Then, another song fairly ambushed me, “As She Moved Trough the Fair,” which plays usually as a more upbeat song, as a dream of an impending wedding. Her memory perhaps had been an ancestral response, too, as I’m as German as I’m Irish. “There is no maid I’ve seen/ like the brown Colleen/ that I met in the County Down.” The lyrics summoned, for me, the memory of such a lass I’d met and known, a brown-haired Irish lass named Colleen from long ago, and then another, a German blonde Colleen from just a few years bye, and all- too-soon married. The toe-tapping album opener “Star of the County Down” boisterously celebrates the memory of a romantic memory.
But they were two albums of pop artists working with traditional ethnic musicians which helped unlock a great new strain of cultural possibility, and the popular flourishing of so-called “world music.”Īnd I was again immersed in Heartbeat‘s winsome beauties, feisty spirit and stunning arc of trans-Atlantic wonders. A chat over beer led to Irish Heartbeat, which gained widespread critical acclaim for its surprising and immensely-affecting twist on record industry norms, coming on the heels of Paul Simon’s Graceland. Morrison’s was a far more natural collaboration, given his affinity of heritage with the fellow Irishmen. In 1987, Morrison, our greatest contemporary Irish soul singer-songwriter, was touring through Ireland when he hooked up with Paddy Moloney, the Uillean pipes player of the greatest traditional Irish music band of them all. So, I played the record from whence the song came, Irish Heartbeat by Van “The Man” Morrison and The Chieftains. And further arose within the shadow of perhaps my best friend, an Irishman named Jim Glynn – a paraplegic Vietnam-era veteran with a great passion for life, women and music – who has indeed passed, and returns only in the spring glisten of thirteen melting snows, since his death in October, 2004.Ī great friend and a great Irishman, the late Jim Glynn (right) with me on the occasion of him serving as best man at my second wedding. Patrick’s Day and the song in the air seemed to nudge me with quiet insistence, as if to say, “How often ’tis, old lad, you’ve let the great Irish holiday slip by with nary a thought nor a hoisted glass of Guinness!” It seemed to coalesce with the faint memory of this line from the traditional Irish song “Carrickfergus”: “My boyhood friends have all passed on, like the melting snow.” And I sure enough, such thought had finally roused something within when I had dinner a few days ago at the excellent Irish restaurant County Clare with four of my oldest friends, going back to high school and beyond, all of us now graying and slightly fading, compared to our youthful primes. Something in the wind from the brooding clouds sent a shiver of melodic memory through me this afternoon.
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