James Goodman music collector 1828–1896

 

 

During James Goodman’s lifetime his collection of melodies remained unpublished, though not unknown. After his death, his eldest son Frank was eager for them to appear, and the Limerick collector, Patrick Weston Joyce, envisaged editing them for publication. But the project did not thrive, and the Goodman family could only deposit them for safe keeping in the library of Trinity College Dublin, where they remain today. Goodman was written about, his musical labours were desired in print, and by a few consulted in manuscript. It was two World Wars and some decades later before interest in them became serious. A potential editor, Breandán Breathnach, having done all these things, seems to have concluded that Goodman was away ahead of other 19th-century collectors of traditional Irish music. And it was a great misfortune that Breandán did not live to realize the edition he intended, given his own qualities and the esteem in which he held the collector.

The writer of this article has, perhaps unwisely, undertaken to replace him. Thus the recent Music of the Munster Pipers is the first of two volumes to be published—by the Irish Traditional Music Archive/ Taisce Cheol Dúchais Éireann—an edition and a study of Goodman’s oral music and its historical context.

James Goodman was born at Ballyameen (Baile Áimín) near Dingle, Co. Kerry. His qualities and circumstances were ones which brought him close to the people who played and sang for him: an unusual thing in his day. He grew up speaking their native language, singing their native songs, and, probably, playing what he called the ‘Irish [now uilleann] pipes’ from a younger age than has been supposed. But Goodmans were living in Kerry and Cork from the 17th century: Protestants of English extraction, his father Thomas and grandfather John between them Church of Ireland (Anglican) curates in Dingle for some eighty years, John showing that the link with Britain was remembered by obtaining—in his old age—an ecclesiastical living in Gloucestershire. ‘An Seabhac’ saw the Goodmans as not naturally part of the local community (‘níor chuid nádúrtha de phobal na háite iad’) and James himself declared his Saxon stock, yet added that his family could claim to be more Irish than the Irish themselves (‘ipsis Hibernicis Hiberniores’), while dearest to him from youth was to listen to the old tales of adventure, the stories of Fionn, or the surpassingly sweet music of Ireland. Is it surprising that we do not know whether Goodman ever crossed the sea?

His musical bent must have developed early. But it is not certain whether he was ever ‘a fine fluter’ let alone ‘since boyhood’, as O’Neill states—or, on the other hand, whether he took up the pipes only in his thirties, as O’Neill reports from John Wayland of the Cork Pipers’ Club. It is a pity that many of the ‘facts’ of Goodman’s life are unconfirmed, often seeming to rank at times as folklore or, hardly better, hypothesis. So, for example, he shows interest in the pipes or is taken as an authority on them well before his thirtieth year—why? Perhaps because he already played them. Another hypothesis: Some tunes preserved in writing from his thirties can hardly have escaped his notice much earlier, to judge from the local allusions, especially names, in their titles: the ‘Humours of Holystone’ (in Dingle), ‘Ditto of Ballymore’ (a townland next to his home), ‘The Top of the Cliff’ (on the sea side of the Goodmans’ farm), ‘Píce an tSúgradh’ (nickname of a Dingle weaver wellknown as a dancer) etc. One explanation is that these were local tunes. Another could be that Goodman supplied some titles to replace forgotten or unknown ones.

Several manuscripts formerly owned, and some written by him, now in the Library of University College Cork show that he was early on the lookout for songs in Irish. In a letter in one of them dated 29 Dec. 1848, the Gaelic scribe Pádruig de Lonndra (Landers) of Ventry answers a request from Goodman (then a student in Dublin aged 20) for the words of ‘An Buachaill Caol Dubh’, the Dark Slim Youth. Pádruig had got some of it from a blind woman ‘Máire na Garbhiagh’ and the rest from a learned gentleman in Dingle, Pádruig Ó Fórhann—

 

Here are the verces I got from that woman… and I aproof them better than Mr. Forhin[’s] verses.

 

For Goodman, as he says himself, Irish music was leisure, in contrast with his more serious occupations. These begin to be recorded in 1846, when Goodman enters Trinity College Dublin to study Arts and Divinity leading to a B.A. (1851), eventual ordination (1853) and work for the Protestant Missions to Irish-speaking Roman Catholics in West Cork at Skibbereen, Creagh, and Ardgroom. From 1867 he became rector of Abbeystrewry parish, from 1875 Canon of Ross. Living in the Rectory on Baltimore Road, Skibbereen did not prevent him becoming Professor of Irish at Trinity College, Dublin (1879); he remained rector and spent about half the year in each place. Trinity students of Irish were then mainly ordinands preparing for the same missions to Catholics that Goodman had worked for: the movement now called Souperism active during a large part of the century. Goodman was involved in it partly because it was there, but an amount of folklore and some hard fact indicate that, like his family, he lacked the coercive urge which the memory of that movement chiefly recalls. Any examination of his involvement in the fifties and sixties shows that he was motivated by strong personal belief in the benefits of voluntary conversion. An anonymous poem in Irish, Agallamh Bhriain agus Airt, the Debate of Brian and Art, is found in some manuscripts: copied in Goodman’s fine Gaelic hand there is no doubt that he was its author. The subject brings together two young men, a Catholic and a convert to Protestantism, in debate about conversion. Disregarding the subject, Standish Hayes O’Grady, a friend of Goodman, took advantage of its anonymity to remark that its sole merit was a rich vocabulary. Music figures in the Debate in the unexpected shape of a piper: specifically the piper of Dunurlin, whose role is to welcome a maiden personifying Truth. This piper’s model can only be the convert Tom Kennedy, who by the date of the poem (c.1853) was living near Ventry with its missionary settlement. Called for one reason or another an ‘ex-piper’ by Goodman, Kennedy was his most fertile music source and the only performer he names in his music books.

It was in Beare, chiefly or wholly at Ardgroom, that Goodman compiled his three oblong volumes of musical fair copies (1–3, dated 1860–66) and, it is said, took down more music there from Kennedy, though this was perhaps said because the fair copies were made in Ardgroom! The other volume, numbered ‘4’ though actually the oldest, is in different format. Parlour music distributed through it was not written by Goodman but most likely by his fiancee, Charlotte King of Ventry (1826–88) before their marriage in October 1852. This probability is confirmed by the place and date given in her presumed hand after the ‘Sturm Marsch Galop’: ‘Ventry Sep 14th 1852’. Between this date (or their marriage) and about the end of the fifties Goodman must have filled the remaining blank space with his own closely packed melodies.

Charlotte too was interested in music, but preferred the popular music of literacy and probably played the piano. Here and there however she wrote down wellknown traditional tunes, including a few also written by James. ‘Siubhail a Rún’ seems to show collaboration between the spouses, with Charlotte writing the music and James the title and words, making his usual elegant distinction between gaelic and roman script for the two languages (this is the only song of which he has written extant words.) Their collaboration challenges the image of a lady who is said to have disliked pipes, pipers and their music when they came visiting her husband. Has this commonplace of folklore hard facts to support it? Or did Charlotte deserve a better press?

The three oblong volumes appear as a fresh start by Goodman on the collection. Volume 4 is laid aside and used only now and then to copy a tune out of into volume 1 or volume 3. These two volumes are of greatest interest for items noted from oral sources, whereas volume 2 contains almost wholly copies taken from print or manuscript.

In our search for his oral collecting Goodman gives us help. In volumes 1 and 3 he uses symbols to indicate the status of items. Most of these refer to printed sources; among the rest, ‘K’ marks over 500 items obtained from ‘Munster pipers etc.’ The letter ‘K’ suggests that he means Tom Kennedy, but this may not be presumed. Only in about half-a-dozen places is Kennedy named—only three times, in volume 4, as a source of music (each time a song air). The letter symbols are useful, not entirely reliable or sufficient, but rarely in error.

Goodman’s notations are competent, written from performance, most often in the common major keys of d and g, or copied in more varied keys from sources already published etc. He counts note and rest values as a rule correctly, but metrical detail seems to bore him in cadences and he shows little concern to distinguish quaver and crotchet rests. His aberrations hardly disturb strictly measured music like dance tunes or marches, since these will fall readily into a regular scheme. But songs, slow airs and suchlike, being less strictly measured, make it difficult at times to discern Goodman’s metrical intentions. Most 19th-century collectors did not bother to represent rubato style or metrical peculiarities in their tunes—thinking it somehow sinful? But Goodman writes some bars as if deliberately to show irregularities of metre. A 3/4 piece may suddenly develop a single 6/8 bar of like time value, for example, two dotted crotchets instead of a minim and a crotchet, as if a song of ambling gait momentarily became a jig. Such aberrations are too common to be just dismissed as errors. Goodman is ready to absolve the sinful bar, though his interpretation of what it does may surprise us.

The musical varieties in the collection reflect his own tastes widely. But scrutiny of them is best restricted to his ‘K tunes’, as representing native musical practice in Munster or perhaps preponderantly in Corca Dhuibhne. The great mass of popular and classical music of urban, foreign or ostensibly foreign origin which he includes would deserve notice in a wider context than this, as a sign of his relaxed, non-doctrinaire approach to varieties. But it is not part of the present subject. Moreover, Goodman himself identifies Irish music as a special category which he not only admires but responds to at a deep emotional level.

Songs in Irish seem to stir him most deeply, though they have no words beyond their titles any more than those in English. This strange, bewildering fact conflicts with the preface of volume 3 ‘When noting down an air I always made it my business to take down the original words as well.’ And what follows shows that Goodman has the piper’s concern to ‘give that expression to the music which the words require’—while also declaring himself ‘possessed of a multitude of Irish songs’ enabling him to remember the airs. Apparently he never matched the missing words he says he wrote with the surviving tunes, for no space is allotted for words. They were, most likely, rough copies which, like the rough copies of the music now preserved only in fair copies, no one bothered to keep. It is worth noting that few 19^th-century Irish collectors of songs took down words for the melodies they collected. Goodman, though disappointing us, thus appears innovative in making even half an attempt.

 

[Nearly a decade after the above was written a grandson of Canon Goodman, Gavin Goodman, made a remarkable discovery of two missing manuscripts. One was a 12-page book of ‘Irish music of every description collected and transcribed, from various sources, by James Goodman...’. This contains 57 tunes in fair copies, all but one of which also appear in the four-volume Trinity College collection. The other, as well as religious writings, excerpts of ‘pipe music’ etc., turned out to contain the text of 85 songs (nearly all in Irish and many with multiple verses) in the Canon’s hand. Sixty-eight of these correspond to titles of tunes published without words in The tunes of the Munster pipers. These manuscripts have now been donated by the Goodman family to Trinity College Library. — Lisa Shields, October 2009 ].

The situation is in a sense reversed in the case of the Fenian and other narrative lays, for Goodman copied many verbal but no musical texts of the lays into his literary, not musical, manuscripts. Perhaps the musicality of lyric genres seemed more apt than the declamatory style of lays, just as the ‘Irish cry’ would seem dissonant and formless in a context of songs. Keening was certainly practised in the district, as Mrs Thompson the land steward’s wife reported of a group of Catholic women raising the cry at a Protestant burial service for converts who had been brought up as Catholics. Goodman, on the other hand, collected formal death laments, some of them placed in historical context by naming the poets or those who were mourned. But the most abundant lyric category is certainly the love songs, sung to impressive tunes in varied strophic forms, most often in phrases AABA or with repetition AABA, BA. These songs often have a narrative or discursive support in speech which rarely finds its way into writing or print (an t-údar). Goodman does not include it any more than he includes the words of the songs.

The instrumental music is still more abundant: as he says in volume 1 ‘jigs, reels, hornpipes, marches or slow airs in endless variety’. Generally speaking, the shorter the dance forms, the better they are, whereas the thirteen parts of the ‘Drogheda Jig’ are, to say the least, a pity. He cannot resist comment (preface to volume 1) on the two descriptive pieces, the ‘Fox Hunt’ and ‘that strange piece Allisdrum’s March’, few versions of which were then known. He writes out both of them from the mythical piper-figure ‘K’ at the end of volume 1, with a commentary in Irish, respectively, on sounds of the chase and of battle and lamentation.

Goodman remains strange to us partly because we know him little as a person. Facts most reliably recorded, like the prizes at College in Hebrew and Irish, are usually least informative. The photograph of him printed and reprinted shows a degree of seriousness heightened by the costume of his vocation. It is at variance with the word picture of his homecomings to Ballyameen with a musician, ready to set up a session of dancing; at variance also with the Goodman brothers’ game of running and then leaping into a sitting position with their legs dangling over ‘the Top of the Cliff’ recalled in the title of one of his reels. A more recent rector of Abbeystrewry remarked that he imagined Goodman as ‘a hearty evangelical type’. If he was, it hardly shows in his music. But music is not a medium for such display, nor Goodman probably given to it. There is still a lot to learn about this versatile and unusual man.

                                                                                                      Hugh Shields [June 1998]