A trad session at Daltons

Daltons Bar in Kinsale. Photo by David Lansing.

Stumbled in to Daltons around midnight. Jammed. Nowhere to sit. Everyone mostly standing around the bar, listening to a loose collection of men and women spread out across a brown leatherette booth in the corner. Maybe eight or nine players and singers, all over fifty, some closer to eighty, Santa Claus beards, blue suspenders, a red tie here, a golf shirt there, playing button accordion, tin whistle, violin, flute, the bodhrán, even a banjo.

What’s the name of the group, I shout to the middle-aged woman slopping around a tray of beers.

Live music, says she, moving deftly through the crowd.

A plain looking farmer’s wife stands up and sings an a capella version of No Place Like Home. Hard to believe such a sappy song could bring tears to everyone’s eyes, including mine. Then the banjo player sings a limerick and there’s one Irish song after the other although thankfully there’s no Danny Boy. Roundabout singing of the Sloop John B (is that originally an Irish song?), which sounds so much richer and thicker than anything the Beach Boys ever sang.

But the crowd at Daltons is divided. There’s the younger group at the bar, mostly ignoring the singing while they lob de gob at their oul dolls, and the older crowd pushing right up against the trad players who keep shusshing the youngsters making out at the bar. Keep getting the feeling that a fight is about to break out. Older woman next to me, lushed, is looking for a pen to write something out for the bleary-eyed man next to her. I hand her mine. She looks at it like it was a gold coin. Have you anything to write on as well? she asks. All I’ve got is my business card. Which she takes. Writes down a phone number. Gives it to the grinning man. Who now has the older woman’s phone number on the back of my business card. That should confuse him in the morning.

A Power’s? asks Mr. Lynch. Why not, I tell him. Sip our drinks, listening to Santa Claus, who appears to be the chairman emeritus of the trad musicians, giving a nod here and there to determine who gets to perform next. Don’t have any idea what he’s saying since it’s in Gaelic but whatever it is, it’s enough to make me cry. Or maybe it’s the whiskey.

Some young man at the bar is getting upset as he watches a young tart being mashed by an ox of a man. “Relax de cacks, Tommy, an’ take a chill pill,” says his mate, holding him back by the shoulder. “I’m gonta bayte de head offa dat lang,” says the upset young man. He shoves the ox in the shoulder. The ox deposits the tart on a stool as if she were a child and throws his chest at the young man. The Irish trads play on.

Might be time to leave, says Mr. Lynch. Might indeed, say I. We swallow the last of our Power’s and slap the glasses on the bar just as the first punch is thrown.

Now that’s a true Irish night at a pub, says Mr. Lynch.

Indeed. And the music was grand, wasn’t it?