Review of Packie Manus Byrne, Recollections of a Donegal Man
Packie Manus Byrne, Recollections of a Donegal Man, compiled and edited by Stephen Jones (Lampeter, Wales and Montreal, Quebec: Roger Millington, 1989).
Available from: Roger Millington Publishers
Bear in mind this review is written by a young American who has visited Donegal only once. So take it for what it is worth.
I enjoyed this book quite a bit and I would recommend it to anyone interested in the culture and music of Donegal, in the development of the folk music scene, and basically anyone who might like a good yarn about a quirky Irish character who went from humble beginnings to spend slightly less humble twilight years as a well-loved musician and storyteller. As a philosopher I would be remiss not to add that the book has some philosophical merit as well!
What motivated me to read this book is that it contains a lot of interesting stuff about rural life in Donegal in the early years of this century, written by a musician who was personally familiar with some of the great fiddlers of those years. So you get it first hand -- what farm life was like, how schools and churches were run, what some of the old local musicians were like, and so on. But that is only the first half of the book. The second half of the book, which was entertaining but really a different sort of story, concerns Packie's life as a worker and wanderer in England and sometimes in Ireland. He worked at all sorts of odd jobs: cattle drover (Irish cowboy if you will) and smuggler, actor, and even doing "Internal Security" -- a sort of a home-ground spy during World War II! And of course eventually he got seriously into musical performance, singing and playing the tin whistle.
What makes the book entertaining is that the story is suffused with Packie's personality. Let me give you some examples of what I mean:
- "People led very simple lives in those days. There were only three things of any importance: work, religion, and music. What was happening in other parts of the world wasn't of any interest to us. Being very largely self-supporting, we didn't have to depend on anything outside our own little area." (p. 2)
- "Mountain people you know, they have a strange way really of living -- it seems strange to people who wasn't brought up with it. Now in fact you have much the same way of living in the Appalachian mountains of America, and in the north of Scotland. They still live like that -- doing something for some other one. And you know, a lot of that tradition still applies, even to me, and I'm an old man away from all that for one-and-a-half generations and living here in Kilburn. I would ask no better fun than going over and chatting that bloke across the road." (p. 29)
- "I think because the children were let go to do whatever they liked, it did leave youngsters that they grew up more enlightened in how to get along with people. How to avoid getting into trouble, and how to handle yourself if you did. If you couldn't fight you ran, and if you couldn't run you stood your ground and you done your best. Get out of it one way or the other!" (p. 38)
- "It's possible that [fiddlers] Big Pat and Paddy Boyle might be considered a bit rough and ready beside some of the best today, but they played really nice music, and they played only the best tunes: if they picked up a new tune and found it didn't seem to fit the fiddle music, they scrapped that one. John Doherty, till the day he died, had the same habit." (p. 85)
The entire book reads like this. Packie tells us how, in Donegal when he was growing up, life was simpler and oriented around a community, people were more honest, better able to fend for themselves, stronger physically and emotionally, etc. Recollections is not just a story; it is a kind of illustrated practical philosophy. And so the reader does not learn simply how the man lived and what he did; you get to see how he thought and how he evaluated people and situations, in his own words and manner. So for someone, such as myself, who comes from a radically different background, it's very entertaining and provokes some thought. Not always thought on the deepest subjects of course. But thought about a lot of the defining characteristics of an early 20th century rural Irish outlook on the world, the ways of thinking and feeling responsible for the music I like to play; and then what happens when that outlook meets life in England in the middle of the 20th century.
I personally was endeared to Packie and I suspect many other readers have been, and will be, as well. "It's been a good life, of course it has," he says, and having read about it, I believe him.
(Review by Larry Sanger.)
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