiver to \u00a32000 a night in two years” (230). for many years after the break-up of Taste, the Gallagher brothers sought to recover lost earnings–first from Kennedy himself and later from his estate. their final concert was played at Queen’s University, Belfast, on December 31, 1970, as part of a tour that took place purely to satisfy contractual agreements. According to Coghe, Gallagher was blamed for the split and was viewed as someone who, as a consequence of his success, had become a dictator. The result of this acrimony was that Gallagher refused to play Taste songs for years afterward (51).<\/p>\n

As a soloist, Gallagher recorded fourteen albums between 1971 and 1990. In addition he played on recordings by such artists as Muddy Waters, Jerry Lee Lewis, Lonnie Donegan, Davy Spillane, the Furey Brothers & Davy Arthur, Stiff Little Fingers, the Dubliners, Peter Green, and the rolling Stones (on “Miss You”), who sought him out as the replacement ofr Mick Taylor (Harper 233). Gallagher, though flattered, was not interested. It is ironic that even though Gallagher’s most important work was composed after he had disbanded Taste, he would face an uphill struggle to capture the imagination and support of music fans that he had enjoyed around the time of the Isle of Wight festival. Gerry Smyth believes that Gallagher’s “music and image stalled…around 1970,” though I would argue that it was the reception that had stalled rather than the music itself (36-37).<\/p>\n

When we evaluate popular music, and equally other artistic endeavors, we are inclined to assume that commercial sales and artistic success are part of a continuum though this does not reflect hard reality. Often in popular music in particular, large-scale success is short-lived, and the best music has been composed and played far beneath the radar of the charts. At the same time, Taste emerged at the height of the British Blues explosion and, like Cream, who were the dominant figures in this movement, successfully wedded Mississippi Delta and Chicago blues with British Blues-rock, as Smyth points out:<\/p>\n

The form was organized around two central elements: the traditional, three-chord blues song and an instrumental ability to improvise at length around the basic chordal structure. The electrification of instruments owed much to the advent of rock ‘n’ roll, and the idea of a long, semi-improvised solo was clearly borrowed from the jazz tradition…(36)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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The break-up of Cream marked the end of the Blues Explosion–from this point onward, other forms and variations would become more popular, and the three-piece blues ensemble would seem constricting and somewhat out of step with the new aesthetics and a more “modern” Zeitgeist<\/em>. Many of the guitarists who had popularized the blues in England–Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Alvin Lee, Mick Taylor–would abandon the three-piece unit and progress to play in a variety of bands and musical genres. Of the great players of this period, only Gallgher and Jeff Beck remained rooted in tradition; over time, despite their artistic accomplishments, they would become marginal figures. However, such conclusions are easily available in hindsight–throughout the 1970s, given Gallagher’s recordings and touring schedule, one could hardly have claimed that he was a marginal figure, except in America, where, despite many tours, he had never succeeded in reaching a large audience. Eventually, to expand musical possibilities, he would add a keyboardist to his band and, later on, a harmonica player.<\/p>\n

Gallagher’s first solo recording, Rory Gallagher<\/em>, was released in 1971 and featured a second Belfast rhythm section–Gerry McAvoy on bass and Wilgar Campbell on drums–with Vincent Crane of Atomic Rooster guesting on piano. Harper and Hodgett write of the album that it<\/p>\n

is a beautiful, subtle album of virtually end-to-end highlights. It stands alongside Jethro Tull’s Aqualung<\/em> and with Led Zeppelin III as one of the year’s defining moments…Not quite as macho as Zeppelin, nor a willfully quirky as Tull, Gallagher had created his own sound, drawing from modern jazz chordings and octave soloing, urban and delta blues, straight-ahead rock and Celtic folk (223)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Recalling the making of the album, Gallagher remarked, “it had a nice atmosphere…Not as hard or rocky as some of the Taste stuff, nor the later recordings either. A little tight sound–all live vocals and live lead guitar. Recorded very quietly with one little Fender amp and a twelve-inch speaker” (Harper 233). In addition to the influence of the blues, the album illustrates the degree to which Gallagher had steeped himself in jazz and folk music. It was through his immersion in the work of Django Reinhardt, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, and as a result of his friendship with Don Van Vliet, better known as Captain Beefheart, that Gallagher was led to “give freer reign [to] his creative process” (Coghe 41). From playing in showbands, Gallagher had learned the operational etiquette of “unbending musical discipline where nothing was left to chance” and this was eventually superseded by lessons learned from jazz (Coghe 41). While living in a bedsit in London in 1967, he had learned to play the saxophone from books, records, and from setting himself the task of learning a tune each day. So as not to annoy his landlord, Gallagher practiced in the room’s one wardrobe (Coghe 41).<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

style=”text-indent:15px;”Of course, it is for his live performances that Gallagher is most often remembered. According to Fairport Conventions’s Dave Pegg, “he really knew how to manage a crowd” (Harper 232). Harper and Hodgett note:<\/p>\n

Most people’s recollection of Rory Gallagher today is of a lean, frenetic figure storm-trooping around festival and city hall stages all through the seventies with a permanent checked shirt and archetypal battered Strat, flanked on one side by Gerry McAvoy, splay-legged, head-banging and writing the text book for the pummeling school of bass quitar. Rory’s live shows were high-energy affairs. “It would start with the encore–that’s what it was like,” says Dino McGartland. “We’d go home shattered.” Any number of Old Grey Whistle Test<\/em> specials [on BBC], or his record number of Rockpalast<\/em> broadcasts on German TV, bear this out. (232)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Gallagher toured tirelessly and world wide. His Irish concerts during the 1970s are particularly important, occurring at a time before Ireland was featured on the map for well-known recording artists. For many young Irish music fans, myself included, a Rory Gallagher concert represented a rare opportunity to witness a performance by a major international artist in Ireland. In addition, Gallagher was alone among first-rank performers, as is noted by many who have written on popular music in Ireland, who consistently played in the North throughout the troubles. One can be certain that his high-energy and no-frills attitude and mien influenced such bands as Stiff Little Fingers, whom Gallagher subsequently recorded, and the Undertones, who would emerge in the late seventies as part of the Punk-New Wave phenomenon.<\/p>\n

As previously noted, Gallagher’s decision to forgo a radical change in musical direction meant that he had set himself the task of working within the narrower confines of a musical genre that had begun to recede from popularity. Of course, he himself would hardly have seen his future in this way; instead, he might have commented on the degree of continuity that had existed in his career from the first instant he’d heard the blues, that long moment that set him on his life’s path. In this respect, it is clear that to understand his aesthetic and achievement, Gallagher’s work is best discussed in the context of the blues of the Mississippi Delta and Chicago. Giles Oakley has defined the blues in this way:<\/p>\n

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The principal theme of the country blues, and probably of all blues, is the sexual relationship. Almost all other themes, leaving town, train rides, work trouble, general dissatisfaction sooner or later reverts to the central concern. Most frequently the core of the relationship is seen as inherently unstable, transient, but with infinite scope for pleasure and exultation in success, or pain and torment in failure. This gives the blues its tension and ambiguity, dealing simultaneously with togetherness and loneliness, communion and isolation, physical joy and emotional anguish. In Patton’s blues, even the sound itself has the feeling of tension, with damped down, “dirty” toned, monotonously repeated bass figures giving a heavy emotional undertow, lightened by the sensuously rising and sliding notes, driving and swinging with the joy of release (55).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In addition to writing his own songs under the influence of his American predecessors, Gallagher performed, recorded, rearranged, and imitated the works of the masters: Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Blind Boy Fuller, and many others. It was in their footsteps he walked, to their tradition he owed allegiance, and his achievement ought to reside alongside theirs. Gallagher’s songs are full of the themes that Oakley enumerates and are based on the structures and techniques that passed from Clarksdale to Chicago to Cork. Even though the blues had emerged from the American South, was rooted in the lives of the dispossessed and the particular conditions of their<\/em> dispossession, and was African American at its roots and core, it contained elements, or archetypes, that would give it wide appeal beyond its various borders for, as Little Brother Montgomery has said, “blues come from within, the music come from within a person, it don’t come out of a conservatory” (Oakley 42). When asked about the music of Robert Johnson in a 1993 interview, John Lee Hooker concluded that “it could be any country or any state, and over the years, I guess it would be. Nowadays, he could be any state or any country. But then, that was the kind of music in the South” (Davis 53).<\/p>\n

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In Ralph Ellison’s opinion, the blues is “an autobiographical chronicle of catastrophe, expressed lyrically,” and this would seem to indicate that it is available to all (Davis 243). In this respect, one is tempted to suppose that Rory Gallagher’s facility with the blues is rooted in his own cultural inheritance as an Irishman as one of the dispossessed, rejected, defeated, evicted, lampooned, and exiled. We might argue that Gallagher’s blues are Ireland’s blues. But this path is reductive. Even though Gallagher enjoyed a normal Irish childhood and was exposed to life, culture, history, tradition, music, and religion in the same manner as others growing up in the decades after “The Emergency,” he remade himself imaginatively<\/em> to become a bluesman. To draw strident parallels between the experience of the Irish in Ireland and African Americans in the South, while superficially attractive and supported on some levels by fact, is to invite specious generalization and to assume that Irish Studies scholars have the inside track on understanding the African-American experience. In his book, Searching for Robert Johnson<\/em>, Peter Guralnick reaches the following conclusion of Johnson’s achievement that we can apply to Rory Gallagher:<\/p>\n

Robert Johnson became the personification of the existential blues singer, unencumbered by corporeality or history, a fiercely incandescent spirit who had escaped the bonds of tradition by the sheer thrust of genius. (2)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We can also apply Muddy Waters’ accounting of his own achievement to Gallagher’s–“[I] took the old-time music and brought it up to date:” (Davis 175). Gallagher, an intensely shy man, found in the blues the objective correlative for his talen, skill, imagination, and feeling. He fits a mold described by Frank O’Connor: “writers who come from Catholic Ireland do bring with them something of its anonymity, [ and they] are more impersonal, more identified with their material” (501). Lyrically, there seems little that is of his direct life in Gallagher’s work; rather, the weight of passion and personality is conveyed more subtly, and indirectly. The onstage and offstage Gallaghers can appear to be radically different persons. The final years of Gallagher’s life, when he had passed his peak in popularity and his health had begun to deteriorate, were difficult. It was then that he came to understand what he had forfeited–a private life and a family–to live the life of a touring musician. He was consumed by efforts to win back his back catalog, grew obsessed with astrology and superstition, abandoned his checked shirt for a more sombre black one, was “racked with self-doubt,” most inopportunely, at a time when a blues revival was taking place, and was often over-medicated (Harper 237). At the same time, his later recordings-Defender<\/em> (1987 and Fresh Evidence<\/em> (1990)–are considered by many to be among his best. His final years were spent at the Conrad Hotel in London close by a house he owned in Earl’s Court in which he had never lived. He became a Howard Hughes-like figure, dying at forty-seven, the same age as F.Scott Fitzgerald when he died; both great artists who reached the heights of fame while young, were quickly forgotten, and then rehabilitated to the pantheon after their deaths, with the formers rediscovery facilitated by the advent of the CD, the laters by the advent of the paperback.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This is how Francis Davis describes a central journey in the history of the blues:<\/p>\n

In Clarksdale, Mississippi, one Friday afternoon in May 1943, a twenty-eight-year-old tractor driver on Stovall’s Farms who had somehow eluded the draft caught the 4:00 P.M. train to Memphis. Carrying only his guitar (mail-ordered from Sears, Roebuck for $11) and a suitcase with one change of clothes, McKinley Morganfield–nicknamed “Muddy Waters” from his childhood in Rolling Fork, Mississippi–switched trains in Memphis, boarding a northbound Illinois Central and taking it to Chicago, the end of the line. (Davis 175)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I participated in a panel on Irish Popular Music with Larry McBride and George O’Brien one Saturday afternoon at the ACIS national conference at Fordham University. That round table discussion was the first such ever organized at an ACIS national conference. I reflect upon Rory Gallagher because Gallagher was Larry McBride’s favorite Irish musician. When I think of Larry, I think of rory. I think of Larry in Chicago, the place I associate him with the most, and the blues he heard performed there, the blues that is part of the fabric of that great city, and i think of the many Gallagher concerts Larry attended in the Chicago, and I imagine his excitement as he waited for Rory to appear on stage. Of course, at one level I might want to separate the world of Larry Mcbride the historian from Larry McBride the blues fan, though equally, we might want to assert the connectedness of everything, the sense that the parts of the man cannot be separated from the whole. I recall talking to Larry about music and being in awe of his encyclopedic knowledge. And, like any of us who knew and loved him, I marveled at his kindness generosity. I will finish with some lines from Mary Oliver:<\/p>\n

“Make of yourself a light,”
\nsaid the Buddha,
\nbefore he died.
\nI think of this every morning
\nas the east begins
\nto tear off its many clouds
\nof darkness, to send up the first
\nsignal–a white fan
\nstreaked with pink and violet,
\neven green. (68)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Larry McBride made of himself a light.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

TweetAs promised in a previous post, the following is the essay written by Eamonn Wall titled, “What in the World”: Reading Rory Gallagher’s Blues, that was delivered as the first Lawrence W. McBride Lecture for the American Conference for Irish Studies. This article was published in the Fall\/Winter edition of An Sionnach in 2005. Thanks […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[7],"tags":[8,11,10,9],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shadowplays.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shadowplays.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shadowplays.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shadowplays.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shadowplays.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=170"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/shadowplays.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":198,"href":"https:\/\/shadowplays.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170\/revisions\/198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shadowplays.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shadowplays.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shadowplays.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}