In a period dominated by epic anniversaries and political commemorations, historian DR LAWRENCE H HOLDEN begins a new News Letter feature series which recalls the often forgotten histories of our rural townlands. From Field and Fireside is set in the townlands of Co Antrim and revives forgotten histories from the memories of the quiet country people who worked the land
MUSIC knows no bounds.
Throughout history, songs and tunes have wandered where they pleased; throughout the British Isles, from Ulster to America, and back again in various guises. It is a foolish man that would claim a song or tune is unique to a particular place without fully knowing its history.
Having said that, rural Ulster has always retained its areas of unique local identity and no matter how well travelled a song or tune may have been before settling in a particular townland, local culture has been distinct enough to leave its mark on the tunes and songs that have passed this way.
John Kennedy’s singing and playing styles provide ample evidence that the stamp of locality can give a ‘wandering’ song or tune the honour of ‘belonging’ to many places.
John Kennedy was born on the last day of August 1928 at Sydney Row on the edge of the great moss which once stretched from Burnquarter and Garrydoo in North Antrim, to the Loan, which lies above Cullybackey and Ahoghill, to the south.
The independent, resilient and self-sufficient nature of the people and communities that lived around the moss is well attested to, and a large part of the character of that place, and its people, is manifest in the character of John Kennedy.
Though only a few miles north of the village of Cullybackey, and little more again from the busy town of Ballymena, this collection of townlands represented a place apart from both village and town.
In the 1920s and 30s a bus journey to Ballymena was a rare occurrence, and for John and the other children of Sydney Row ‘four field lengths’ was all their world.
When John brought the Fermanagh singer Paddy Tunney to his old home-place he told him a story that carried more than a grain of truth wrapped in its humour: “Next door to us two oul lassies lived, Becky and Liza Jane. Becky was always readin’ the paper but she never ventured far from home. There used to be great talk in the papers then about Southern Ireland. One day Wullie Scott was in on some errand and says she tay Wullie, ‘Where’s Southern Ireland?’ ‘I’m no too sure,’ says Wullie, ‘but I think it’s on the other side o’ Ahoghill.’
“You know yourself, Paddy, Ahoghill’s only down the road from Cullybackey.”
The sound and rhythm of local speech, and much of the broader culture in the area was clearly recognisable from its 17th century lowland Scots origins, but, as can be seen from John’s sources for much of his songs and tunes, this vigorous, but fluid, cultur
al world was by no means isolated from outside influences.
Some pathways are as old as time; a song carried in the memory and on the tongue of someone from beyond the district, the written word, and, of course, that first great cultural leveller of the modern age, the wireless.
The first place that John picked up his songs was at Sydney Row. His lifelong love of song is not surprising when you hear the enthusiasm in his voice, relating the story of late night ‘singings’ by the hearth with his grandmother Annie Workman when, as he recalls ‘she sut up an’ sung steady tae us, tae quarter tae four in the mornin.’ Annie had worked in other areas of Co Antrim and her young grandson clearly enjoyed listening to her store of songs. He was keen to learn then, and fully realises the importance of her influence now: “That was what I would a termed, lukin’ back on it, as tradition in the highest degree, ye hear it... an’ that tune was in yer heid when ye went to bed, it was better in it in the mornin’ and then ye whistled it or ye sung it tae yersel the next day, or if ye had the tune, then ye put the words tae the tune and ye got it that way, and again that was what I would call tradition, because ye grow up alang wae it.”
John’s entry into the wider world of work at the age of 14 eventually led to his meeting with Hughie Surgenor. Hughie taught him tin whistle and fife, and introduced him to the local fifing tradition which owed much to the Nicholls of Killyless and a local drum maker, and sometime fife tutor, Jock Leckey of Cullybackey. Leckey’s tunes were perfected by John, Hughie Surgenor, Wullie Thompson and others in a small shed below Harperstown, by the banks of the river Maine.
As well as the living repertoire of these men, the tunes were also preserved in the Leckey manuscript, which Jock Leckey left unwittingly to posterity due to the care of his former pupil, Willis Patton.
The manuscript provides a valuable window on an era of traditional Mid-Antrim fifing. John Kennedy is now one of the few living links with this older tradition, when men had a repertoire of up to 50 tunes, and he can afford to criticise those who have learned only a handful of tunes and would ‘deave ye’ with them.
An older generation of men like John’s grandfather James Kennedy, David ‘Doit’ Bartholomew of Tullygarley, Joe Holmes of Killyrammer, and the aforementioned Hughie Surgenor, played the fiddle and fife with equal dexterity, pointing to an era when popular country tunes, jigs, reels and hornpipes were converted to march time and made the journey from the fiddle at a flax-pulling dances and churn suppers, to the fife at a loanen end or Orange walk.
An intimate knowledge of those threads of tradition which trace the journey of a tune, or the wandering history of a song, ensured that men like John Kennedy realised that music and song has no boundaries – in different places, and in different ways, it belongs to us all. Thank goodness we still have the long memory, ready wit and rich store of song of the ‘Bard of Cullybackey’ to remind us of that truth, if needed.