Ron Kavana could be the busiest Irishman in the music industry. At 46, the Cork-born London resident has recently finished an American tour, released a live album from the tour, as well as a double CD, 1798-1998: Irish Songs Of Rebel- lion, Resistance & Reconciliation, alongside Farewell To Ireland, a four-CD set of Irish music recorded in New York in the 1920s and 1930s. Kavana is a big fellow with a big history - where do we start? At the beginning, he suggests.
"I was born in Fermoy, Co Cork. My Dad was from a family of native Gaelic speakers, while my Mum was born in the south side of Chicago to Irish immigrants. She returned to Ireland and met my Dad, and in the 1950s they left Ireland for London to look for work. I stayed in Ireland, living with my grandparents in a pub. I grew up hearing a lot of music and my Grandma was always singing songs, which I learned years later were country songs by the likes of Jimmy Rodgers and The Carter Family, stuff she'd learnt in America. Growing up in Co Cork, Rory Gallagher was my absolute hero.
"I shifted to London when I was 18. Back then, London was the best place in the world for traditional Irish music, there were so many great Irish musicians living in London. Maggie Barry, Michael Gorman, Felix Doram, Willie Clancy, and I was on first-name terms with them all. That was my apprenticeship, really, listening to all these great musicians.
"By the 1970s I was making my living playing guitar with great American blues and r'n'b artists. In the mid-1980s I started writing a lot of songs and what was coming out was . . . the whole political scene here, the internment in Northern Ireland, the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six . . . it started eating at me and I started having to write about it. Around then, the whole London Irish music scene was changing very quickly. I was hosting a Sunday morning jam session in a Camden pub and everyone began to drop in, Irish musicians, visiting American musicians, and it became The Pogues' office. They asked me to go on the road with them as their opening act, and I worked with them on their albums and they recorded two of my songs. Then things got too hairy in The Pogues camp - too much drugs for my liking - so I decided to put out my own album.
"I formed a band called Alias and we took off. It was a great time and continued for about six years, and by then I'd had enough of the music industry. My Mum died and it was time to get out for a while, reflect on life, so I went to university and did Irish Studies. It gave me a whole new insight into what I wanted to do.
"Having the academic background lent me the confidence to do the 1798-1998 project. 1798 was a key year in Irish history because of the United Irishmen movement. And, of course, 1998 because of the Northern Ireland Peace Treaty. I sat down and recorded the first 40 songs that came.
"A lot of Irish rebel songs are just bar-stool patriotic and I wanted the songs to reflect on the suffering and the reconciliation." He goes on: "I tried to follow the songwriter's intention and let the songs be soulful and heartfelt and terribly sad. Foggy Dew is my favourite. I wept while I was singing it, it's such a sad song. That's as soulful as I'm ever likely to get."
Farewell To Ireland, his magnificent collection of early 20th century Irish recordings, came out of a similar mix of academic and personal quest. "My maternal grandfather and grandmother were among those who migrated to America and my grandfather was a musician; he played in a dance band in the States. When I was growing up in their pub in Co Cork there was a photo of this band with my granddad in it hanging on the wall and I was always so impressed. I guess that got my interest started, and as I got immersed in London's traditional music making community I began meeting Irish musicians living in the US and hearing stories of all the great musicians who had crossed the Atlantic." Things were difficult for traditional musicians in Ireland in the 1920s, what with economic hardship and the often puritanical attitude of the Catholic Church towards dance music. Amongst the migrants to America then were the cream of Irish musicians, many of whom - including such legends as Patsy Touhey, The Flanagan Brothers, Michael Coleman and Tom Ennis - turned professional there. They played the vaudeville circuit and concerts arranged by organisations promoting Irish culture such as the Gaelic League and the famous Chicago Irish Music Club.
"It's my favourite era of Irish music making," says Kavana. "There is an air of naivety about it - you've got to remember it's music made by people who had only known poverty in Ireland and quite suddenly found financial and political and religious freedom in the US. And that comes through in the music."
Recording began in 1916 when a Cork-born music seller and travel agent, Ellen O'Byrne, convinced Columbia Records to make a 78 rpm recording of the banjo and accordion duo James Wheeler and Eddie Herborn. When the resultant 500 records sold out overnight, the Irish-American recording business was up and running.
"The Irish were the richest ethnic group in terms of the number of musicians and the number of people who could afford to buy their records," says Kavana. "This led to there being 56 Irish radio stations in New York alone. Some of the 78s sold over a million copies! There wasn't accurate accounting back then and records were sold everywhere - the corner store, the butcher's, my grandad sold them through his tea store - and some of the musicians were huge stars in their time."
Some 78s found their way back to Ireland, revitalising Ireland's moribund traditional music scene. Michael Coleman always claimed his elder brother Jim (who stayed home) was the better fiddler. Legend has it that when Michael's first 78 arrived in Co Sligo they got Jim around to hear it. After listening carefully, Jim nodded and said; "Ay, he's almost got it right".
Irish music, Kavana emphasises, has never been a pure source untouched by outside influences. Beyond the Gaelic sound of sean nos, instruments and styles have come from other parts of the world and Irish musicians in America were equally adept at listening to and assimilating what their new neighbours were playing.
"You listen to Dan Sullivan's piano playing (CDs 1 and 4) and you can hear blues and boogie woogie in there. He was listening to Fats Waller and everyone else. The amazing thing about this is when I was working as a professional musician through the 1970s and 1980s, whenever I tried to get the band - and this was a band full of Irish men - to play an Irish tune with, say, a reggae feel they'd refuse to, tell me it couldn't be done. Now, you listen to this music from earlier this century and you realise Irish musicians were forever picking up on other styles of music."
SO what happened to this supposedly insatiable demand for Irish music in America? These days Irish music is big business again - "the post-Riverdance era," Kavana calls it - but in no way can it be compared to the energy and activity of the 1920s. "The depression closed a lot of the market down," says Kavana, "and that resulted in less experimentation in terms of bands and record companies. And, all the time, the record companies were becoming more corporate and there were changes in the publishing laws." Still, this does not account for the drop-off in Irish music in America. What appears most likely - especially in the aftermath of the second World War - is that the Irish in America, like all other ethnic groups, wanted to be seen as American rather than Irish. The Jewish community lost klezmer music around the same time as Irish recordings evaporated. American music - country, jazz, rock'n'roll, blues, cajun, pop - ruled instead, assimilating musicians from all the nationalities who made up the American melting pot.
In this sense, Farewell To Ireland documents a secret Irish history while providing a key to Irish roots in today's popular music. Big Ron, take a bow.
Farewell To Ireland and 17981998: Irish Songs Of Rebellion, Resistance & Reconciliation and Alien Alert: Ron Kavana Live in California with the Resident Aliens are available through Proper Records Ltd.
