Interviews

*Click here for interview w/ Mike & Paul Wells

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Mike Rafferty, East Galway Music Master

CEOL

*By Earle Hitchner

Kevin Crawford, the highly accomplished flute player in the Irish band Lúnasa, has nothing but enthusiasm and awe for fellow flute player Mike Rafferty's music. "Mike and I used to play some tunes together in the Hill Bar in Kylebrack," he said. "I just love his playing. It's so soulful, so beautiful. It's the reason why I poached not one but two tunes from 'The Old Fireside Music,' a brilliant record he did with his daughter." The Hill Bar is not far from the village of Larraga in the parish of Ballinakill, East Galway, where Mike Rafferty was born on September 27, 1926. Irish traditional music was played at the Hill Bar on Tuesday and Saturday nights, and the two tunes Crawford "poached" for his own 2001 solo album, "In Good Company," were "The Hard Road to Travel" and "Feeding the Birds," the latter composed by Mike. "The Old Fireside Music" (Larraga Records, 1998) is one of three albums made by the father-daughter duo of Mike Rafferty and former Cherish the Ladies member Mary Rafferty. The others are "The Dangerous Reel" (Rapparee, 1995; Kells Music, 1996) and "The Road From Ballinakill" (Larraga Records, 2001). All three capture the unrushed expressiveness and heart of the East Galway style of playing. "Fast music is like fast talk: you can't understand what the person is saying," Mike Rafferty remarked in the photo-lined basement of the home he shares with wife Teresa in Hasbrouck Heights, N.J. "I like to play Irish traditional music at a nice, easy tempo. No speed. That's how I learned it, and that's how I teach it."

GROWING UP IN BALLINAKILL
Mike Rafferty is one of seven children born to Thomas and Kathleen Rafferty on a small farm in Ballinakill. Their thatched cottage had noelectricity, gas, or running water, and cooking was done in heavy pots in an open hearth. "I worked with pick, shovel, plow, and horses on the farm," Mike said. "There was very little machinery back then. Tractors came later. It was hard work, but you got used to it. I also cut turf for our family and for other families. The money wasn't great, but it kept you alive." Mike's father, Thomas (born in 1875), was a highly skilled flutist and a proficient uilleann piper. His nickname was "Barrel," and "Barrels" eventually became the nickname of the entire family. "My father could get a great tone out of the wooden flute, and it was said he could fill a barrel with wind, so he was called 'Barrel,'" Mike explained. "Then we were called the 'Barrels,' which helped the postman differentiate our family from the other five Rafferty families in our village." Music was played on both sides of Mike Rafferty's family. Apart from their father, Mike's brother Paddy lilted and played some tin whistle, and his brother Tommy played flute and tin whistle. Packie Moloney, a brother of Mike's mother, was also a fine flute and whistle player, and he'd often visit the Rafferty home. "He started me off on the tin whistle when I was six or seven years old," Mike said. "Then I graduated to the flute and pipes." Mike Rafferty today plays whistle, flute, uilleann pipes, and Jew's harp, and he also lilts (mouth music, where syllables form not words but rhythm). His father, who had gone blind from cataracts when Mike was very young, gave him many pointers on those instruments. "Father Tom Larkin, a priest in our parish, used to visit my father a lot, and he once asked my dad which of the children was he going to make a flute player of," Mike said. "My father said, 'I think the lad on my knee.' That was me, and it happened." The first flute Mike Rafferty played was not a full one. "Good wooden flutes were hard to come by in those days, so I got the loan of a three-quarter one, which my dad showed me how to blow into," Mike said. "Then I finally got another, full flute, and I played that with my father, who used the smaller one." The uilleann pipes Mike Rafferty inherited from his father were made by Leo Rowsome (1903-1970). Mike's father was a lefthanded player, so Mike, who's righthanded, had to play them upside-down. "I started out on them when I was about 15," Mike said. "They're not a full set, and I eventually had them converted for a righthander. I also had to have them redone, and they're in good shape now." To demonstrate, Mike took me into an adjacent room in his basement, pulled out his father's 85-year-old pipes, and played them with pitch-perfect precision. East Galway has long been a hotbed of Irish traditional music and has produced many extraordinary performers, including the renowned Ballinakill Traditional Dance Players, a céilí band founded in 1928 by the same parish priest who visited the father of Mike Rafferty, Fr. Tom Larkin. The initial lineup comprised Stephen Moloney and Tommy Whelan on flutes, Jerry Moloney and Tommy Whyte on fiddles, and Anna Rafferty on piano. Mike Rafferty's father actually declined Fr. Larkin's invitation to join them, citing his blindness. The Ballinakill Traditional Dance Players' recordings and appearances at dance halls were considered events from the late 1920s to the 1940s. "Father Tom described himself as a struggling fiddle player, which meant he could scratch out some tunes," Mike said, "but he always encouraged me to play. For a short time, I played in the No. 2 Ballinakill band. I didn't have the seniority to play in the No. 1 band." For about two years, Mike Rafferty also played with the Killimor Céilí Band in a nearby parish. "We had two fiddle players, two accordion players, and myself and Gerry Whelan [Tommy Whelan's son] on flutes," he said. "You worked during the week at farming or whatever, and played in the dance halls mostly on weekends." As an adult, Mike Rafferty worked for the Land Commission. "I dug trenches and drains with a pick and shovel in lowland, where water tended to collect or flood," he said. "I did that until I came out to America."

IMMIGRATING TO THE U.S.
In 1949, Mike Rafferty left East Galway for New York, where he first found work as a gardener, planting flowers and cutting hay with a scythe on a large estate in Purchase, Westchester County. After a year and a half of that, he took a better-paying job with a Grand Union supermarket in Carlstadt, N.J. He moved from renting in Carlstadt to buying a home in East Rutherford, and in 1969 Mike and his wife Teresa, whom he married in 1953, purchased the home in Hasbrouck Heights. The first 10 years of Mike Rafferty's residence in the United States were almost musically silent for him. "I didn't play at all, except maybe an old tin whistle once in a blue moon at a pub in East Rutherford," he said. "I had forgotten all the tunes I used to know. Traditional Irish music was kind of overlooked back then, so I didn't play." In 1959, Joe Madden, a button accordionist from Portumna, Galway, and the father of Cherish the Ladies leader Joanie Madden, immigrated to New York. He, Sligo flutist Mike Preston, and fellow Galway musicians Jack Coen on flute and the late Seán McGlynn on button accordion coaxed Mike Rafferty back into playing. "When I wasn't playing, Seán McGlynn said I should be ashamed of myself, considering where I came from," Mikeacknowledged. "And when I decided to get back into it, I had to learn to play all over again and relearn the tunes." Mike Preston suggested he take up the silver flute and showed him "a few little tricks on it." Mike Rafferty also taped music played in various sessions so that he could learn the tunes afterward at home, and 78-rpm recordings of the great Tipperary button accordionist Paddy O'Brien (1922-1991) and a Tulla Céilí Band LP provided further impetus to his re-entry into playing. "I wore out the 'The Spike Island Lassies' and 'Dowd's Favorite,'" Mike said, referring to a pair of reels O'Brien had recorded solo in 1954. "I was glued to those records." Even as he diligently climbed his way back into playing, Mike Rafferty was cautious about where and with whom he played. "You usually didn't play traditional music for people if you thought they didn't understand or want it," he said. "When I first arrived in New York, there was little or no Irish traditional music being played in the pubs. Mostly it was jukeboxes. I remember Jack Coen and I playing two Clarke C whistles in an Irish pub in the Bronx, and there was a bunch of people around us, listening. But the jukebox wasn't getting any money, so the pub owner told us to either leave or stop playing. We stopped--and left." The popularity and acceptance of Irish traditional music today in America came not overnight but through the perseverance of performers like Mike Rafferty and his peers. Mick Moloney, who immigrated to America in 1973, understood this, which is why he conducted several field recordings of veteran Irish musicians in the 1970s and released them on such labels as Rounder and Topic. One of those albums, "Irish Traditional Instrumental Music From the East Coast of America" (Rounder, 1977; reissued on CD in 2001), featured Mike Preston, Seán McGlynn, Jack and Charlie Coen, Mike Flynn, Gene Kelly, Eddie Cahill, Paddy Cronin, John Vesey, Gus Collins, and Mike Rafferty. "Mick Moloney came to my house with a machine and recorded me upstairs," Mike said. "I must have played that tune 10 times before I got it right." The tune was fitting: "Barrel Rafferty's Reel," learned from and named for Mike's father. In 1983, "Light Through the Leaves" (reissued on CD in 2001), an album spotlighting wind instruments (pipes, flute, whistle), came out on Rounder. It was drawn from field recordings conducted by Mick Moloney in musicians' homes during 1976-1978. On this album, Mike Rafferty played silver flute on the reels "Gerry Commane's/Paddy Taylor's."

BICENTENNIAL BREAKTHROUGH
To celebrate America's Bicentennial, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., asked Mick Moloney to assemble some Irish musicians for a program of live performances in 1976 as part of the Festival of American Folklife. Mike Rafferty was among the musicians invited to play
during that week in the nation's capital. "That was the moment of my real comeback," Mike said. "It was the biggest thing that ever happened to me musically and really brought me out into the limelight. I had to play day and night in order to come back into those tunes. We had one stage for ourselves, and we played in a group. I wasn't playing as well then as I would in later years, and I sat in the middle so the other flute players couldn't hear me quite as clearly." Besides Mike Rafferty, the wealth of Irish and Irish American talent presented that week included flutists Mike Preston, Sonny McDonagh, Mike Flynn, Fr. Charlie Coen, Séamus Cooley, and Jack Coen, Clare tin whistle player Micho Russell, fiddler Liz Carroll, and stepdancer Michael Flatley. The momentum and praise from that Bicentennial week of Irishtraditional music helped convince Mick Moloney in 1977 to launch NEA-sponsored national tours by the Green Fields of America, a protean ensemble of Irish musicians living in the United States. Mike Rafferty made his first musical tour of America with the Green Fields troupe of 1979.

LIFE-SAVING FLUTE
At the Irish Folk Festival held in Glen Echo Park, Md., Mike Rafferty stumbled upon a superior wooden flute to play after growing dissatisfied with the flute he had been using. "Patrick Olwell [a hand craftsman of flutes in Virginia] had a booth set up down there, and he had on display a flute in E-flat," Mike said. "Seamus Egan handed it to me and told me to try it. I tried it and, by golly, I held on to it. I asked Patrick to sell it to me, but he said he couldn't because it was a demonstration model. He told me he'd make one for me in six months, and I told him"--here Mike cracks a wide smile--"I could be dead in six months. So I conned him into selling it to me. It's the one I still play today. As far as I'm concerned, it saved my life." Acutely aware of how family and friends supported and encouraged him in America, in a sense saving his life by restoring it to music, Mike Rafferty repays that gesture of faith by instructing pupils each week at his home. He's been teaching music ever since his retirement in 1989 from Grand Union, and currently he gives one-on-one lessons to advanced students. Two of his best students were Brian Holleran, a superb flute player from Long Island who studied with Mike for about seven years, and Mary Rafferty, his daughter. She acquired the basics from the late Martin Mulvihill when he was holding classes in Dumont, West Orange, and North Arlington, N.J., but it was Mary's father who stirred in her a lifelong passion for playing. "One time I told Mary, 'You'll go places,' not realizing that when she joined Cherish the Ladies, she would," Mike said. At first, it troubled
him that she wanted to leave a good day job to perform with Cherish. "As a father, I felt I had to advise against it," Mike admitted. "My own father had an expression, 'Music has its curses,' and I knew how hard it is for anyone to play Irish traditional music full-time. But I wouldn't have stood in the door and not let her go. As it turned out, I was wrong and she was right. She wound up playing with Cherish for seven and a half years." A gifted button accordion, flute, whistle, and concertina player, Mary invited her father to guest on two Cherish the Ladies recordings, "At Home" (RCA Victor/BMG, 1999) and "The Girls Won't Leave the Boys Alone" (Windham Hill/BMG, 2001). There Mike joined such other "Cherish the Daddies" cohorts as Joe Madden, Byron Long, Jim Coogan, and Bobby Clancy. Two other albums featuring Mike Rafferty as a guest are Galway button accordionist Joe Burke's "The Leg of the Duck" in 1992 and daughter Mary Rafferty's excellent solo debut, "Hand-Me-Downs" (Larraga, 2002). In 1985, Mike and Mary Rafferty also recorded two flute-accordion tracks for an album entitled, appropriately enough, "Fathers and Daughters" (Shanachie), which showcased the impressive musicianship of 9 fathers with 11 daughters. Since Mary's departure from Cherish the Ladies, Mike, she, and her
fiancé, singer-guitarist Dónal Clancy, have done a couple of short tours together. "We all packed into the one car and traveled up to New England," Mike said. "It was exciting to be playing with my daughter and my future son-in-law for these little concerts in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts. Not much sleep, but fun just the same." Even alone, Mike Rafferty is thrilled to be playing the music he once had to give up for a decade. "I practice a lot and play every night, just for myself," he said. "I think I'm playing better than ever, and I know I enjoy playing more."
Mike Rafferty's resolve since 1959 is evident in everything he does musically, and no other Irish-born instrumentalist living in America distills the pure drop of traditional playing better than he does. For proof, attend the céilí he plays for from 5-9 p.m. every third Sunday of the month at the VFW Hall, 239 Leonia Ave., Bogota, N.J., under the auspices of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann's Michael Rafferty Branch, founded in 1993 and named for him. Or catch Mike Rafferty in concert with button accordionist Billy McComiskey and keyboardist Felix Dolan at 9 and 10:30 p.m., March 28, at the Blarney Star, 43 Murray St., NYC (212-732-2873).

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