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Sad Farewells to Eithne Vallely, Bob Breheny, and Dolly Parton

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Eithne Vallely

The unexpected, tragic death of Eithne Vallely last week is a huge blow to Irish traditional music in Ireland and the wider world. As matriarch of the legendary Vallely clan, she is the epitome of “the good ancestor.” The founder of the Armagh Pipers Club in 1966, with her husband Brian, she was an inspirational teacher of a wide range of traditional instruments. Eithne grew up steeped in Donegal music and Irish-speaking culture. Her mother, grandmother and grandfather were fiddle players, and she began playing at age nine.

Three of her children are distinguished musicians and part of the traditional music avant-garde: Niall is a concertina player who formed the Cork-based band Nomos and later recorded two albums under the name, Buille, with his brother Caoimhin on piano; Caoimhin co-founded the group North Cregg and is also a fiddle player; Cillian is a piper and has been the calm center of the high-powered group Lunasa since 1996.

Eithne’s husband, Brian, is a teacher, organizer, and pipes and flute player. In addition, he is a highly-regarded painter who focused on Irish music and musicians in his work. His portraits featured in many publications, including the Companion Guide to Irish Music edited by his first cousin, Fintan Vallely.

The Irish Times report on her death noted that the Armagh Pipers Club said it was with “great sorrow” that they shared news of her death, extending “heartfelt sympathy” to her family. “Eithne brought music into the lives of children for six decades,” the club said. “Her enormous contribution to Irish traditional music was recognised nationally with many awards and honours.” Thousands of musicians got their start at the Armagh Pipers Club, and many are still active performers.

Bob Breheny

And, in the SF Bay Area, we mourn the passing of Bob Breheny, the quiet dynamo of the Celtic Music scene in the South Bay for over forty years. I had several fruitful and funny encounters with him over the years at concerts featuring Tony Mac Mahon, Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill, Molly’s Revenge, Old Blind Dogs and others.

Michael Black knew him well and wrote this elegant, eloquent tribute for the Celtic Society of the Monterey Bay. I particularly liked this summary:

He was incredibly well read, quietly observant, and full of unexpected humor. I will admit it took me a while to get used to his puns, but they became part of who he was, and part of what made him unmistakably Bob.

Bob was well known for his quirky ways as a host and his very wry (but never awry) sense of humor. He liked nothing more than drawing you into a bout of high-level banter where his erudition would flash and frolic.

I pulled up a couple of his old email messages, which illustrate his mischievousness. From 2011,

Cheers Tom.

Thanks for the bellow below.

Bugger. Wish I did espy in the sky your review of Brendan & Caoimhin ere churning out the cheesy newsletter. Had I done so, I’d filched the whole thing. Of course, permission would be good too. Maybe I’ll figure out how to include in October update or at least refer folks to same. Saxophone!

There’s also a bit on your blog about Moya Brennan in T with the Maggies, arriving anon for only No. California appearance in Santa Cruz. Her manager and better half, Tim Jarvis, will also be along, so I hope we get a good showing or it’ll be my guts for garters.

Imbibed your riff on ‘The Guard.’ Ever see Brendan Gleeson flick ‘I Went Down?’ Mighty stuff. Thought I read somewhere that he was directing film of what I’d thought to be unfilmable, Flann O’Brien’s ‘At Swim-Two-Birds.’ Anything, other than 12 inches, afoot there? 

your palindrome pal, -BoB

And this exchange from 2008:

Hey Bob: Thanks for the blog menchkin (which, as you know, is an old Gaelic word for a little mention) in the latest newsletter. You’ve got some great stuff coming up. I saw the Molly’s last night rattling the pews in an Episcopal church in Castro Valley….. Can I use “blogtrotting” if I give you credit? As you said once to me, I wish I’d thought of that…. -Tom

Mazel tov, Tom.

Use what you wish sans credit, it’s not as if I’d be calling you and come after your blog with a bludgeon.

Did I say ‘I wish I’d thought of that?’ Maybe I was thinking of the Wilde-Whistler exchange:

Whistler: (says something or other)

Wilde: I wish I had said that, James.

Whistler: You will, Oscar, you will.

(discom) Bob (ulated)

Bob hosted the late Tony Mac Mahon during a 2002 visit at the Resource Center for Non-Violence in Santa Cruz. Tony was in fine form and partnered up with Japanese guitarist Junji Shirota. It was a magical evening with Tony responding wholeheartedly to the energy generated by an audience of aficionados. Pete Haworth of Molly’s Revenge recorded the concert and gave me a copy. So here’s a rare live recording of a suitably mournful slow air called Amhrán na Leabhar (Song of the Books):

https://on.soundcloud.com/ztlQwlc1xmRcuggSqv

Dolly Parton

And, finally, Irish music fans join the mourning for the great Dolly Parton. She enhanced and beautified every musical genre she touched, including Irish traditional songs. She understood well the underlying connections to country music from early Irish immigrants to the United States.

Her primary collaboration was with the Donegal band Altan. Her voice blended gloriously with Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh on the songs “The Pretty Young Girl” and “In the Sweet By and By.” Mairéad recalls the great fun she had working with Dolly in this RTE interview. This YouTube video features their duet of “The Sweet By and By”, from the Women’s Heart- A Decade On album

Another Honest Ulsterman Departs

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Michael Longley

The news of Michael Longley’s death today prompted me to search through the blog archives for my review of books by Longley and Ciaran Carson. Carson died in 2019, and Longley has now departed. Many tributes will be paid to Longley over the next few days and weeks. The Irish President, Michael D. Higgins, led the way in today’s Irish Times:

Michael worked to give space and actuality to the moral imperative that we must live together with forbearance, with understanding, with compassion and insight, and above all else, perhaps, with hope.

One of the first pieces I wrote for The Irish Herald in San Francisco in May 2000, at the instigation of Elgy Gillespie and Catherine Barry, was a review of two books of their poetry. This edited version appeared in the blog in August 2010, and I reproduce it here as a small tribute to Longley’s work and genius.

The Honest Ulstermen


A review of The Twelfth of Never by Ciaran Carson; Wake Forest University Press, 1998, and The Weather in Japan by Michael Longley, Cape Poetry, Jonathan Cape, 2000.


I first came to Carson’s poetry through his prose. Last Night’s Fun (North Point Press, 1996) is a masterly piece of work, arguably the finest book ever written about the mysteries of the music-making process. His new book of poetry, The Twelfth of Never, continues in that vein. He uses tune titles –notoriously misleading in the Irish tradition- for many poems. He poetically plagiarizes many old ballads, twisting and turning familiar lines into a darker tapestry such as this from The Rising of the Moon:

The pale moon was rising above the green mountain,
The red sun declining beneath the blue sea,
When I saw her again by yon clear crystal fountain,
Where poppies, not potatoes, grew in contraband.


Carson writes like a man possessed. The Twelfth of Never reads like it was written in one passionate, pellucid night when the words flowed freely, and his magpie mind couldn’t be stopped. And, as if living in the North was not strange enough, Carson’s forays into Japanese culture bring him to locations where he finds,
The labyrinth to which I hadn’t got the key.

Poetry is, at its best, an intellectual and emotional con game. The poet hopes to trick us into thinking anew about things or rethinking familiar things by sleight-of-word. Carson riffs, raps, trips, traps, rocks, and rolls our perceptions in his poetry.  In The Display Case, Carson seems to express some regret that his oeuvre is nearly all in English, not his native Irish language. But this is English writing that could only emerge from an Irish consciousness,
Where everything is metaphor and simile (Tib’s Eve).

Carson’s poems are odes to complexity, a dissection of that hairball of historic proportions, that nest of co-dependent hostilities that is Northern Ireland. And discussion of Northern Irish poetry is no less fraught with difficulty, a minefield sown with words.

Both Carson and Longley are distinctly Northern Irish. Longley describes being there as living in three places at once: one partly Irish, one partly English and one that’s “…also its own awkward self.”  Each covers the touchstones of Northern identity and the struggle of people to lead normal lives in the mayhem, including their efforts to play an artist’s role in a society given more to ideology than to introspection.

Both are famous as the artists that stayed home, laboring in the bloody northern field. They served long stints with the Arts Council of Northern Ireland before retiring in recent years to focus on their writing. As John Hume has noted (Arguing at the Crossroads, 1998), Northern artists were mainly responsible for keeping the flame of diversity and multi-culturalism alive during the years of strife and political polarization.

In All of These People, Longley ruminates:

Who was it who suggested that the opposite of war
Is not so much peace as civilisation? He knew
Our assassinated Catholic greengrocer who died
At Christmas in the arms of our Methodist minister.


The North, despite George Mitchel’s valiant efforts to impose some American pragmatism, remains an immensely complex place where words can and do explode –just think of the recent haggling over “decommissioning.” As Fintan O’Toole noted in the New Yorker (The Meanings of Union, April 27, 1998), crafting agreements in the North will require a poet’s skill, not a pragmatist’s words.

The ancient words of the Persian poet Rumi seem particularly pertinent to the current impasse in the North of Ireland.

Out beyond ideas of
Right doing and wrong doing
There is a field.
I’ll meet you there.


And if the Catholic and Protestant diehards ever make it out to that field, they’ll find Michael Longley and Ciaran Carson waiting to have words with them. High kudos to them for these collections. I can think of no two better Irish people to lead the charge of the write brigade across the field of new Irish dreams.