Folklorist Henry Glassie first visited Northern Ireland during the Troubles, yet was struck by the welcome, he tells Belinda McKeon
'There's some kind of a god who looks over foolish fieldworkers," laughs Henry Glassie. He's remembering his first trip to Ballymenone, the farming community a few miles south of Enniskillen, where he arrived in 1972 to begin an anthropological study which would, as it turned out, absorb a large part of his energy for the next 40 years.
It yielded five rich, fascinating books on the area, on its people, and on Northern Irish culture more generally, the latest of which, The Stars of Ballymenone, was published this year by Indiana University, where Glassie is Professor of Folklore. Its cover photograph is a sepia-toned shot of a wild-haired old man in a suit and a wool geansaí, a fiddle touched to his shoulder, his eyes tightly shut as he draws the bow over the strings.
The man is Peter Flanagan, and the photograph was taken by Glassie during that first visit, 34 years ago. The god of fieldworkers brought him to Flanagan, Glassie jokes. Brought him, on that first day, through a wet field, through a bush of thorns, into a drain, around the path of a bull, and up to the gable, at last, of Flanagan's cottage. Outside it stood a man in a black suit, with a rosary clutched in both his hands.
"You look tired," the man said to Glassie, and led him into the small house.
"And Peter Flanagan became one of the most important characters, not just in my book," says Glassie, "but, honestly, in my life."
Why the rosary clutched to Flanagan's chest? It took years for Glassie to get to the bottom of that. But when he did, it made sense; in a Northern Irish community in the worst year of the Troubles, it made terrible sense. "He told me afterwards that he had been terrified of me," says Glassie. "Who in the world was I, how was I blundering across the fields, coming into his place."
Flanagan and his brother, Joseph, could not place the stranger's accent. To their ears, Americans had Yankee accents, they came from the Bronx, where the Irish emigrants settled; they did not speak in this strange, Scots-sounding burr. And Glassie was too tall for their liking. They took him for a spy, a detective, someone coming to get them to reveal the nests of IRA men that were all along the border. Still, they were welcoming to Glassie. That, after all, was the way.
"I think the thing that has surprised me most, looking back over 30 years, is that it was the time of the Troubles and yet everybody was so immediately cordial," says Glassie. "I don't think they really necessarily - to say it directly - wanted me there, but they simply had such a strong culture of hospitality that they couldn't reject me."
So there was no ice, as such, to be broken with the Flanagan brothers; "stuttering" and "strange" as the conversation was, it went on, around the hearth, that first afternoon. The three men did not know what to say to one another; Glassie was just at the beginning of his project, progressing by instinct and hardly knowing what he was looking for, hoping to stumble on his material as he went along, while the brothers were not just frightened but bewildered by the American's sudden presence in their house, by his questions about their ways, gentle as those questions might have been.
"Until at last I made the right comment," says Glassie. "It happened that I had spent a lot of time paying attention to traditional music in the mountains of North Carolina and Virginia. And there are enough similarities between the music played there and the music in Ireland, because after all the families in those mountains are, many of them, from Ireland. I happened to mention a fiddle tune that made sense to him. And that coerced him to get his own fiddle out and to play for me."
Glassie was astonished by the music that came from the old man's bow. Afterwards, the conversation between them flowed more easily. They talked for hours, well into the night. And at the end of the night, they had established a firm friendship; Glassie was the best man, the plainest man, ever to come out of America, the brothers said. Peter Flanagan was the best fiddler since Michael Coleman. Glassie walked home, happy, in the night's stark blackness. His work in Ballymenone had begun.
WHAT GLASSIE DOES is to observe. He traces patterns of behaviour, of belief; he takes note of customs and traditions, stories and superstitions; he spends time with ritual, with habit, with custom, with the things that make a community and a people what and who they are. He listens and he records; in books like All Silver and No Brass, an account of Christmas mumming which was the first publication to come out of his time in Ballymenone; and in the larger study of that community, Passing the Time in Ballymenone, published in 1982, he captures the voices, the tunes, the jokes and the gestures of a generation now gone.
The Stars of Ballymenone returns to that generation, depicting them vividly in a text that is as rigorous as it is affectionate; this is no twee coffee-table book for Irish-Americans. Glassie, who has written similar studies about communities in Turkey, Bangladesh, China, Kuwait and Israel, among others, is regarded, today, as one of the world's most prominent folklorists and ethnographers. But back in 1972, he had no such credentials to present the people of Ballymenone. And even if he had, they would hardly have made much of a difference. Hospitable as they were, when Glassie landed on their doorsteps, asking to take a long look into their everyday lives, the people wondered what he really wanted. And Glassie knew that he had to ease himself into their trust.
And trust was a hard-won thing in a Northern Irish community in the early 1970s, especially from a man bearing a tape recorder and asking people to talk openly and honesty. Openness? Honesty? Seamus Heaney's poem from the same era, from the same province, comes to mind: "Where to be saved you only must save face/ and whatever you say, say nothing."
It was a delicate process, sure enough, says Glassie. "Once I'd been there long enough, I was getting a lot of information which I couldn't conceivably have published. People would watch to make sure that I wasn't showing too much interest in that kind of information."
The police certainly wanted to know about his interest, and his information; they questioned him on a number of occasions, one night ransacking his caravan, reading through all his notebooks, to see what information he had on local young men. Glassie's notebooks yielded nothing. And when Passing the Time was published, the same young men brought it to the parish priest, asking what they should make of it. He kept it for a while, and gave it back, telling them they should be grateful. That this was a man who knew everything about them, but had said nothing.
GLASSIE SPENT A year in Ballymenone at first, living in that caravan with his young family. Soon afterward, he was hired by the Ulster American Folk Park as a consultant, which meant that he got back to the area a couple of times a year for the next decade. Some of the visits were for a fortnight, others were for a couple of months. It was important to spend a year there at the beginning, he says, getting to know people; and to immerse himself in the vernacular, so that he left "speaking the language and moving gracefully". But this was no easy task. For, if his accent sounded strange to the Flanagans, the dialect of rural Fermanagh took some time for an American ear to distil.
"You settle in, and you begin to get the rhythms of the language," he says. "And I'm speaking not just of a dialect but of a kind of sociolinguistic frame. Even if the words are familiar, the usages, the ways to handle those moods, the occasions in which those words are appropriate, that takes a very long time. In fact, I would never flatter myself by thinking that I ever got fully articulate in the language."
He remembers a local man, Joe Murphy, brought him to the bog to learn about turf cutting, and referred to the slane, the tool for cutting turf, as "that lad"; "lad" being a word used generally, and randomly, to refer to things. Glassie thought this was a technical term, and asked Murphy about its meaning, which brought Murphy, who had never thought twice about the word, to an acute, and slightly confused, self-consciousness about his own speech. "In a sense, I would say, a person like myself travels the world to find a person who will enjoy increasing their own self-consciousness. And that's not the normal person. But there are people who are curious and intellectual in every environment."
And one such person is another of the heroes of his books and of his life, Hugh Nolan, a man with a mind like a university library, stocked high with stories and histories; a man who knew as much about the happenings in his community in the sixth century as in the 20th.
"Mr Nolan was a man who, in a different environment, would have been a PhD in anthropology and philosophy," Glassie says. "He was just exhilarated by the whole process of bringing the culturally inchoate into clarity, so that by the end of my questioning, he would take off on a kind of philosophical essay in which he would summarise the kinds of things we'd been talking about. He just found it really exciting to work with me at figuring out discriminations, at working out patterns of usages in his community. The presence of an ethnographer will inevitably bring self-consciousness to members of the community, and there are some people in the community who go beyond curiosity to find that an exciting job, and they become your collaborators."
With all Glassie's old collaborators now dead, the new book is marked by a deeper poignancy than the first; it is a repository of lives and of voices (quite literally - a CD of stories and songs told and sung by his "characters" accompanies the book) now faded into the past.
Understandably, that past is one which many Fermanagh people might prefer to forget, scathed as it was by violence and poverty, by fear and distrust. But there is much, still, which merits remembering in the past of a community such as Ballymenone. Glassie laughs at the memory of that first visit, when his nervousness and enthusiasm had him babbling and gushing in front of the hearths of those people into whose lives he had wandered with his notebook and his tape recorder.
"What I've found over the years is that people don't listen to what you say at first," he reflects, "they listen to how you say it. They watch you and they try to gauge from your demeanour whether you're sincere. And I think, of me, they thought, ah, the poor idiot, he's being sincere. His questions aren't offensive. I'll talk to him a while."
The Stars of Ballymenone by Henry Glassie is published by Indiana University Press, £22 in UK
