Non-irish people playing ITM

[anniemcu]

I learned my music from my parents first, and my mother made sure Iheard a wide variety, but she also made sure I knew that my genes carried some of it too. Just because i wasn't born where my great and great-greats were, doesn't mean they didn't carry any influence in my life. I love the music I love, and I play the music I love. Anyone thinks that's wrong can better spend their attention on something else.

[TheSpoonMan]

I believe this is because it is the direct ancestor to modern popular music.

wait waht? If you mean via american music, that's not totally true... american music doesn't come from irish music, tho they're related. Not sure what you mean tho.

Country music's direct ancestor is Irish and Scottish music.
Rock and Roll was a mix of the blues and country.

Mukade

Mmm, I disagree. I'm not sure exactly of Rock's pedigree, but i know that coutnry music has its roots in American folk music, which comes from a lot of sources, but not very much from Irish music- Scottish yes, English yes, and the three are certainly related, but there's not much of a direct Irish influence as far as I know. Either way, yes, Irish music and popualr music are very very related, and very very similar, so the point is there, I'm jsut splitting hairs

[pancelticpiper]

But there's sometimes a kind of cliquishness at the boundary of national pride that may communicate an exclusionary air, intentional or not. I suppose a certain amount of vetting by ordeal occurs in any specialized social group, as in the practice of the arts. But at worst, it becomes the kind of subtle or not so subtle bigotry and parochialism that pancelt described.

Boy I've experienced that, as an American playing Irish music. Many Irish have the attitude that if you're not Irish-born you shouldn't attempt to play their music. Non-Irish players have to be very, very good to overcome this prejudice. I must admit that, in a sense, they are correct, in that most non-Irish people who attempt to play Irish music don't ever attain a true native sound.
A friend who is a professional jazz musician, who happens to be white, encounters this all the time from black jazz players. He has to prove himself over and over, but no matter how good he is, he's just a white guy trying to play black music.
I feel this same strange sense of entitlement about Appalachian music. When I encounter somebody who doesn't have the accent playing "my" music, they had better be darn good.

[chrisoff]

the Lowland Scots would still have called themselves English, and did for a while IIRC (the word scot in AS meant "foreigner" sometimes- kinda the opposite process of wealh>welsh I guess).

Source?

Anyway, brief history of the unification of Scotland:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/scottishhi ... ndex.shtml

[Innocent Bystander]

Yeah, I'll give a to that too.

"Scot" meant "Irish" - Like Duns Scotus could be translated as "John the Irish".

[Ro3b]

Many Irish have the attitude that if you're not Irish-born you shouldn't attempt to play their music. Non-Irish players have to be very, very good to overcome this prejudice.

As long as we're flinging generalizations around, I'd say more Irish-American people have that attitude. I've never gotten any guff from actual Irish people about being an American who plays Irish music. But no matter how good you are, just try to get booked at Irish or "Celtic" festivals in the US if your band is all Americans of no particularly Irish ethnicity.

[MaryC]

But I do have a friend who is a racist when it comes to Irish music. When he sees somebody playing Irish music who is neither Irish nor of Irish descent he complains about it in private.

....
I think this is one of the dirty little secrets of the golden "come all ye" world of ITM abroad ...

I'll go even further and say that it's related to another dirty-little-not-so-secret-anymore now that there are poorer countries than Ireland in the EU, and applies far more broadly than just to music.

Irish society in general is really struggling with accepting people from other cultures: "they" were fine when "they" lived "over there", but having "them" living in the same street is a whole different ballgame. Local authorities here run explicitly-named anti-racism campaigns, but to my eye (coming from a country that was just as bad 20 years ago) there is a long, long way to go.

(Yes, I'm choosing my words very carefully here, not wanting to "give out" at anyone in particular, just to name the trends I'm seeing.)

In terms of ex-pat communities in general, often true that XXX people in Somewhere-Overseas are more XXX-ish than the ones at home: this makes sense because the ex-pats are trying to preserve their identity, while the current residents are able to develop and interact with the changing world far more freely.

[Wanderer]

I once knew a lady who grew up in a little hick suburb of Houston, but discovered her "irish roots" (meaning some great grandpappy somewhere had some smidge of irish blood) into her 50's.

She took on every irish stereotype you could think of, from the love of Guinness to the hatred of the English. I used to say she was "more Irish than any Irish person I knew"

[A-Musing]

Being an American Mongrel, with Anglo/Euro/Native American "roots," I love and play Mongrel Music. Irish sounds are a particular love, and they truly inform my own music. Couldn't care less about being accepted by a "true Irishman." (Or a "true" Frenchman, or Englishman, or Native American, etc ad nauseum. I incorporate you all. That's all. Enjoy!)

Playing music IS a great joy, in this life. Herd politics are B.S.

[WyoBadger]

Well said, A. That's exactly the way I feel. I love Irish and Scottish music, and I have Irish and Scottish "roots" (great story, Wanderer--did that lady like Green Beer, too?), but I live in Wyoming. I'm not trying to recreate a musical culture that just doesn't exist here. And I'm not too worried about being accepted by musicians from Ireland or Scotland, though I would surely have a lot to learn from someone like that.

Maybe that's where the much-maligned term "Celtic music" comes in handy. It seems like most of us aren't trying to be Irish, or Scottish Highlanders, or whatever. We love the music, and we try to learn it, and it blends in with our lives in the here-and-now.

That'll be $.02

Over in the Pub, Mutepoint suggested we all have little tags in our signature line so people know where we stand on the issues of the day. Maybe we should have the same thing with our music.

Tom
[admirer of trad playing/players] [not much of a purist trad-wise, myself] [whistle, bodhran, guitar, and euphonium player] [Celtic/classical/bluegrass/jazz mongrel] [admirer of Mack Hoover and Tony Dixon] [living in a 100% session-free zone] [aspiring to be a great musician, but not there yet]

[WyoBadger]

Brian Lee, you out there? You might have a word or two on this subject.

Tom

[TheSpoonMan]

the Lowland Scots would still have called themselves English, and did for a while IIRC (the word scot in AS meant "foreigner" sometimes- kinda the opposite process of wealh>welsh I guess).

Source?

Wikipedia (sorry ):
"Old English (also called Anglo-Saxon,[1] Englisc by its speakers) is an early form of the English language that was spoken and written in parts of what are now England and southern Scotland between the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century."

Eduard Sievers, An Old English Grammar, emphasis added:
"The OE Writers uniformly call their own language Englisc [....]
Northumbrian and Mercian together form the Anglian group [of dialects]"

From these two quotes we learn that English was spoken in both England and Scotland, because the "English" people, when they invaded Britain settled, that far north.

Scots Online: http://www.scots-online.org/grammar/whits.htm
"....south east Scotland was part of a Northumbrian kingdom based on the Lothians. These people were the descendants of the Angles who had settled in the north of England. [....] This language called Inglis was spoken between the river Humber in the south and the river Forth in the north. By 500 A.D. a tribe of people from Northern Ireland called the Scoti had began to settle in Argyle. [....] It wasn't long after 970 A.D. that the Northumbrian kingdom also became part of the kingdom of Alba [the Gaelic kingdom], creating the borders of modern Scotland that have hardly changed since.

One of the conditions to the annexation of the Northumbrian kingdom was that the Northumbrians were allowed to use their own language and laws. Scotland's political centre of gravity moved from the west Highlands into Central Scotland. Soon a situation had emerged where the Royal household was only Scots in name. They too were speaking Inglis. At this time Inglis speakers called Gaelic Scotis."

And to make a long story short, this "Inglis", due to its preeminence, eventually took over the name "Scottis" and became what we today call "Scots", parallel to the development of English from the southern dialects of OE (which is why we call Scottish Gaelic "Gaelic", not "Scottish"). But its roots, unlike that of the northern language, are Germanic, not Celtic. Before Alba, lowland Scots would not call themselves "Scottish", but "English" or "Northumbrian"; the Scots were foreign invaders from Ireland, just like the English had been centuries before. In the same way Cubans don't call themselves "Mexicans"- but if Mexico took over Cuba (who knows ), in a hundred, two hudnred, three hundred years Cubans jsut might call themselves "Mexican", and there'd be nothing wrong with that.

So there you go, hope that helped And sorry for the confusion; I was using Scot in the modern sense of "person who lives in Scotland". And actually, on the word Scot being used in OE in the sense of "foreigner" (I didn't mean that it meant foreigner, I meant that it was used in that sense, because the Irish were foreign to the Anglo-Saxons), I acutally don't remember where I got that, so I'll take that back for now I do know that the word "welsh" comes from the OE word for foreigner, wealh.

[Gordon]

I play ITM because I like it; not a drop of Irish or Scotch, that I'm aware of, unless I've been drinking. Of course, there will be narrow minded people in every culture; if I was faking an accent and trying to pretend I was Irish, that'd be something different. But I don't pretend to be anything I'm not; it is, for me, all about the music. If my Americanism shows through the music, somehow, so be it.

[MarcusR]

For me it is the other way around, no connection to Ireland at all. The only time I have been there was then I picked up my set of pipes.

But as my ancestors very efficiently spread their gene pool while ravaging and plundering the costs of Ireland and the British isles
I feel there is a strong enough bond for me to play and listen to ITM



/MarcusR

[Colin]

... Lowland scots are angles: as germanic as the english.

No, the reality is much more complex. The Scottish lowlands were a crucible
of clashing cultures - Scot's, Strathclyde Britons, Picts and Angles. Cumbric
(the Brythonic tongue of the Britons) was spoken in Strathclyde into the 11th
century, and Gaelic was spoken in Galloway into the 17th century and into to
the 20th century along the borders of the lowlands that creep up the East
coast beyond Aberdeen. The Anglian speech of the Northumbrians did
eventually displace the Celtic languages in the lowlands but the people
speaking it were not Angles - they were a Celtic/Germanic hybrid. Check
out detailed maps of the lowlands and you'll see hundreds of place names
derived from Gaelic, Cumbric, Pictish and Scots (derived from the Germanic
Angles).