I was pleasantly surprised by the announcement. The bus will depart at 10:30. My watch said it was 9:00. I had a whole 90 minutes! What a luxury, considering the usual stop was too short to disembark and the longer ones allowed only 20 minutes or maybe 30. But this time I could take a walk away from the bus terminal and really stretch my legs and see a little bit of Toledo, Ohio.
I was on a cross-continental bus trip from Portland to New York so I could get a cheaper flight to Ireland from the east coast. Our last stop had been Chicago and I was busy with some of the tapes I'd recorded in Irish pubs and sitting rooms the summer before, indexing and transcribing. I left them on my seat to resume work when we started eastward again.
Dumbfounded and shocked are too weak to describe the sudden devastating and hollowed out feeling that hit me when I heard that the bus had left 40 minutes before. And I had arrived back at the terminal with 20 minutes to spare. What had gone wrong? My watch! It was still on Central time. The bus was gone, along with my suitcase, backpack, and the tapes I'd been working on. Fortunately, I had my music notebook with me and was able to recover the suitcase and backpack in New York. But the tapes were gone forever.
Almost three decades later I wanted to learn one of the songs I'd transcribed that day. I had the words. All I needed to do was to find the tune. Ought to be easy enough—just go online. I only had to search for the title of the song, “Smiling Aghadoe.” But nothing came up. Maybe it would be lurking, hidden deep in Mudcat.org. Not there either. It would surely be in the Irish Traditional Music Archive. The next time I was in Dublin, I dropped into their offices and with the help of one of their archivists, searched in as many different ways possible for several hours and found . . . nothing. “Smiling Aghadoe” had apparently never been published, never been recorded, never even been collected.
What was I to do? Certainly someone would remember it. I went back to west Cork where I'd first heard the song and asked a well-known local singer, Eoiní Ó Súilleabhain. Sure, he remembered having heard the song years ago but couldn't remember the tune. But he referred me to Jimmy O'Brien over the hills in County Kerry. Jimmy would either know the song or who sang it.
Jimmy was a well-known publican in the town of Killarney, just an ass's bray from Aghadoe, itself, the hill just to the north of the Lakes of Killarney. I must agree that on a sunny day, Aghadoe surely smiles as it looks down on the beautiful lakes at the foot of the tallest hills in all of Ireland. A grand scene, entirely. And, oh yes, Jimmy knew of the song. And he also knew that the only person who had sung that song in the area had died about 20 years before. “No one sings it now.” And, no, he couldn't remember the melody.
Was I stuck again? Well, I continued networking, looking for any old singers in the area. I went to the library to ask if any old traditional singers perform there. No, they don't have a meeting or performance room, but they do have a reference librarian who rises to a challenge. Eamon Browne asked me to give him 15 or 20 minutes to see what he could find. He returned with a book of local history which enumerated the main families in each of the area's towns. And in the Aghadoe area was the Cronin family whose patriarch, Danny “the Singer” Cronin died in 1995. That was my man! He must have been the one who sang the song.
It went on to say that some of his children still lived in the area! Now I was on a mission. The goal was getting closer. I went out to Crohane, the tiny hamlet near Aghadoe Heights and started knocking on doors. It took only three tries before I found Tim Cronin, one of Danny's sons. And yes, his father used to sing that song! Not only that, but he thought there might be a recording of him singing it. He promised to look for it. I returned in a week and was given a home-made CD of a sitting room recording of Danny singing about ten songs, including “Beauteous Aghadoe.” I finally had succeeded in finding the air to the song. I could now sing and learn it. But what's with the different name? “Beauteous Aghadoe?”
The rabbit hole gets deeper!
To be continued...(scroll up)