Folk Singers: Long Gone Macushla

To some listeners, Irish folk music suggests a vista of the Wee Folk prancing in a Donegal sunrise, described in the sad sweet tones of John McCormack. But Ireland is currently in the middle of a folk-music craze similar to the one that swept the U.S. in 1963, and Macushla’s blue eyes would turn glassy at the sound of it all. The undisputed leaders of the revolution are The Dubliners, five bearded, brawling musical assailants whose style is just about as far removed from the McCormack idiom as Sgt. Pepper is from The Chocolate Soldier.

Looking a little like 21 boxes of Smith Brothers cough drops, these sons of the Dublin working class offer a musical effect somewhat like Saturday night in a pub just before the police arrive. Bass Ronnie Drew, 33, whose voice is like nothing so much as a bullfrog with a hangover, bestraddles the line with occasional forays a mile or so off pitch. Tenor Luke Kelly, 26, gives out what might be the mating call of a rusty file. Banjoist Barney McKenna, 27, Tin Whistler Ciaron Bourke, 32, and Fiddler John Sheahan, 28, round out the onslaught with glorious disregard for niceties such as time or tune.

Stoned. Audiences on both sides of the Irish Sea find The Dubliners’ pandemonium somehow endearing. Their record of Seven Drunken Nights, a woozy chronicle of just what its name implies, has passed the quarter-million sales mark, with Black Velvet Band just behind. Two weeks ago, a sellout crowd of 25,000 at Dublin’s National Stadium matched the group roar for roar, and last week The Dubliners headed an all-Irish bill at London’s hallowed Albert Hall.

In repertory and insolence, The Dubliners resemble superficially the long-arrived Irish-American group, The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, but the Clancys have slipped in Irish esteem because of what some observers feel is an increasing slickness. Whatever the sensitive ear may find wrong with The Dubliners’ current style, it has nothing to do with slickness or lack of authenticity. When the group raises the roof in praise of drinking, for example, the lads are working from personal experience: they are lip-smacking veterans of the informal hooleys and singsongs at Paddy O’Donoghue’s in Merrion Row, the pub celebrated in J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man.

No Laughing Matter. Most of The Dubliners’ arrangements are appropriately home-brewed from traditional materials that the boys have assimilated on their pub crawls. At its frequent best, their hard-edged raucousness restores even the most familiar ballads to the folk sources where they were spawned. A song like the traditional Weila Waile, which the Clancys turn into a laff riot, comes off in The Dubliners’ brawny hands as the grisly epic of infanticide that it actually is. The often sentimentalized Rising of the Moon becomes in the Dubliners’ ver sion a powerful, harrowing hymn of revolutionary heroism.

Following the current English tour, the group returns to home base for dance-hall engagements through Christmas. No American tour has been booked as yet, but that seems only a matter of time. So far, however, The Dubliners have betrayed no hankering after Clancy-sized wealth. “It’s no ambition of mine,” croaks Drew, “to be a part of a pop industry. I don’t want my individuality to be taken away by any success.”