A new four-part series produced by the Irish national television channel TG4, Blas Bluegrass, documents the popularity there of American old-time and bluegrass music. A scene in the first episode (starting at 17m 55s) is devoted to the late Chris Twomey, an Irish singer and multi-instrumentalist who became a noteworthy exponent of the autoharp. The clip shows one such of his instruments in a display case at The Corner House pub in Cork City.
The series is presented by Enda Scahill, one of the country’s leading tenor banjo and mandolin players. I’m as interested in those instruments as in the autoharp, all of which appear in the series. An earlier post discusses a crackpot combined autoharp-banjo patented in the US in 1892. The preceding three posts (aggregated here) deal with a widely manufactured hybrid banjo mandolin rooted in a US patent issued in August 1882 — just three months after the US patent for the autoharp. The present text takes a look at the musical proximity of the autoharp and mandolin, segueing into its discussion with a few additional background details.
This post’s banner image shows a large chromatically tuned autoharp with 21 bars, built in Sweden circa 1898 (Photo: Scenkonstmuseet, cat. no. M4011 — under my curatorial care at the precursor Swedish National Music Museum for over 20 years). The upper 66 of its 73 strings are tuned as unison pairs, also termed double-strung courses. The distance between the strings in each pair is smaller than the distance separating adjacent courses. In zither parlance this is termed mandolin-style stringing.
Autoharps with mandolin stringing are still made and played on the eastern side of the Baltic Sea (discussed further with the depicted Swedish instrument here). Conversely, diatonic autoharps were initially single strung, with as many equidistant strings as required for the three or more available chords, over three to four octaves. Varying intermediate schemes became commonplace early on.
The chromatic and diatonic models that figure in the following discussion all have bodies of the same design, fitted with 36 or 37 equidistant strings. The difference is that the diatonic instruments are tuned with a varying number of unison pairs, depending on how many keys they support.
The filmed sequence with Twomey is specifically about his relationship with the Irish group, The Lee Valley String Band, formed in Cork City in 1968. They are still active and specialize in old-time music and bluegrass. Twomey was one of the founding members, singing lead and playing a 12-bar chromatic autoharp in the following performance recorded in 2004.
Twomey was a left-handed player who consistently cradled a right-handed instrument in his arms. This situated his thumb toward the treble strings, rather than the bass. In turn, this increased the amenability of the thumbpick to use as a flatpick for the idiomatic rapid ornamentation of the traditional Irish material that he also played.
The group didn’t release any recordings until 1977, with an EP aptly titled At Last (linking to the cover photo of the performers and their instruments). Twomey released a CD of his own in 2004, titled Midnight on the Water, and subtitled “the essential autoharp recordings of Chris Twomey.” A commentary in the accompanying booklet, written by another founder of The Lee Valley String Band, Niall Toner (who also appears in the TG4 series), notes that:
At some stage during 1967…Chris…tried his hand at the autoharp, a scarce enough instrument in those days. … Chris uses several Oscar Schmidt autoharps on this recording. As well as the standard [i.e. chromatic] instrument, he uses three others which are set up in diatonic tunings in the keys of F, G, and A.
One of Twomey’s diatonic autoharps is now in the display case at The Corner House (with a soundboard decal dating it to the mid-1940s). He played what is presumably the cited one in F at Jimmy Crowley’s Cork Folk Club in 2012, the year before his death.
Twomey was also a founding member of another Cork group, Stokers Lodge, formed in 1970 and anchored in Irish folk and traditional music. Jimmy Crowley was the lead singer and played the bouzouki. He does so in the next video, recorded at the Cork Opera House in 1979, with Mick Murphy playing the mandolin, and Twomey on the concertina. (The piper is Eoin O Riabhaigh, who produced Twomey’s solo CD and is heard on the snippet from it further below.)
Stokers Lodge also play this set on their second album, Camp House Ballads, released in the same year. Twomey takes the lead on another of its tracks. He accompanies himself on a single-key D diatonic autoharp in the ballad Man of Constant Sorrow.
This is essentially a cover of a rendition that Mike Seeger recorded several times beginning in 1961, with a specimen performance airing on Pete Seeger’s television show, Rainbow Quest, in 1965.
One pivotal difference is that Twomey is joined by the quintessentially Irish uilleann pipes just over a minute into his performance. Another is a shift from the even sixteenth notes in the second half of Seeger’s American-style boom-chucka strum, which Twomey lilts toward an Irish triplet — a ubiquitous ornament explained below.
The first Stokers Lodge album, The Boys of Fairhill, was produced in 1977. This is where Twomey first recorded on the autoharp, paralleling the melody of a ballad sung by Crowley (joining in at 1m 20s). This marks the earliest recording of the instrument used melodically in any traditional Irish context that I’ve managed to locate thus far.
Twomey’s position on the broader timeline of the autoharp’s association with recorded ITM is detailed in an earlier post about The Autoharp in Irish Traditional Music. It includes a scene from a film made in 1967 at the National Festival of Traditional Irish Music and Song (Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann) in Kilrush. In it, the autoharp and mandolin make a shared debut appearance.
That chronicle ends with a snippet from Twomey’s solo CD. Before refocusing more directly on the mandolin, I’m going to present another excerpt from it (truncated because I don’t have reproduction rights) where he plays Carolan’s Planxty Irwin on a single-key F diatonic autoharp. On the full track, Twomey goes through it three times; first in the accustomed range, then an octave lower, and finally together with other instruments. The point to be carried into the remaining discussion is that the ornament approaching a triplet in the 1979 recording is now a proper triplet, played with increasing clarity throughout.
Marla Fibish and Jimmy Crowley further explore the pairing of the mandolin and bouzouki on an album from 2011, titled The Morning Star. The next video is a performance of the first set on it, in a house concert held in the year of its production.
The album is subtitled Irish Music on Double-Strung Instruments, which I’ve co-opted as the heading of the present text. Fibish’s approach to ornamentation is heard more clearly on the studio recording.
The triplet is a mainstay decorative device, and one of the easiest to execute on an autoharp. It is equally accessible to the chromatic and diatonic forms. However, the latter is better able to realize the full range of nuance applied to triplets on other instruments.
Scahill explains that variation in the following tutorial video for the Irish mandolin. The down-up-down flatpicking pattern he describes is the conventional way of executing triplets on it. Twomey does this with a thumbpick on the autoharp, on which the D-U-D pattern is otherwise emulated with the alternating movement of two fingers or distributed across three.
The stuttered triplet explained 5m 48s into the lesson is particularly easy on an autoharp but requires conceptualizing and treating a double-strung course as two separate strings. It can be used wherever two damped strings are situated above the one intended to sound, plucking all three with one finger in a single downward stroke. It obviously doesn’t matter how the damped strings are tuned but care is needed to pluck just the first undamped string in the sequence.
If more than three strings are plucked, the intended rhythmic effect risks being lost. Any type of what Scahill more precisely terms a single-note triplet can be played with three accurately aimed strokes, but there are several two-stroke options, as well as one with a single finger movement. I’ll defer procedural detail to a post of its own, including other ornaments that I feel suitable to the autoharp.
These range from a rapid single grace note from above, called a cut, to a complex five-note roll. There is significant variation in the way the latter is executed on different instruments, and it is largely forgone on some. I’ve set myself the goal of puzzling out how to play it convincingly on the autoharp and will report the upshot in the promised how-to text, if anything of broader interest comes out of this proof-of-concept exercise.
Fibish’s commentary on adapting Irish ornaments played on other instruments to the mandolin, is fully applicable to any initiative of this type. The wrap-up video is linked directly to the relevant part of the broader dialog. Every word said during the following six minutes is germane to the crafting of a viable Irish style on an autoharp.