The preceding post examined early audible evidence of the mandolin in the performance of Irish traditional music (ITM). The first attested association is on two wax cylinders recorded ca. 1905. Each begins with an announcement of the tune being “played on the violin, mandolin, and fife, by Messrs. Cronin, Kiley, and O’Neill.” The post then considered the richer subsequent evidence of the banjo mandolin in the same musical environment and concluded that Thomas Kiley played that type of mandolin on the recordings.
The present text continues with an identical situation just over a half century later. On the occasion of the National Festival of Traditional Irish Music and Song (Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann) in Dungarvan, Co. Waterford, in 1957, Frank Wisenor was recorded playing several tunes on what was announced as a mandolin. Four of them were in a small group and two solo.
The way the recordings were announced suggests that they were of entries in the All-Ireland Championship competition held at the Fleadh. Snippets from all can be heard here. A solo performance of the reel, The Sligo Maid, indicates with particular clarity that Wisenor was playing a banjo mandolin.
For comparison, here is the same tune on an ordinary mandolin.
Since the 1957 recording has no visual component, there is latitude for questioning the type of mandolin Wisenor was actually using. The first filmed appearance of the ordinary instrument in a specifically Irish musical context that I’ve so far been able to locate, is in a production of the Irish National Broadcasting Service from 1963. It shows Barney McKenna and John Sheahan in The Ronnie Drew Group (the forerunner of The Dubliners) playing bowlback mandolins in the classical manner with nearly constant tremolo.
This performance was anchored in a renewed interest in Irish folk music and balladry that precipitated a similar popularization of ITM. The flatback mandolin is generally regarded as the distinctive form in the latter situation, and made its own film debut in a documentary of the 1967 Fleadh Cheoil in Kilrush, Co. Clare. It received awards at several international film festivals and can be viewed in its entirety here.
The instrument is first seen cradled in the arms of one of the younger attendees. Another then flashes briefly by in a scene showing the musicians gathering. Finally, a mandolin has the melodic lead in a performance of the air, The Mountains Of Pomeroy. In the following snippet, it is heard in the background and then brought into view. (The reason for it being upstaged by the autoharp, which was also making its film debut in the same regard, is explained in an earlier post.)
The mandolin is again played with tremolo throughout. This remains an element of Irish-style mandolin playing but is used modestly when compared to the characteristic so-called triplets heard in the performances of The Sligo Maid. That style of banjo mandolin playing cascaded from the 1920s through the 1960s in céilí bands and small ensembles, in both Ireland and the US.
As detailed in the preceding post, one of the instrument’s major exponents, Willie Joe Power, was awarded an All-Ireland Championship for it at the 1957 Fleadh. If the instrument Wisenor used on the recordings made during the same event was indeed a banjo mandolin, it was referred to simply as a mandolin, just as it was in 1905. The same unqualified label would obviously have applied to ordinary mandolins. It is safe to assume that the broader usage was applied now and again, if not regularly, through the entire intervening interval.
Mooting uncertainty about who was playing what type of mandolin and when, here is an example where Power plays a banjo mandolin on a recording made by the Four Star Quartet in 1962, starting with the reel Hand Me Down the Tackle (on the disc as Reidy Johnston).
This was just one year before the filmed performance with McKenna and Sheahan on bowlback mandolins. They use flatback instruments in a concert of The Dubliners filmed in 1995, where they play Ryan’s Hornpipe and the reel, The Mullingar Races in the now accustomed traditional Irish style. (Their performance is interrupted by an interview but continues thereafter, with the instruments seen in full detail at its end.)
The popularity of ITM grew significantly between these two appearances. Barney McKenna is widely credited with having made the tenor banjo a major participant in that development. The pivotal action was changing the way the instrument was tuned, lowering it from the standard CGDA (the pitches of the four strings from lowest to highest) to the GDAE an octave below the mandolin.
As the story is told, McKenna took some of his inspiration from the banjo mandolin when bringing the tenor banjo into the mainstream. However, tenor banjos are heard in their original tuning on recordings of ITM beginning just a few years after the instrument’s initial appearance in 1908–09. As discussed in the preceding post, the banjo mandolin and tenor banjo were used alternately by the same performers right from the outset.
The earliest known recording of ITM on the tenor banjo is a shellac disc produced in December 1916. James Wheeler provides a driving chordal accompaniment to the reel, The Maid Behind the Bar, played on the accordion by Edward Herborn.
I can’t pinpoint the first corresponding melodic use of the tenor banjo but the following recording from 1923 places it early enough for the present discussion. Mike Flanagan plays the jigs, Sarsfield’s and The Rakes of Clonmel, just as a contemporary player might and with the same triplet ornamentation. This time the banjo is a peer of the accordion rather than subservient to it.
McKenna also played the tenor banjo in the performance by the Ronnie Drew Group. His rendition of the Donegal Reel in the next example, doesn’t differ in any marked stylistic regard from Flanagan’s.
A distinction is now commonly made between the structurally identical Irish and American tenor banjos, based on the way they are tuned. Conversely, the identically tuned but structurally different flatback and curved-back mandolins are seen respectively as more typically Irish or more typically American. This is particularly so when the latter also has the ornate Gibson F-style scroll (seen ridding the landscape of its pesky potato bug antecedents in this post’s banner image, taken from an advertisement run in 1908).
Once the tuning of the Irish tenor banjo had settled on GDAE, the mandolin became accessible to banjo players without need for managing two fingering systems. The decrease in string tension also effected a favored change in its sound. The banjo mandolin slipped into the periphery and the ordinary instrument moved back into prominence.
This series of changes included an initiative taken by Johnny Moynihan toward gaining acceptance of the Greek bouzouki. The parallel revitalization of the mandolin is commonly associated with his friend and co-performer Andy Irvine. The two crafted an intricate contrapuntal approach to accompaniment, interweaving the two instruments. It is heard on the 1968 debut album of their group Sweeney’s Men, in the 18th-century Scottish song, Rattlin’ Roarin’ Willy.
Other members of the broader circle of musicians to which they belonged weighed heavily into both the popularization of the mandolin and the uptake of the bouzouki. The mandolin most often seen in the hands of the key participants is the Gibson A-style with an oval soundhole and gently arched back and top. A dichotomy is also drawn between bowlback Greek bouzoukis and flatback Irish ones, each with distinctive stringings and tunings.
Here, though, both types are encountered in ITM performance. The primary Irish configuration has four pairs of strings tuned GDAE an octave below the mandolin or, more frequently, with the E lowered to D. The two instruments are again played side-by-side in the following jig, The Blarney Pilgrim, but share the lead without countermelodic embroidery.
Paul Brady plays an A-style mandolin and Irvine a bowlback bouzouki, both demonstrating prodigious skill with traditional ornamentation. This raises an intriguing question about how Francis O’Neill (as discussed yet again in the preceding post) might have compared them 60 years earlier with Tom Kiley’s “facility of execution almost inconceivable” on the mandolin. To Kiley, “The Flogging Reel…with its turns and graces, presented no more difficulties than Home, Sweet Home.”
Regardless of what the answer might be, in Dublin in 1912, Francis Roche published a Collection of Irish Airs, Marches and Dance Tunes Compiled and Arranged for Violin, Mandoline, Flute, or Pipes. Nothing indicates that the mandolin was a recent entry into that group of instruments. Nor is it likely to have been included in the title of the collection if there wasn’t an appreciable community of mandolin players to receive it.
The fiddle, flute, and pipes are at times reckoned as the Big Three instruments in the performance of traditional Irish dance tunes. By placing the mandolin in parity with them, Roche ascribed comparable status to that instrument. He published an expanded second edition of the collection in 1927, with the same title. The popularity of the mandolin may then have ebbed prior to its mid-century revival but, especially if the banjo mandolin is taken into consideration, perhaps not as deeply as is often maintained.