Hi, I'm Rhiannon Giddens.

Welcome to Ireland, my second home.

We're here in Dublin at Whelan's, a legendary music venue that was one of the first places I ever played in this country.

In this season of “My Music” we'll be visiting with some of the wonderful artists who call Ireland home.

Bridge Street is a hub of community activities in Castlebar, County Mayo.

Much more than a bar, since opening its doors in 2017 Bridge Street has become a meeting place for regulars and a performance space for artists.

That's where we met up with Emer Mayock.

That's where we met up with Emer Mayock.

Emer is the very image of what is known as the “pure drop” musician, having been a part of the traditional “feis” culture here in Ireland since she was small, but her deep knowledge of the history and locality of the music that she plays gives her an appreciation for the complexity of folk tradition and how important it is to be aware of that tradition without being confined by it.

♪ reels ♪ Emer... Hello.

-Thank you so much for doing thi Thank you.

This is near where you are from.

-Yes.

You know, because we're in Castlebar at the moment.

Yes.

So this is where I grew up, five miles from here.

This was our local town, and I grew up learning, everything about life here in the countryside— and music also.

And I came back here about 20 years ago having kind of done a little bit of rumbling around the world.

-Okay.

And I lived in Dublin as well, which was a really good base for growing as a musician.

But then I decided to move back to where I came from.

So I live in a little village five miles from here.

Is Dublin kind of like New York, like for America, where it's like everybody goes and spends at least, like, five years, kind of.

-Well, yeah.

Know what I mean?

Is that... Well yeah.

I felt I had to do that.

So when I was 17, that's what I did, you know.

And I pretty much spent the next kind of 15 years there— a few little detours.

But that became my base even when I was touring.

I... yeah, and I immersed in Dublin, and there was a great scene there, and there is for every generation.

I'm sure there's a great scene now, though I think it's probably a little bit more difficult to make your way but when I arrived there, you could, you know, rent a room in a Georgian house and, you know, do some sessions, do some teaching, and get by.

You know?

-Right.

So it is like New York.

-Exactly, yeah.

They're both incredibly expensive now.

-Yes, exactly.

And there was a way of, you know, then meeting your like-minded musicians who wanted to do that exact same thing, to sort of break out of where they were in their creative life and to make that bigger and grow it further.

And I was very lucky that I ended up meeting a lot of traditional musicians, but also, musicians who were playing and coming from other genres.

Also, weirdly, through my family, I, you know, and their interactions in Dublin, I, was in contact with filmmakers, with visual artists, with writers.

So we all formed a little bond together in the north inner city.

We used to call it the North Village, so it's a bit like the East Village.

-I love it, I love it.

So yeah, that was great.

- So have you always— have you always played?

Did you just play as a small child?

Yes.

So I was very lucky.

So in traditional music, there can be the situation where the mum and dad play, or the granny or grandad, or there is a guy across the road who's a seminal artist who everybody knows and goes to for tunes, but we didn't have that.

And the way music was discovered in our family was my mother was the primary school teacher and a music teacher came to her school to teach music.

His name was Martin Donoghue, and he started teaching my older siblings.

And by the time I came along then, that meant there was music in the house.

My parents really fostered it.

Neither of them played music.

I'm sure in another lifetime, had they had the opportunity, they certainly would have been musicians.

And we also listened to a huge amount of music.

So music was a soundtrack in our house, you know, they brought us to festivals and they brought us to all of that.

So they completely created that landscape for us.

And I kind of benefited the most, I think.

Not that my siblings aren't great musicians, but I was the youngest, so I got all the, you know, I was listening to it for longer.

- Right.

And you were listening to, like, people playing it.

-Exactly.

- Right.

-Yeah.

You know, they didn't go on holidays.

We went to the Willie Clancy Summer School, you know, that kind of thing.

-Yeah.

So was pipes your first instrument, or did you start on... No, but I, I saw them very early on and I wanted them.

I played the whistle and a little bit on flute and I discovered the pipes.

And again, I think when I said to my parents I'd love to play the Uilleann pipes, I'd say they'd have to kind of find out what they were, exactly.

-Yeah.

So yeah, they got me a practice set and I started going to lessons locally.

But after that we went to the Willie Clancy Summer School every summer so that I could have that week of pipes immersion.

So I was taught by different people throughout the years.

I think I went there from when I or 9 ‘til I was, you know, 19, w Wow.

The Uilleann pipes so “uilleann” is the Irish word for elbow.

So let's get that out of the way.

And we don't blow into the chanter.

We use the bellows for air.

So our elbow is doing all of that work.

They date back, I mean we, we have we have accounts of the pipes in Ireland in the 1700s and also being played on stages in London in the 1700s, you know, they were the pastoral pipes or the Union pipes at that stage.

And they evolved and became really, really popular in Ireland.

So, to look at the mechanics of them, first of all, I mean, your basic thing is the bellows, the bag, and the chanter.

So the chanter is what we play our lead melody on.

And then after that, what really makes them even more unique are the drones.

So we have our three drones— bass, tenor, baritone—and then we have the regulators.

So beautiful!

So there's chordal accompaniment on as well as the drone accompan So like a lot of traditions, instruments have their heyday and they had their glory day, and then they weren't for one reason or another.

And we have many reasons in the Irish tradition as to why things died out.

But the pipes were at a very low ebb by the time we come into the 20th century.

So when... by the 1960s, there was probably maybe... we're thinking maybe 100 people played the pipes.

Wow.

And probably only 3 to 5 people were even able to make them.

Never mind make them well.

-Gosh.

Okay.

So, the Píobairí Uilleann was established in 1968 and that was a famous meeting of pipers.

established in 1968 and that was a famous meeting of pipers.

And this, like, a lot of people in the picture are still alive who were very young then, and then the older ones who are no longer with us, who put that together and who were really influential.

But in America, the pipes had a great time, you know, but under that very, that very particularly traditional Irish scene like in Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, and a lot of people, in fact, who immigrated to the United States could play music but didn't have pipes.

But got pipes when they got to America, between one thing and another.

So...but there is often, you know, you have to make that distinction between the Uilleann pipes and the bagpipes.

It's a different tradition.

It's a different repertoire.

The technique... one helps the other, but it is quite different kind of thing going on.

And how we ornament tunes.

The piping tradition is an art form in itself; you could easily just go into the room with these the rest of your life and be tot Yes.

And, immerse in everything.

You know, what we look to, I suppose, as pipers, is, you know, the seminal recordings of the people who brought them to where they are now, you know, the makers and and the players and to look to repertoire and look to how we in the 21st century can interpret traditional music on it now and, and it changes: style changes, and approaches change.

But they're just an incredibly beautiful instrument.

♪ jigs ♪ Because I think what's really interesting is that, you know, how global the Uilleann pipes are, but also, like, even the, the overall global piping tradition that existed, you know already— like there's pipes ever Yes.

So it makes sense that, you know, this version is also— you know what I mean?

There's like, there's obviously a hunger for pipes just in general.

Like in America we think, oh, there's only one kind of pipe.

Yeah.

Like, you know, in Iran and in Spain.

- In Spain, absolutely.

And so many kind of— like a lot of traditions, the similarities are there.

You know, and the reasons why they were developed and evolved are there.

And I've played with Iranian pipers, Spanish pipers, you know, Galician pipers.

And it's, yeah, there's a compatibility there.

I have a feeling we have a very similar approach to, you know, our own tradition's music, you know, and how we think about it.

But I, I have a moment in my life that made me go from being a musician to being like... a cultural musician, if you know what I mean.

Like, to really thinking about...not just “Oh, I just learned another tune” but like, what does this tune mean?

Where does it come from?

How does it connect to my history?

Was there a moment for you that kind of, you know, you'd been playing since you were 8 or 9, playing pipes, and you learn the tunes and you go to the workshops and you have your teachers and stuff, but was there a moment that turned you into “What's the history of this?” You know, because not every musician is interested in these kinds of things.

-Yeah.

I think, you know, as I was growing up and listening to players, I knew that there was something in their music that was deeper than just the musicianship.

And I was also sort of guided by certain people who I would hear speaking, and they would speak about traditional music and they would talk about, where this tune came from, and that's... all traditional musicians hear that.

There's no doubt about that.

I guess, again, it had to come from the moving away from where you're from, and then coming back.

And we all know that when collectors came in, be they with, you know, later on, with audio recorders, that they went to certain places, but they didn't go everywhere, you know, and so it's really... I love the investigation of that.

And I suppose when I started working on the Goodman manuscripts, which were collected down in West Kerry and in Munster and the tunes of the Munster Pipers, because James Goodman got a lot of tunes from pipers.

I started, you know, I saw how enriching that was.

I saw how lovely it was to engage with those tunes and that music and figuring out, you know, the variations that occurred; that I'd start by saying, oh, yeah, I know that tune.

We still play that tune in our tradition.

And then there would be a passage in it and I go, oh, no, we don't play that.

And then discovering tunes that we've no idea where they came from or where he got them because they were never heard of after.

-Right.

And then I thought that was the music that was going on there, what was going on in my part of the world, at that time?

So... that and more.

But I'm also very interested in how people can take that in a contemporary world that we live in where there's so much, so much noise, even in music, there's so much noise, and how they can be alone with that and how we can enrich their creativity as contemporary traditional artists.

♪ Well, I think the being able to put two instruments from completely different traditions, but ones that are related, obviously, because so much of traditional music has relations no matter where you are on the planet.

Absolutely.

Because it's either dance music or it's, you know, music of poor people or whatever —it's made out of wood, it's, you know, to the sounds of the, say, my early banjo, you know, 1850s replica and your... the instrument that you have, the wood that, you know, that the woods— wood speaks to wood.

-Absolutely.

When we played in the studio, that day, in Dublin, immediately I felt like, you know, the resonance between the instruments was really, really strong, feeling that they they definitely were talking to each other —independently of us!

And we hadn't even started.

- Right.

They were just like “Hi!” -Yeah, exactly.

I think we could be friends.

So yeah.

And I really feel that, you know.

I think that's one of the nicest things about, you know, stepping out— and then you bring that back to your own, you know, whatever you're doing.

Like now I'm going to bring, you know, playing with you, I bring back to my, to my, my own little cellar, you know, and I think that's why it's so important to reach out and play with each other.

Absolutely.

Thank you.

-Thank you!

♪