SHE WAS called the “Queen of Irish Song” by Séamus Ennis; she was recorded by Alan Lomax and is admired by Christy Moore; and her versions of Gaelic song have been covered by Clannad and Iarla Ó Lionáird.
She was Elizabeth ‘Bess’ Cronin (1879 - 1956 ) and her songs, her voice, her culture, her times, and her legacy are captured in The Songs of Elizabeth Cronin - Irish Traditional Singer, written by her grandson, Dáibhí Ó Cróinín, professor emeritus at the History Department of NUI Galway.
Published by Four Courts Press, it is accompanied by two CDs - 59 tracks in all - of Bess Cronin singing, a fitting celebration of a pivotal figure in Irish traditional music and song.
The book and CDs are a revised, updated, and expanded edition of that which came out in 2000, but which sold out almost as soon as it hit the shelves.
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“There were two print runs of 1,000 each and they were all gone within six months,” recalls Prof Ó Cróinín, during our Monday afternoon conversation. “But I was still getting requests from people from all over the world asking how they could get a copy. I have a phobia about revising things I’ve done. Once it’s done, it’s done, and I move on. People were asking if I could put Bess Cronin’s songs on Spotify or Facebook, that was one option, but if you want to know about the background to those songs, online isn’t really suitable, so I decided to do the book again.”
Prof Ó Cróinín is one of our most distinguished historians, specialising in Medieval Ireland, and is a noted expert on Hiberno-Latin manuscripts. However, researching the life of Bess Cronin was a very different endeavor, one that took him in surprising directions, and where chance encounters produced significant results.
‘A repository of lore’
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Bess Cronin [pictured above] grew up in Baile Bhuirne, in the West Cork Gaeltacht, into a family, and community steeped in the Irish language and our native traditions, singing songs handed down through the generations, songs that dealt with everything from daily life and love, to the Napoleonic wars.
Apart from her singing, she was also noted for the quality of her Irish. Her deep knowledge of often rare and colloquial words made her as sought after by linguists and folklorists, as she was by musicologists.
It was this latter aspect of Bess Cronin that Prof Ó Cróinín was initially familiar with: “My father, when he was home for the summer holidays, would note down the things she said. Bess had a rich vein of Irish, she was a repository of lore, her Irish was exceptional. She knew words you wouldn’t find in the standard dictionary.
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“Also, we had a copy of Dineen’s Dictionary [described by Alf MacLochlainn, former director of the National Library of Ireland, as “a thesaurus of the words, phrases and idioms…of pre-industrial manners, customs, lore, skills, and crafts] which my uncle, Seán Ua Cróinín, who worked for the Irish Folklore Commission, had filled with annotations of extra words he knew from Bess Cronin.”
It was only after Prof Ó Cróinín’s father, Donncha, died, that he felt the responsibility to preserve Bess Cronin’s legacy. “My father was professor of Irish at Our Lady of Mercy Training College, Carysfort, so he always had an interest in Bess Cronin, and wanted to do something on her,” he says. “After he died, I took that up, and I had access to all the family notes and information. It took me the best part of 10 years.”
A chance encounter
The origins of the latest edition of The Songs of Elizabeth Cronin began at a launch for the original edition of the book when Prof Ó Cróinín was approached by a man with a brown envelope.
“It was an old lined school copybook written by Bess Cronin, in her own longhand, of a number of the songs she used to sing,” says Prof Ó Cróinín. “She had put together this collection for her neighbour, John Connell, a very good singer. There were extra songs there I didn’t have before.”
That copybook resulted in the addition of six songs to the newly-published edition. The track listing for the two CDs was made by Nicholas Carolan, the founding director of Irish Traditional Music Archive, with restoration and remastering by Harry Bradshaw.
“It’s nothing short of miraculous what Harry has been able to do,” says Prof Ó Cróinín. “The recordings were made in the 1940s and 1950s, often on very poor equipment, and were often filled with snap, crackle, and pop, and it was difficult to hear the words. Not any more!”
The American connection
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However, the most striking discovery in the entire evolution of the book came during a visit to a cousin in the 1990s. It was a visit that would lead Prof Ó Cróinín to the recordings made of Bess Cronin by the influential American folk singer, Jean Ritchie [covered by Led Zeppelin, among others].
“Jean Ritchie came to Ireland on a Fulbright Scholarship to record Irish and British folk songs - the source of the American tradition, and she was directed by Séamus Ennis to Bess Cronin,” says Prof Ó Cróinín. “She came with her husband, the photographer, George Pickow. That was 1952, a year after Alan Lomax had come to record Bess.
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Jean Ritchie. Photo:- George Pickow
“I was visiting my cousin, and when I told her I was researching Bess, she gave me a brown envelope - another one! - full of tiny one inch photos of Bess. I had never seen any of them before, and I was told they were taken when Ritchie and Pickow were over, so I wrote to Jean Ritchie, and got sent this huge box of contact prints, a kind of pre-digital equivalent of thumbnails today - of Bess and Jean.
“Jean and George also sent me some of the recordings they’d made, and I was blown away by the quality, as they were recorded on much better equipment than anything available here at the time. They sounded so good they could have been made yesterday, and there were songs here not in any other repositories. They were mostly collecting songs in English, but they were enlightened enough to ask her to sing in Irish. That was the big revelation.”
‘Tranquil power’
Given the wealth of songs she had at her fingertips, and her command of the Irish language, it is little wonder Bess Cronin holds such a high position in Irish folk and trad, but Prof Ó Cróinín also cites the quality of her voice and singing style as vital.
“I remember Bill Meek in The Irish Times, describing, ‘the tranquil power of her singing’,” he says. “It seems effortless, there is a gentle and subtle power to her voice, and she was part of a living tradition. When musicologists and collectors came to Ireland they would ask Séamus Ennis where to go, and the first person he would always direct them to, was Bess Cronin.”
The Songs of Elizabeth Cronin is available in paperback and Includes two CDs. It costs €29.95. See www.fourcourtspress.ie
