We present an extract from the new book Tommie Potts: The Sorrowful and the Great by Seán Potts, published by the Irish Traditional Music Archive.
The Sorrowful and the Great is the first comprehensive biography of Tommie Potts' life and unique artistic process. Written by ITMA's Seán Potts, Tommie’s grandnephew and son of the late Seán Potts, founder member of The Chieftains, the book charts the course of Tommie’s formative years in the fertile musical environment of his family home; the trauma he endured as a young firefighter surviving the Pearse Street tragedy of 1936; his powerful relationship with the great traditional musicians of county Clare; the story of The Liffey Banks LP; his friendship with Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin and an assessment of his legacy by the contemporary artists who encountered his genius during their lifetime.
On 11 August 1971, Jim Furey, Tommie Potts's son-in-law, was summoned to carry the reluctant fiddle player to the magnificent gothic hunting lodge in Luggala, home to Guinness heir Garech Browne. After years of coaxing, Potts had finally been persuaded by Garech Browne, Paddy Moloney and Seán Potts to record an LP for Claddagh Records. The following is an abridged version of how events unfolded on that momentous night.
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Listen: The Rolling Wave on Tommie Potts: The Sorrowful and the Great
Tommie’s reluctance to record was in everyone’s mind, but Garech Browne had devised the plan around Luggala. In his gorgeous gothic hunting lodge developed by the La Touche family in the eighteenth century, Tommie, he felt, would be more relaxed. "He came down to Luggala because I thought it was better to do it in a house than in a recording studio, that it would not make him quite so nervous. I was the one who then became very nervous because I am terrible at the names of dance tunes, so I was frightened wondering what to ask him to play next. Tommie was wonderful and just played away quite happily."
"We set up an old EMI machine with quarter inch tape," explained Paddy Moloney. "We had an English friend who took a great interest, young Ioan Allen, who was doing the engineering. We had Tommie in the dining room, and he was playing away."
the unlikely setting for the recording of The Liffey Banks
The set-up in Luggala bordered on the bizarre. The famously reticent Potts, now almost sixty years of age, with several pit-stops already completed and further libations offered by Garech on arrival, was recording in front of a party. Jim Furey has never forgotten that memorable scene.
"Seán Ó Riada was there the same night, recording on an eighteenth century harpsichord. Margaret Barry, Pecker Dunne, members of The Chieftains were there. We were all sitting in a semi-circle and eventually, I was introduced to Garech de Brún, who then introduced me to the guests. Tommie was on my left, while on my immediate right was this fine-looking lady and I said to her, 'what shall I call you?’ and she said, "call me Tiger." It turned out she was Lady Elizabeth Countess of Cowley. Next to her was an American psychiatrist from New York who had come over for a weekend and stayed for a month, and then there was Garech himself and an Indian lady with whom he was enamoured at the time. Tommie eventually got up to play and the people on my right were talking about what they were going to do the next morning. I was thinking, ‘I am at the concert of a lifetime, and they are worrying what they’re going to do tomorrow!’"
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Listen: Author Sean Potts talks to Miriam O'Callaghan
Despite the distractions, once Tommie started, no one said a word. "We all stopped, you never spoke when Tommie was playing, he would glare down at you and stop you in your tracks. He just played from one tune to the other to the other... he was just told, ‘play away.’ At this stage he must have had three or four pints, a lot for him, as we had been in the pub, then we came out, and he was having another drink. He was also nearly sixty."
It was ten o'clock when Tommie stood up that night in the elegant surroundings of the dining room in Luggala to perform his repertoire of cherished, "developed" melodies, his own poor reflection of the unbroken music of heaven. He played, most immediately, for producer Paddy Moloney who was hands-on in the temporary studio to ensure that they captured a representative body of his music, for his nephew and confidante Seán Potts who was providing moral support, for the project’s patron Garech Browne, for assembled musicians including Seán Ó Riada, and for a small entourage of indifferent socialites, most of whom, we can safely assume at this juncture, were half cut. Moloney persevered, determined to overcome all the obstacles, including Tommie’s procrastination.
(Pic: Kevin McMahon, for The Irish Times
"He was in good form but in the middle of a tune he might just stop, bang!" explained Moloney. "And we would have to stop, ‘Tommie what did you do that for?’ ‘I wanted to tell you the story.’ God love him, he was a wonderful person. But I managed to edit it and put it all together. And in fact, about a year later, we went about doing a second one with Tommie, but he just was not up to it, he was not happy going into the studio. But that was a good old time, going down to Luggala and doing that recording."
Of the music recorded that extraordinary night, twenty-two tracks made the final cut. Several striking melodies emblematic of Tommie’s playing were captured — the six slow airs in particular — with a vinyl sound quality which, to this day, remains a testimony to Tommie’s exceptional tone, the skill of the sound engineer Ioan Allen, and the acuity of Moloney as producer, editor, and managing director of Claddagh.
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Listen: John Bowman on Tommy Potts and a legendary recording session
Seán Ó Riada, a close friend of Garech for many years, then sat down and recorded his long-planned album on the 1740 upright harpsichord made by Weber in Dublin which Garech had acquired for Luggala. Ó Riada’s album Vertical Man featured his orchestral work ‘Hercules Dux Ferrariae’ and included poems by Thomas Kinsella, John Montague and Seamus Heaney set to music by Ó Riada. It had been released by Claddagh in 1969, with Moloney also working on the production. Peadar Ó Riada remarked that his father and Garech were "very close and would plot and plan great schemes to rescue poetry and promulgate the culture of ‘The Gaelic Nation,’ ‘An Náisiún Gaelach’."
Two weeks after Seán Ó Riada recorded in Luggala, Garech received word from his wife Ruth that Seán was hospitalised in Cork with a genetic liver disease and a horrible prognosis. He died on 3 October, less than two months after that luminous night in Luggala.
Meanwhile, Tommie Potts, relieved if uneasy with his recording efforts, saluted Ó Riada who had brought the lid down on the two hundred- year-old harpsichord. It was an hour before dawn. Tommie sat into the car with Jim Furey, the moon was still glistening on Lough Tay and its mystical white sandy beach, the pebble stones crunched beneath the tyres as they wound their way out of that enchanted valley, heading back to the working-class suburb of Walkinstown.
Back in the dining room, a batch of spools containing quarter-inch tape sat on the table. They would become The Liffey Banks.
Tommie Potts: The Sorrowful and the Great is published by the Irish Traditional Music Archive - find out more here
