1. The Pinch of Snuff.

From the LP "Masters of Irish Music: Seamus Ennis", Leader Sound Ltd., LEA 2003, 1969.
Recorded and Produced by Bill Leader.

From the liner notes:

The first record in the series Masters of Irish music is of master piper, tale teller, singer and collector, Seamus Ennis, introduced here by his mother.

My O! How I yearn at times to have pipes playing around me again! We lived in the townland Jamestown, where I bore and reared my family, in the district of Fingal (the northern half of County Dublin). It was a place of large farms and widely-spaced homes. My husband cycled to his civil service office in Dublin city each morning. We had no other transport but the pony-and-trap for Mass on Sundays. week-end shopping and outings.

In the long winter nights Séamus’s father spent his leisure hours playing the pipes. He had yet to reach perfection in his piping skill to emulate the old pipers whom he heard and studied when they came to the annual Oireachtas, a music festival, financed by members and supporters of the old Pipers’ Club. Some of the best of these came and stayed in our house during their visits to Dublin. Their rich mellow drones blended trill and chirrup chanter-finger like congested groves of blackbird, thrush and honey-bee and was everywhere—from room by day and kitchen by night, aye, and from open door and windows in the sun, when passers-by bestrode our high roadside wall betimes, enraptured. Retiring men and boys were often soaked beneath the spent shelter of our driveway trees wet nights with starved ears drinking. so I’m told. Later some made timid-bold to heed my back and take a chair. Our billy-goat was always nigh, second in devotion only to my infant boy—today this fleasgach [lanky] wizard of the old music of his departed father’s bag. Of late they write and speak of him as the Ard-Ri or high king of Irish pipers Maybe he is. He grew a bit taller than any of our folks, on both sides.

To this he was suckled and weaned and saw and wailed; then watched and was drawn in fascination. He remembers playing make-believe pipes while he hummed with sticks he saw being cut and barked for him in his great-grand-father’s garden at Naul on the county’s northern bounds, in holiday-time. He remembers getting child’s size bag, bellows and chanter (the beginner’s set) from Santa Claus, but played no note until he had churned 13¼ years’ music, so rich that it must out. One wet August Sunday afternoon (he tells me), on a spare set of pipes, he found some ‘outs’— some notes encouragingly musical. His father’s ‘Wait until he asks me how’, when I confided faulty flaws, was a piece of wisdom I remember and which rewarded. Séamus asked later and got several hours grinding on music manuscript paper and was told to take it from there. Practical tuition soon followed, in advancing stages. When he was sixteen he played on radio in Children’s Hour. His father never allowed him to enter for a competition and seldom let him play outside home. Now I had them both, constant.

The old people had it that it takes seven years learning, seven years practicing and seven years pIaying to make a piper. His father believed and learned the hard way that this is very near the truth and Séamus tells me he believes it too. He adds that were the old man spared to us he would still be learning from him. I fear I cannot judge this for the years dull details, but the instant I hear pipes on radio I know it is he when it is.

As the years pass he has played from Venice to Los Angeles his father’s piping on his father’s pipes which many claim to be the best set in existence. (I’m told they are about 165 years of age. a little over twice my own). I don’t know rightly where he hasn’t played in all, but then Adriatic to Pacific is something never crossed my young mind when the cradled infant defied sleep to listen wide-eared and fey-eyed the wrap of Daddy’s velvet music.

Mary Josephine Ennis.
September 1969.

свернуть