Celtic Mouth Music

Celtic Mouth Music
As firmly rooted in Celtic consciousness as the blues are in America's South, mouth music is vocal music made for dancing when there aren't instruments or trained musicians around. Imitating fiddles, accordions, bagpipes and Jew's harps, mouth musicians developed fantastic vocal effects, creating a rhythmic, tuneful music unlike any other. For generations, mouth music made it possible for Irishmen, Scotsmen, French Canadians, Acadians and people in Appalachia to have "a bit of a birl" when good times couldn't otherwise be found.

Known by colorful names like "diddling" and "lilting," celebrated for its bawdy or nonsensical but always playful lyrics, mouth music has found its way into ambient and pop music by groups like The Cranberries. But such efforts only hint at the sounds mouth musicians are capable of. In addition to 37 tracks of this wild and beautiful music, Celtic Mouth Music contains many stories about the phenomenon and its practitioners, both legendary and real. It even holds a lesson on how to make your own mouth tunes.

With contemporary and archival tracks from Ireland, Scotland, the U.S., Canada and France, Celtic Mouth Music will expose you to a traditional marvel that's been overlooked for too long.
-for all its names both beautiful and strange, mouth
music's a very basic phenomenon. Built on favorite old
melodies and rhythms, on the quips that slip out of folks when they're frisky or drunk, mouth music is for making music especially for dancing when there aren't instruments around. Though found in various forms throughout the world, mouth music is highly developed among the Gaels. The mesmerizing rhythms of mouth tunes made them a kind of Celtic street-corner soul music centuries ago, a tradition that has gained too little attention. Known as diddling, lilting, jigging and port-a-beul ("porsht-uh-bee- ul") in Great Britain and Ireland, mouth music became part of the musical baggage of Scots and Irish emigrants-driven abroad by poverty or persecution, and forced to travel light. It accompanied them to Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, where it was absorbed by Acadian and French-Canadian culture, and down into the southern Appalachians.



"Mouth music" is likely a translation of the Scots Gaelic port a beul ("tunes from the mouth"), the genre's richest form. But whether from the mouths of practiced singers or tinkers, whether sung in English, Gaelic, the Doric of northeast Scotland or meaningless syllables, mouth tunes share cer- tain irreducible traits: sexual frankness, delight in the absurd and-above all- the word-wizardry that propels their compound rhythms.

Though not all mouth music originates in dance (listen to Talitha MacKenzie's rendition of "The Cave of Gold," track 21 on the enclosed CD), it always swings. Sung with the sparse addition of bones, bells or jew's harps, if accompanied at all (in unison, traditionally, not harmony) mouth music continues to offer ground for experiment, and a reminder-in a time of increasingly sophisticated music production-of the power of the human voice.

The most colorful story of Scottish mouth music's origin suggests it
was born when the bagpipes were banned after the second Jacobite rising against the British crown in 1745. Nonsense lyrics were fitted to precious pipe tunes, helping players recall the intricate quavers that gave the originals "lift." The method ensured the classical body of bagpipe music was not lost. Mouth music, howev- er, soon developed a life of its own, with practitioners contriving new tunes for dances, enlivening gatherings where instruments weren't to be found.
Like lots of good stories, this one smooths history's rough edges, and contains various contradictions.

 The bagpipes weren't ever banned, for one thing, though a man was hanged for possessing a set in York in the 1740s (disincentive enough!). A more complex memory system called canntaireachd, which bagpipers use to teach each other tunes, had long existed-and lilting a tune to teach the melody is a universal practice. Song and dance are also, of course, intimately connected; in some form, mouth music is undoubtedly ancient (the gigue form, on which much mouth music's propounded, has existed for over four hundred years). And mouth music, finally, has various precedents-Scots musical culture carries a wealth of imitative song forms, as Annie Johnston's exquisite bird songs on this album (track 25) demonstrate. Singing to accompany the rhythm of work activities, including rowing, reaping, spinning, milking and "waulking," or shrinking wool, is also a highly developed feature of Scottish culture.

Scottish mouth music's greatest period of growth came during late nineteenth century religious revivals, when Calvinist ministers forbade indigenous music. Church hostility to traditional pleasures-which sometimes saw violins, pipes and harps thrown onto bonfires-continued to this century.
Though the Catholic Church was also sometimes hostile to traditional music, Ireland's long periods of poverty are more central to mouth music's development there. In thousands of isolated villages well into the 1950s, lilting offered an opportunity to dance when the day's labors were done, and instruments or musicians with sufficient skill and repertoire to keep the company dancing-were scarce.

The great singer Margaret Barry said Ireland's County Wexford was once "great country for diddling, or 'doodlin,' as they called it there." Paddy Tunney says "scrapy ould fiddlers were helped along" during Donegal dances by lilting from the crowd. Singer and flute player Micho Russel of Clare says young women were "picked out specially" to lilt at weddings, often in groups of three- a pretty sight, one imagines, and a joyful noise.
"Everyone could lilt in them days," says 84-year-old fiddler and singer Tommy Gunn of his youth in Derrylin, County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland.

In Derrylin there were these two fellows, the Gilroys. Tommy lilted, and Johnny was the best dancer you ever saw. They'd come out on the floor in the Owens' parlor Tom, John and Mary, John's dancing partner, and Tommy would kinda get down on one knee. Then he'd start to lilt.

He'd start off nice and steady-Doodle aiddle doodle aiddle doodle aiddle did- dle dee dum... and John and Mary would commence to dance a reel. John wore hob-nail boots, y'see, and Mary had a pair of clogs with steel strips 'round the bot- tom. Between the lilting and dancing it made a great sound.

Two of the Owenses were flute players; two were fiddlers-they hosted the country dances. None of them married anyone in his life. The only interest those people had was music-they'd play all night in order to get a tune right, and sometimes they woke the whole village fighting about how to play a reel.
I was only a young lad, fourteen or fifteen. One day a neighbor was making hay and went over to the Owens' for a rake-this is a gospel story I'm telling you. John Owens-he was one of the fiddle-playing Owenses-was digging a hole in the floor; he had dug up all the flagstones in the parlor! This fellow the neighbor looks down at John. "I'll tell you one thing, John," he says, "when you die they won't have to carry you far to bury you."

"Would you like to know what I'm doin'?" John asks. "Do you see that great earthenware pot outside? I'm gonna bury it here and put the flagstones over it. And when John and Mary dance, the rhythm'll be like a kettle drum 'neath their feet!"
Sure enough, it made an incredible sound. I used to lie in bed and listen to the music and dancing coming from the Owens' house. You could hear it all over the village, way out in the country...
TOMMY GUNN
​
Lilting's part of a larger tradition, called the séan nos, or "old style" in Ireland, which emphasizes subtle ornamentation and embellishment in song. Fine séan nos singers like the late Joe Heaney from Carna in western Ireland could hold listeners spell- bound with song and story for hours on end. In his turn, Heaney remembered lilters who had just one tune to their names, but who lilted that tune so well they kept villages dancing all night!
With economic development, lilting declined. Mouth music's seldom used for dancing now, and is sometimes viewed as an anachronism, even a sport, used by singers to show off their voices at Scotland's Gaelic Mòd or the All-Ireland Championships. Great lilters are now scarce, according to long- time watchers of the traditional scene. "When you hear a great old-style lilter," says Harry Bradshaw, senior producer at RTE Radio One in Ireland-"you know it."
A GLASS OF RUM PUNCH
There once was a man had three daughters. Their mother, God bless her, was dead. The father was the apple of his daughters' eye, they the apple of his.
One night the father came home sorta lame lookin'. He didn't feel good, and he went up to bed.
The daughters put their heads together. "What can we do to make daddy happy? We have to do something," they said. They decided to make him a glass of strong punch.
They got a big glass and filled it up with rum, adding cloves and hot water. They put sugar in it, and took it up to his bedroom and gave it to him.
The following morning their father was jumping on the landing! The oldest daughter came up and asked, "Did the rum do?"
"Did the rum do?" he laughed.
The second girl came up and asked, "Did the rum do, Da?" "Did the rum do, indeed!" he laughed again.
The youngest came in and asked, "Did the rum do, daddy?"
Their father looked at them. He started to tap his foot and began to sing, "Didderumdo, o didderumdo, o didderumdo dad-dy? Didderumdo, o didderumdo, o didderumdo, me daughters..."
STORY OFTEN RECITED BY JOE HEANEY (courtesy Ethnographic Archive, University of Washington)

They have a great genius for music.... Several of both sexes have a quick vein of poesy, and in their language (which is very emphatic) they compose rhyme and verse, both of which powerfully affect the fancy.
MARTIN MARTIN
A DESCRIPTION OF THE WESTERN ISLES OF SCOTLAND (CA. 1695)
Puirt-a-beul singing is perhaps the most exquisite of mouth musics, a practice requiring rhythmic precision and Gaelic fluency. But despite the demands that such tunes make on singers, experts like Kenna Campbell insist puirt-a-beul aren't songs at all, but instrumental tunes whose lyrics power their rhythms.
"A Nova Scotian friend once proved this for me," says Campbell, "by chant- ing the words of some puirt-a-beul tunes without the music. My feet began to itch immediately-I couldn't help moving! The words are fitted so neatly for their rhythm, they perfectly match the steps of the dance. You really don't need the melody at all, we realized, the rhythm is held so securely by the words."
Great puirt-a-beul singing often travels in families. The Campbells hail from a long line of pipers from Greepe, on the Isle of Skye. "Most of the puirt we sing are also played on the pipes," says Campbell, whose two brothers, two sisters and two daughters are adept puirt singers like her father's family, from whom they learned the skill. "Our singing's strongly informed by the pipe's
sound."

As with other Celtic music, stringing together two or three puirt-a-beul in a satisfying set is an art in itself. "Ideally, you go for a related key in moving from one to the next," says Campbell. "But sometimes the tessitura-the combined range of pitch-is too wide. Then you must hunt for something else that works."
Occasionally, puirt-a-beul contain vocables (the "hollow" or nonsense syllales one finds in thousands of songs, which form the meat of lowlands Scots did- ling and Irish lilts). Generally, however, they have lyrics, as in this song of Ewen's oracle, or boat, part of a class of puirt-a-beul probably devised for children:
O look at Ewen's coracle With twenty-five white oars! Look at Ewen's coracle Passing the White Point.

Ewen, Ewen
Ewen will be skipper of her Ewen, Ewen
Passing the White Point.
"It would be fascinating to know the circumstances in which these tunes rose, for the words are very clever," says Morag Macleod, a lecturer in Gaelic ong at Edinburgh's School of Scottish Studies. "For the most part we don't now their origins or who made them." This translation of one, addressed to a re that's slow to start, offers a hint of their whimsical qualities:


"Quite a lot of them had bawdy texts," says Macleod. "When field historians first set out to collect them, people simply wouldn't sing them."
The meaning of many puirt-a-beul tunes is obscure. Some may have constituted a kind of insider speech. The lyric to one popular puirt-a-beul-"The ewe with the crooked horn has a full udder"-meant "the whiskey still is full," according to Macleod.
Great puirt-a-beul singing wants intensive practice. "Finding breathing spots is also an art," says Campbell, "something that must be worked out in advance." Often, such openings come nowhere near the end of a line, but in oxygen-afford- ing hollows in the body of the tune. 
You have to assume the music will be danced to, and sing with the absolute precision of instrumental music. You can't just break off and have a breath and a pie and a pint at the end of the phrase-if you do, someone's left with a leg up in
the air!

KENNA CAMPBELL
Once, while I was traveling through the Irish Gaeltacht-way back in the early '60s when the women were still wearing their shawls and the old men their bainín (the white homespun trousers made by local weavers), I stopped in a pub in a little coastal town called Spiddal. When the people learned I was a singer, they asked me to come home with them and give them some tunes.
We drove to a lonely farm out in the hills. We went inside, and there was an old woman seated by the fire. She had a rag in one hand and a snuffbox in the other.
They asked would I sing, and I replied that the custom, as I understood it, was a song from the host first, then singing till dawn from the guest. The old woman nodded; she appreciated my awareness. But she wouldn't begin unless the flute player held her hand-an old custom-to draw energy from him.

The first song that I sang was "Molly Bawn." Almost immediately the people began to shout, "My love on your voice!" and "Get it out well!" in Gaelic. When the Irish encourage you, you really get a boost. I took off!
I started to sing some mouth music, and they got excited. Stop, they said, stop! They hadn't heard that sort of music in thirty years. I waited while they laced up their heavy-studded boots, pulling their caps tight 'round their heads, then they made me start again. I sang for hours. Every time I stopped they cried "Aris!" ("Again!") They were step-dancing like fury-in the old style, their whole bodies moving on the flagstone floor. I tell you, the sparks really flew.
NORMAN KENNEDY