Nollaig Casey has spent two decades working in the shadow of other musicians. Now she's had the chance to record in her own right. It has been worth the wait, writes Siobhán Long.
It's a compound more readily encountered in the heart of Appalachia than in Bandon: a fiddle player who sings with the fluency of a multilinguist weaned on the twisted vowels of the Antipodes and the tongue-twisting consonants of Belarus. Nollaig Casey has been hiding her light not so much under a bushel as between the creases of an eclectic gathering of artists' repertoires for long enough.
Having cut her teeth on a European tour with Planxty, in 1980, she has performed on major works by Shaun Davey, was the first featured fiddle player with Riverdance and more recently played with Dónal Lunny's groundbreaking Coolfin. These days she intersperses road trips with her husband, Arty McGlynn - as well as a plethora of other musicians, from Sharon Shannon to Mairtín O'Connor - with US network-television appearances alongside Emmylou Harris and Steve Earle. Then there's the odd film score - Dancing At Lughnasa, Hear My Song - to keep her distracted too. Small wonder that it has taken Casey this long to get round to recording her own solo début.
"I've wanted to record my own album for a long, long time," she says, smiling sheepishly, "but I've been rearing my two daughters, who are now 16, so it's that bit easier to concentrate on my own music. I always loved working with other people; I love sparking off other people. But I've always been sidetracked, and I never really gave myself enough space to do my own thing. So I finally just decided, okay, now's the time to do it."
Having waited so long to record, The Music Of What Happened is inevitably flush with material that Casey has been storing up for more than a few years. It's an erudite coalition of old tunes (many of them, such as The Clergy's Lamentation, invigorated by Casey's refreshingly baroque interpretation) and original pieces, all of which come with their own particular vignette tucked within the sleeve notes. Casey's sense of history is palpable on the 18th-century song De Búrca The Fair and the self-composed ode to a famed ancestor of her mother's, a member of the O'Sullivan Beare clan, The Last Lord Of Beara.
"A good number have been lingering in my head for quite a while," she nods. "I wrote Twins On A Swing when my daughters, Aoife and Órfhlaith, were four years old. It was used as the theme music for Sult [Dónal Lunny's TV series\]. The Last Lord Of Beara is a fairly recent tune, though. It's a story I've always been interested in, because my mother is one of the O'Sullivan Bearas, from Allihies. I wanted to write it to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Dónal Cam O'Sullivan Beare's voyage in to exile in Spain, and I hope it has a kind of Spanish flavour."
It's clear from Casey's choice of songs that stories are crucial to her music. So many tunes and all her songs rest on the back of picaresque tales, tucked inside the melody lines, pulsing life in to the veins of the music.
"The story is very important to me," she agrees. "I find that if a story interests me, sometimes I think of a tune that will go with it. I find I'm inclined to write tunes when I see something I like or am interested in." Casey's autobiography is written in the tunes, and she's particularly pleased that her début reflects the rich musical inheritance of home.
"One of the biggest reasons I wanted to record this album was as a tribute to both my parents. My father died a few years ago, and I wanted to dedicate this album to him. He was a very special man, a teacher, a bee-keeper and a water diviner. He had a fantastic store of old songs and stories, scéalta Fiannachta, and he passed all of that on to us. A lot of the songs have a particular relevance too. A Spailpín A Riúin was one of his favourite Irish songs, and The Bonnie Blue-Eyed Lassie is from the singing of Elizabeth Cronin, who was distantly related to my father. They're both descended from the poet Ó hIarlaithe, who was head of Dámh Scoil Mhúscraí [Bardic Academy of Muskerry\] in the late 18th century."
Casey's reputation as a fiddle player has been responsible for most of the stamps on her passport, and her easy transition between the traditional and the classical has meant that her comfort zone stretches from barroom snugs to concert halls.
Ironically, her singing has taken a back seat, and for many the rich store of songs lurking within The Music Of What Happened will come as a surprise. "My mother is a great singer, and she played the harmonica and melodeon," she says, smiling, "and my father had a great interest in songs. When I was younger I used to sing a lot, and I won the Oireachtas, but I suppose I was such a good fiddle player that it took over. As well as that, I was quite shy when I was young, and sometimes, in sessions, singing is often pushed to the background, so I suppose the fiddle was my natural choice.
"Then, when Arty and I made our first duo album, Lead The Knave, we decided that it would be purely instrumental, although I did sing on our second duo album, Causeway." Casey's sister is the well-known harpist Máire Ní Chasadaigh. Their choice of instrument was never in doubt, once each was within sniffing distance of the music.
"I remember, when I was about nine or 10, my mother arrived home from Cork with a fiddle for me and a harp for Máire. From the word go I was fascinated with the fiddle. Even the smell of the wood did something for me.
"I picked it up and played Roisín Dubh on it almost straight away, and I didn't take to the harp at all - but my sister Máire loved it. So it's definitely true that certain instruments suit certain people. I don't know whether it's a physical thing or it just captures something in you."
Not content to limit her attentions to the fiddle, Casey embarked on piping at a young age too. "I started classes in uilleann pipes at the school of music in Cork with Micheál Ó Riabhaigh," she says, "and what I learned on the pipes I just transferred on to the fiddle. I'm always more drawn to piping tunes rather than specifically fiddle tunes. They're more modal, I think."
With Casey's love of everything from classical to modern as well as traditional music evident in her début, does she feel she's living in a changed landscape, where traditional music is more secure in itself, less threatened by outside influences?
"Most definitely," she nods. "It's much more acceptable now, even to diehard traditional- music fans, who even as recently as 20 years ago frowned on the guitar.
"I remember hearing people say that you couldn't possibly play traditional music on the guitar, which is actually rubbish, because, for example, the concertina only came to Ireland in the 1850s from central Europe. Nowadays people are much more open-minded about traditional music, and there are lots of bands now who are experimenting with it. And I think it's fine to do that as long as the essence of the music is kept, as long as it's done with integrity. That's the secret."
