If ever you should meet a man from County Mayo, in the Republic of Ireland, ask him what part of Mayo he is from. There are usually only two answers to that question: Belmullet or Ballina. These men define themselves by the proximity of their village to either of these two towns. Occasionally, though, you will meet a rare breed of Mayo man who will say that he is from Kiltimach. These Kiltimach men are a separate breed completely and a law unto themselves.
I want to tell you about a series of events which happened long ago in a little village very close to the town of Kiltimach. I had been living in this little village only a few miles down the road for the summer, having secured a position as an agricultural labourer –and a good little job it was.
I was sharing a little cottage with two other fellas, one of whom played the fiddle in his spare time; it was from him that I learnt many tunes and songs. He even taught me how to play a few tunes on the fiddle, though I am a bit rusty on it these days.
After a hard day in the fields, we would adjourn to a public house in the village and swap tunes and tales. Many the song would be sung, and even the odd dance would break out on occasion. To soak up the beer we would call in to the fish and chip shop on the way home and get ourselves a large portion of fish and chips to eat. Now in case any of ye are wondering what class of a delicacy this is, I’ll just say that over in America, chips would be known as “fries,” but in the general vicinity of Western Europe and its surrounding territories they are known as chips.
After the Second World War, many Italian families settled in Ireland and set up these shops selling fish and chips; it proved to be a very popular and profitable business. Why the Irish themselves never thought of it is something I could never figure out, as their fondness for the potato is well known… and they are also surrounded by water.
Now it was a well-known fact that the Italian family were making a good living out of this fish and chip shop; so a local fella decided that there was room in the village for two fish and chip shops, or “chippers,” as they were known locally. This was where the madness that soon overtook the whole village began.
The local fella set up his business, but was just scraping a living out of it because he could not deep- fry the fish with the same expertise that the Italian fella had, and his chips were always soggy and oozed grease out all over the crispy battered fish. Well, in order to get ahead in the game, he somehow got his hands on a brand new item, never seen before in the west of Ireland, called a Hamburger.
Now the appearance of the Hamburger was the talk of the whole village, and people came from far and near to get their hands on one of these things. Because of his lack of cooking skills, the novelty soon wore off – not to mention the fact that there was not one bit of Ham in the Hamburger – and soon people had drifted back across the road to the Italian fella. The local fella was almost out of business… when he had an idea that changed everything around, and started off a series of events which people in and around the townland of Kiltimach still talk about to this very day.
In villages around the west coast of Ireland there has always been a great fascination with all things American; and there were very few families who did not have relatives living over there in that great land. A parcel of clothing would often be sent over from America, and a fella would appear down in the Pub on a Saturday night in a jacket that had been made in Boston or Chicago or any of these oft-dreamt-about cities; and God help any poor fella who spilt a drop of beer on the new American jacket. I saw many a man beaten to within an inch of his life over a few drops of Guinness spilled on someone’s new jacket or shirt. The parcel would often contain an old newspaper or magazine, and those who had learned to read would devour every bit of news contained in those pages. They would come to the pub and tell, with tears in their eyes, of a terrible fire in a Pennsylvania suburb in which a dog was burnt to death before the fire brigade could get there; or they would even make a collection for the widow of a man killed by a train and send the money over to the editor of the paper, with mass cards and holy pictures thrown in for extra solace.
There was also, around this time, a great interest in the American music that people would hear snatches of on wireless radios. How much of a song or tune you would actually hear before the signal was lost would depend on how the wind was blowing; and this led to a very interesting phenomenon in itself. The local boys who played instruments other than fiddles and whistles and the like would listen very carefully to what ever they could pick up on these little wireless sets, and then meet up a few days later and try to put all the remembered pieces of the tune together. There was no such thing as tape recorders in those days, so when the boys got together there would usually be some debate about how the tune was played; but a compromise would often be reached, and a whole new version of the tune would come into existence. It was as if they had assembled a picture from three or four different jigsaw puzzles. Years later, when records were much more easy to get, people would be listening to an original version of a tune like “Take the A Train” and comment that yer man Ellington played it well, but his version was not a patch on the version they first heard played by Malachy McGuire and The Mighty Moonshiners Dance Band one night up in the Ritz Ballroom over near Belmullet. I used to go to some of them dances meself; and sure it was years later that I began to realise that Malachy’s version of the tune was three-quarters “A Train,” and the rest about half of “In the Mood” and “Caravan,” all mixed up together. T’was no wonder I often slipped up trying to dance to the local versions of these great tunes.
This love of all things American was utilised by the local chip shop fella when he went out and bought himself a few tins of blue, red and white paint. He painted everything in his shop one colour or the other, hung up an American flag that he had got from God knows where, and called his place “The American Style Burger Palace.” They came from far and near; they queued up outside even before the pub had closed for the night, to order “American Style” burgers – he was smart enough to drop the ham bit—and bottles of a vile concoction called “Coca -Cola”. They would come in droves to get a seat and sit there eating these American Style burgers, trying very hard not to spill any tomato sauce (ketchup in the American style) on a shirt recently arrived from an Uncle or Aunt over the ocean.
The woman who worked behind the counter was never known to smile in her life, nor was she ever heard to say a nice word about anything or anybody; but all of a sudden she was being called “Baby” and “Honey,” by farm boys young enough to be her grandchildren. The usual greeting of “How’s it goin’,” or sometimes “How’s she cuttin’,” was rapidly disappearing, replaced by strange terms like “Hi,” and even, God forbid, “Hi there, pardner”. I swear to God that one night an old bachelor farmer who had never been more than 20 miles outside the village in his life, greeted me with “Howdy.” It was getting out of hand completely. Some of the younger fellas had taken to wearing scarves around their necks like something off the cover of a Cowboy book. That little bit of fashion did not last too long after an unfortunate incident involving a hay-baling machine and a slightly less-than-sober farmhand, the details of which I will spare you; it was a very messy business, even though the hay soaked up a lot of the blood.
The madness really got out of hand soon after, when the local pub cleared out a whole section of bottled Guinness to make way for bottles of this Coca-Cola, or Coke, as it was known in the American style of things. People who had always been true and faithful to the produce of Arthur Guinness were turning to this sweet concoction and swore by it. No hangover or stumbling into a ditch on the way home. With my own eyes I saw fellas sitting there all day drinking bottle after bottle of the stuff –although if the night were a cold one they might put a drop of whiskey into it for the journey home. Medicinal reasons, you see.
I knew that the battle was finally lost when I saw a sign stuck up on the pub door one terrible evening: “American Accent Competition starting Saturday night.” Now since anybody could remember, there had been a session of Irish music in that pub every Saturday night. Fiddles and flutes, pipes and accordions would be firing out tunes all night long, but now it was declared unfashionable and dated. No more singing and playing was wanted; it was not American enough for the populace.
This was heartbreaking for the few of us who had not succumbed to this overwhelming urge for American-style this and American-style that. I had learnt many fine tunes and songs at that session over the summer I spent there. I met a travelling man there once who gave me “The Garden of the Daisies,” and another one a week later called “The Skylark,” two grand tunes that always take my mind back to the madness of that summer.
The interest in the American Accent competition was so intense that the publican had to break it down into heats, with the winner of every heat going into a grand final. Young men who only a few weeks before had been dreaming about playing football or hurling for their County now were to be found, not on the sports field, but walking about the town talking to themselves out loud in American accents –or what they believed were American accents. One of the great problems concerning the competition was that nobody in the village or surrounding townland had ever been to America. This was something that the Publican had not thought about at all in his haste to cash in on this outbreak of Americana that was now running wild throughout the village
The first heat collapsed into chaos and confusion when it was realised that two of the entrants were intending to sing traditional Irish folk songs, in the Irish language, in American accents. Others were going to recite poems that they had learned in their school-days; and one poor farmer was of the intention to read passages from the Bible, it being the only book he had on the farm. This confusion led to a new ruling which required contestants to read from one of three selected texts. This, in turn, caused another uproar when it was brought to light that many of the village boys had never learned to read. After much deliberation and a few threats, it was agreed that the contestants could read or recite whatever they liked; but there was to be no singing, in any language.
The heats were decided by a vote from the audience; but this caused even more problems when it was noticed that some of the younger fellas had been moving around the pub and voting two or three times in the show of hands. Eventually, over six weeks the six finalists were selected, and tickets were sold for the Grand Final. The parish priest himself was going to present the trophy to the winner, being available for such a duty because he was beaten into second place by just three votes in the third heat. Those without tickets stood outside in the street, trying to get a glimpse through a window or open doorway. Money was changing hands rapidly as bets were taken on the outcome.
When all was said and done, the winner was none other than the owner of the “American style Burger Palace,” and to this day rumours of bribery, in the form of free American Style burgers for a week, are still discussed and debated with great fervour around many firesides. It is a widespread belief that the winner should have been a man from an outlying village who reduced the audience to tears with a poignant recitation of Thomas Moore’s “The Minstrel Boy,” done in an accent that would have not been out of place in any of the cowboy films that came to Kiltimach in later years.
Now needless to say, but I’ll say it anyway, meself and the other fellas who used to play our music in this public house before the madness descended had found another public house five miles up the road; it was there that we gathered on Saturday nights to rattle out the reels and jigs. In this pub I met a man who owned a quarry, and he offered me work throughout the winter; so a few days later I left the little village outside of Kiltimach that had been my home over the summer of that year.
As I walked the road out of this little village, I heard a lot of shouting and roaring, or hollerin’ as it came to be known; and on looking back to see what was the source of this noise, well, what did I see with my own two eyes but a few of the local lads riding around the field on horses, all the while swinging ropes above their heads while trying to capture a poor sheep that was in a total panic. They had tied what looked like a noose on one end of the rope, and from what I could work out, they were trying to get this noose around the neck of the sheep, and seemed to be enjoying themselves in the process. I turned my back to it all and started the walk to the quarry.
Many years later, I passed through the village on my way to a funeral and noticed that the American Style Burger Palace was still doing a great trade. On the menu posted in the window I noticed something called a “Hot Dog.” I did not go in to inquire, as I was afraid of what I might learn.
So, my friends, if ever you meet a Mayo Man who claims to be from Kiltimach, ask him about Hamburgers and he will tell you a tale or two.
Words and Music 