*Ollie Byrnes. Photograph: Tom Micks.
A LOVE of music blossomed from a young age in Ollie Byrnes and his latest publication chronicles a history of music in Ennis and beyond from 1950 onwards.
Launched at the beginning of October, ‘On The Boards’, the book covers all genres of music, from the Big Bands of the early 1950’s, through the Showbands at Paddy Con’s in the 1960’s, on into the rock scene, right up to the present time.
His passion in music stemmed from his home which in itself was its own musical arena with the sounds echoing from the phone room. “It was traditional music mostly at home, my parents were involved in Comhaltas and we had sessions every Tuesday night without fail for about seven years in our sitting room and then as the branch grew they moved to another venue so I got to hear the cream of Irish music at a very young age and the radio was always on, the standard of music that time coming in was of a very high standard, there was fantastic records made, the production value in records was enormous. I was influenced by not just Irish music but blues, jazz, rock and roll. I started buying records from a very young age, my brother had started off before me when he was about twelve so I was hearing the records he was that he bought when I was about eight”.
Ollie recalled that these sessions took place over seven years, from when he was aged three to ten years old, “it was in the phone room, it was when you came in the door, there was no porch, it was like a big country house by Kelly’s Corner, a big living room area with an open fire and my father got seats from Paddy Cons or someplace like that, apart from the furniture that was there, he he might have another twenty chairs he could put out and you might have you have nine musicians playing and you could have twenty people listening and I thought this was normal and even when we went to bed the music would come through the bedroom. The best musicians played there, everybody in Clare that was playing music at the time was there, it was a litany of people”.
He has been working for three years on this book which is his thirteenth publication. “Some of the material was back about twenty years, I did features for the Ad Mag, which is, magazine from North Clare, South Galway, and, also some material for the from the County Express so I had all that stuff going back twenty years. In the last two years I was practically doing this full-time, I interviewed about 150 different personalities, local and national and I found that very enjoyable, getting to meet people from different genres of music”. He added, “I’ve got no funding, it is something that is very disappointing really but you just try fund it from turnover of previous books, it is difficult working without funding but it is what I love to do”.
Different genres of music are covered. “It is a history from mainly from 1950 when Paddy Cons opened and it includes different genres of music. The Ennis Brass Band goes back to 1910, I had spoken to Bernard McAllister about the current Brass Band which was founded in 1971 but the actual original one goes back 120 years so it’s in sections too so there’s all those sections where you have different genres from different genres which gives us more of a body. It’s like putting a long-playing album together, there has to be a mood to the songs and then with an album everybody has a favourite song like a lot of people have said to me they like to play an essay on Paddy Cons even people who are too young to remember when it was there”.
This segment on Paddy Cons has evoked a sense of nostalgia, he noted. “I interviewed a lot of people for the Paddy Cons section so there’s a lot of different people speaking through it. Another thing I enjoyed was the Ennis Musical Society, I didn’t know a whole pile about the Musical Society but I knew the songs from the musicals which would be a strength of mine”.
Much of his research was conducted in the Local Studies Building, “without facilities like that we would be lost, I gathered a lot of oral history myself but it is invaluable to be able to fall back on the printed word”.
Having ordinarily penned history books on hurling and great hurlers, this publication has a different subject matter but has a common denominator in that the author shares a deep passion for the subject. “It’s not too different because, I had a leg in both camps, my parents would be into hurling so I was caught up in the hurling and I went to matches from a very young age, I’d have gone to college matches with my father to watch the CBS, we’d have went down to the likes of Emly and Bansha and the same going to watch St Flannan’s College and then the county matches, it didn’t matter who was playing it could have been a club game between Ruan and Newmarket-on-Fergus but you’d still head over to Cusack Park to watch it”.
He told The Clare Echo, “It’s similar, the hurlers like to talk about the past and I don’t think there was anyone I approached to do an interview that said no. It’s easy to talk about hurling and music when you’re interested in it”.
On The Board is available to purchase at Scéal Éile Bookshop, Ennis Bookshop, Custy’s Music Shop and from the author on 087-224-4652.
