"One of the reasons to play Irish music, for me, over the last many years has been that you meet great people and wonderful musicians. And sometimes those great people and wonderful musicians get together and form a new band. And that’s just what has happened here, with Don Penzien and Val Plested getting together with Máirtín de Cógáin and Jimmy Crowley, and having this sort of “Cork-Jackson fusion” thing going. You have a huge treat in store for you, so really sit back, relax, and enjoy yourselves. Captain Mackey’s Goatskin and String Band."
--Dr. Jim Flanagan, Irish musician and Chair of Dept of Anthropology and Sociology, Univ. of Southern Mississippi
Corkmen Máirtín de Cógáin and Jimmy Crowley have given their whole lives to the promulgation and nurture of the ballad. Both men hail from the rebel county of Cork and now reside in America. Máirtín and Jimmy proudly speak the Irish language and have won degrees in the subject from the University of Ireland.
Jimmy Crowley is reckoned to be something of a legend in Irish music from his earlier work with Stokers Lodge, described by Micheál Ó Súilleabháin as "an icon in Irish music". He has recorded ten albums of music, is a committed songwriter and a song collector; and has found in Máirtín an able partner and counterfoil for the respect and commitment they both have for all branches of the song tradition from the bardic, Gaelic songs to the present day revival.
Máirtín is a founding member of The Fuchsia Band who have taken many a festival by storm in America. A consummate story-teller, actor, singer and musician, he can be seen and heard in the hit movie, The Wind that Shakes the Barley about the Irish War of Independence and subsequent Civil War.
The Stringband's membership is fleshed out by the addition of two musicians press-ganged from the Irish trad band, Legacy. The addition of Irish fiddler Valerie Plested and guitarist Don Penzien make for a mighty sound, indeed!
Captain Mackey's Goatskin and Stringband takes its name from a legendary Irish-American Fenian and a legendary Cork folk band from the sixties, Paddy's Goatskin and Stringband, which had a seminal effect on Jimmy's musical life.
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Irish history was written by the winners while the ballads were written by the losers, said Frank Harte, the great Dublin ballad singer and lifelong ethnographe. Certainly from the 1798 Revolution onwards, the broadside street ballad in Ireland became a formidable political weapon used to great effect in its didactic role and charged with the natural Irish facility for language which richly flavoured the change from Irish to English.
The street ballad therefore, is a powerhouse of truth, a social vignette in it's honest, direct narrative way of telling us the true facts as they are they are free of reflexive and reflective analysis. When Thomas Davis penned A Nation Once Again it was considered to be highly seditious and likely "to cause disaffection to His Majesty". P. J. McCall's wonderful Wexford songs like Kelly the Boy from Killan and The Lowlands Low are charged with emotion and the centuries-long desire of the Irish visionaries and revolutionaries to direct the people and instill a desire for autonomy. Right up to the present day, contemporary Irish ballads have been a thorn in the side of hegemony. Songs like The Men Behind the Wire and Only Our Rivers are Free accelerated the withdrawal of British troops from the streets of Ulster while the environmental songs of the new bards are staying the hands of relentless developers.
That's only half the story. Long before the ballads the Gaelic poets of Ireland left a priceless legacy of rich, formulaic bardic verse edited by well-to-do Irish-speaking patrons. These Munster poets, when they had to take to the roads produced a genre of love poetry and political Jacobite songs, Aislingí, that has become deeply engendered into the Irish psyche where it refuses to be dispelled. The comic muse, more fortuitous social change and almost every human emotion have savoured the raw materials of authentic Irish balladeers in America
~Damian Brett, Autumn, the year eight
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October 31, 2009
Tunesketeers and Balladfolk,
On Friday, Jimmy Crowley's Captain Mackey's Goatskin and String Band will be performing at Ireland House at NYU (9pm, CD Launch at 8). Go there, buy a CD and enjoy the band doing it's thing in performance. You'll be dazzled. So dazzled, in fact, you'll be all like "wow, I'd love to try my hand playing with these guys." That's where Lillie's comes in. No, it won't be a performance...it'll be a chance to play in session with Jimmy and his band. I can't promise that you'll sound as polished with them as they do on their own--it's a session after all--but it'll be good craic all the same. And maybe if you keep your eyes open you'll witness evidence of the band's secret Fenian history.
You got me right, I said secret Fenian history.
See, what you might not know is that there's a shroud of secrecy that envelops Captain Mackey's Goatskin and String Band. Their musical activities--both in the present day and in the past--are known to be dangerous and possibly illegal, what with their rites and passwords, their secret handshakes and high signs and all. But their place in Irish history is something that "official" sources disregard with extreme prejudice. Nobody, for example, will come forward and say why the group's been banned in some parts of Ireland! Mention their name to nearly any politician or government official and they'll even deny all knowledge of the group's existence! Will no one stand up and ask why?
Ask why...
www.CaptainMackey.com