Seán Corcoran remembered: singer, field-worker and song collector

The inaugural Seán Corcoran Series is a 3-day event taking place in Drogheda this September, to celebrate the life and outstanding work of Louth native Seán Corcoran, singer, fieldworker, documentary maker, and vernacular musicologist.

The stellar line-up includes Radie Peat (Lankum), John Banville, Máiread Ní Mhaoinaigh (Altan), Andy Irvine, Dónal Lunny, Rachel Joynt, Kevin Conneff (The Chieftans) and many more

Below, Seán's daughter (and event organizer) Rósa Corcoran remembers her father: 'Music and song were serious business. But so was a caper'.

My father Seán Corcoran was a born singer, folk music field-worker and song collector.

One of my earliest sound memories is of him transcribing field recordings on a reel-to-reel tape recorder, the warm analogue sound of the music being played, rewound and replayed, so that the notes could be written down.

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Listen: Maighread & Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill and novelist John Banville celebrate Sean Corcoran

Or aged eight, pushing through a packed pub in Miltown Malbay to a singing session in the smoke-filled back room, where he and other singers performed in what seemed a state of hypnosis.

A decade later, it took little prompting from me for him to make a 25-mile detour to a hotel in Kinnegad that sold West Clare fiddler Bobby Casey's Casey in the Cow House cassette tapes from a mouldy display cabinet in the lobby.

Listen: Sean Corcoran & Helen Brennan perform Erin's Flowery Plains

Music and song were serious business. But so was a caper.

Visiting when I lived in Galway city, he disappeared from a kitchen session in the early hours, leaving us to wonder if he was lost, or dead, only to pull up outside next morning in his recently acquired camper van shouting ‘surprise!’

Johnny Moynihan, another great singer, was perched in the passenger seat, having been acquired somewhere along the route. He was already busily counting those assembled to see if he had enough players for a game of softball.

This was very much how they rolled, as the now adult children of traditional musicians and singers of that era will tell you.

A rare cancer took my father’s life, abruptly and with no warning, at the height of the Covid pandemic. There was no opportunity to mourn collectively, in the way the Irish still do so well. In the grief that followed, my memories of him were all encoded in music, and so a gathering, a celebration of music and its importance in our lives, seemed fitting.

He imparted to me a way to think about music that has served me well: that value judgments about vernacular music versus art music aren’t useful or accurate, and that innovation is inherent and ever-present in any traditional art form. For him, as for me, the singer Mary Ann Carolan exists in the same creative realm as, say, Werner Herzog, Raymond Carver, Nano Reid or Lankum.

This has always felt to me a more accurate representation of how we absorb what swirls in the culture.

So for three days, from September 8th to 10th, we will stage and celebrate vernacular music and song in its truest form - as a people’s music, ‘ceol na ndaoine’ - that feels more relevant now than ever and encourages us to return to the source materials and recordings and archives.

Because what we find there is always richer and darker than we could ever have imagined.

The Seán Corcoran Series takes place in Drogheda, Co. Louth, from Friday 8th – Sunday 10th September 2023 - find out more here.