Ennis is a town in co. Clare, just south of Galway, and has a resident population of around 30,000. It can be a busy little very town in high season, easily tripling the population. If you’re there, you’ll want to go down O’Connell Street, the heart of Ennis. It’s a narrow, curved one-way street, lined with about seventy-seven establishments, many being period buildings, and has a distinctive commemorative pillar topped with a statue of Daniel O’Connell at one end — O’Connell was elected MP for Clare in 1828. A drink at John O’Dea’s, is a good way to start your evening. It’s been going about half a century. Dinner at Brogan’s Bar is worthy fare, though the younger crowd will likely opt for a bucket at Supermac’s (now open till 3am!). On the weekends you can usually find traditional music in the Poet’s Corner bar. You can end your night at the Old Ground Hotel, with its Town Hall restaurant, or, if you’re strapped, at the Rowan Tree Hostel.
“A Night in Ennis” is most commonly played in D, and goes by quite a few other titles — what a surprise! Yet, unlike some of these other tunes, what it’s called has some onomastic payoff. That is, the name used gives you a glimpse of its historical trajectory. It tells you from whence the person learned it (or from whence the person who taught it to him/her learned it). Here’s the rub. I first learned this tune as “Sean McGuire’s” from John Doonan’s Flute For The Feis (1972). So, that’s what I called it for a while. On Mick Moloney’s LP We Have Met Together (1973), which features the inimitable fiddler Aly Bain, it was just called “Reel on Mandolin,” but on the 1983 re-release it was entitled “Dicky Sherlock’s.” It’s also called “Sherlock’s” on Danny O’Donnell’s Ón tSean-Am Anall (1977) — which translates as “from the old times.” However, if you go to thesession.org then you’ll need to look up “Jim Kelly’s” to find this tune — where you’ll find still other names for it that I’ve not yet encountered.
Now, there are those, who will call it “The Ash Plant,” and from that you’ll know they got it from either Lúnasa, Henrik Norbeck’s website, or from a Nigel Gatherer publication. “How’s that?” you may ask. Well, it is titled “The Ashplant” on the eponymous Lúnasa CD (1998/2001), though they played it in A, so the key is a tell as well. It is also called “The Ash Plant” on Henrick Norbeck’s ABC Tunes website, which he compiled around 1997, and again in Nigel Gatherer’s Tune of the Week, vol. 2 (2012). However, a note of caution is in order here, as the title “The Ashplant” designates a very different reel in Edor at most of the sessions I’ve been to. Still, it’s always good to notice possible sources of confusion before they occur.
I now call it “A Night in Ennis” or “Night in Ennis” because someone, I don’t remember who, called it by that name at some session some years back and I wanted to avoid confusion. Interestingly, Nigel Gatherer points out on his tunearch.org website that “the ‘Night in Ennis’ title comes from the 1977 album by County Clare fiddler Vincent Griffin, who, “having no name for the reel, named it after Ennis, County Clare.” The Griffin recording is on the recently released monster 3 CD set It Was Mighty!: The Early Days of Irish Music in London (2016), a collection of recordings from 1952 to 2001. Finally, Gatherer also asserts that this tune is “perhaps best known as ‘John Brennan’s Reel,'” which is what it’s called on the Réalta CD entitled “Open the Door for Three” (2012); and after perusing Alan Ng’s website Irishtune.info, just as expected, that looks right. However, as another possible source of confusion, there is a very different tune also in D that I know by this name, and which is listed as “John Brennan’s” on thesession.org. As a result, I’m sticking to “A Night in Ennis” at my usual sessions.
So, in consequence, these titles are a reel tell, if you’re interested in this sort of thing; but it’s a great tune regardless, and names are incidental. Hey, I didn’t say it was a BIG onomastic payoff!
For the ABC click
A Night in Ennis, slow tempo
A Night in Ennis, med tempo
A Night in Ennis, the dots
R100
The Ashplant (Edor)
a teacher with a switch
the way it used to be in school
The term “ash plant” or “ashplant” was once a very common term, and still is in some places. It is a euphemism used by the young and the old. For the young it is a teacher’s stick which would be used to point out important locations on a map, to remind students of something written on the blackboard, or to whack you so hard it would leave a long red welt. So, a phrase like “quit your fidgeting or you’ll get the ashplant!” was once a well-understood admonition. A similar implement, but usually more improvised, has also been used to likewise motivate cows, horses, and sheep. Its use was, I’m sure, as much an endearment to the one group as to the others. By my day the nuns were more civilized, and used a nice heavy ruler, usually focusing on the palm of the hand or the knuckles, but that was in the States, Michigan to be more precise.
Now, for those long out of school the term “ashplant” will refer to something just a bit more hefty than a switch, a walking stick. Ash was the preferred wood because just a few inches below the surface the main root often takes a near right-angle bend for several inches, which then becomes a natural handle when the stick is inverted. So, making one began with simply digging around an Ashplant sapling and cutting it off below the surface of the soil. The rest was just a matter of aesthetics. Seamus Heaney wrote a poem entitled “The Ash Plant” for his father, Patrick Heaney (d. 1982), which has as its penultimate stanza
ashplant walking stick
“As his head goes light with light, his wasting hand
Gropes desperately and finds the phantom limb
Of an ash plant in his grasp, which steadies him.
Now he has found his touch he can stand his ground”
In Ulysses, James Joyce writes of the Aquaphobic and Cynophobic Stephen Dedalus, “. . . taking his ashplant from its leaning place, [he] followed them out and, as they went down the ladder, pulled to the slow iron door and locked it.” And then toward the end of that tome, just after the play, we find this: “Preparatory to anything else Mr. Bloom brushed off the greater bulk of the shavings and handed Stephen the hat and ashplant and bucked him up generally in orthodox Samaritan fashion which he very badly needed.” More recently, in an epic epilogue to Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, we find this: “Grimly, I leaned on my ashplant and said it wasn’t easy; LeVol replied that nothing worthwhile ever was.” (The Heat of the Sun, by David Rain, 2012).
Of course, the names of tunes are not the tunes, and with few exceptions have almost nothing at all to do with the melody. The names are simply tags, at best mere mnemonics. Yet, as mnemonics they only unlock the appropriate part of a memory palace when there’s a practiced path between tune and title. Alternatively, well-worn associates may help. So, one name might have a very functional association for one group of people, but little to none for another. When the key no longer works, the simplest thing is to find something that does. That is just one reason why new names become attached to old tunes, and it is a perfectly legitimate reason. So, don’t be shy if you need to call it something else.
Dervish, Playing with Fire (1996)
Anyway, this reel “The Ashplant” is called “An Maide Fuinnseoige” in Irish and is usually played in Edor, unless you come across someone who learned it either from the old Dervish cassette Playing with Fire (1996) or from Altan’s CD Blue Idol (2002), where it’s played in F#dor.
Importantly, there is another tune, a very different reel most often played in D, that is sometimes done under the title “The Ashplant” or “The Ash Plant.” At least that is what it is titled on the eponymous Lúnasa CD (1998/2001), though there played in A, and also in Nigel Gatherer’s Tune of the Week, vol. 2 (2012). Though I first learned that one as “Sean McGuire’s,” from John Doonan’s Flute For The Feis (1972), it is much better known as either “A Night In Ennis” or “Jim Kelly’s.”
For the ABC click Ashplant
The Ash Plant, slow tempo
The Ash Plant, med tempo
The Ash Plant, the dots
Ashplant, Reel in Edor