The travelling fiddle master
Padraig O'Keeffe
Born 1887 at Glountane Cross, three miles over the hill from Gneeveguilla. Took over Glountane National School from his father in 1915, walked out of the job in 1920, and spent the next forty-three years walking the parishes — Gneeveguilla, Knocknagree, Cordal, Scartaglin — teaching fiddle in kitchens for a few shillings and a bed for the night. He wrote tunes down in his own homemade tablature because he hadn't time for staff notation. He died in St Catherine's in Tralee in 1963. Every Sliabh Luachra fiddler alive learned from someone he taught.
Lisheen to the world
Denis and Julia
Denis Murphy (1910–1974) and Julia Clifford (1914–1997) grew up in Lisheen, a townland of Gneeveguilla, the children of a fiddler father. They walked over to O'Keeffe's lessons as kids and never stopped playing. Denis went to America in the 1940s, came home, played until he died. Julia married into Clare and ended her life in London but the Kerry style stayed in her bow. The 1977 Topic LP The Star Above the Garter — Denis and Padraig together — is the document. If you've heard a polka played the right way once, you have heard their playing somewhere down the line.
Why Sliabh Luachra sounds different
Polkas and slides
The rest of Ireland plays reels and jigs. Sliabh Luachra plays polkas and slides — 2/4 and 12/8, faster, brighter, set-dance music for kitchens with the chairs pushed back. The story is half-true: the Napoleonic dancing-masters left polkas and quadrilles in the country in the 1840s, and up on the rushy plain between three counties they were taken in and never let go. Listen to a Sliabh Luachra polka beside a Donegal reel and you'll hear two countries.
The night the bog walked
Knocknageeha, 1896
On the night of 28 December 1896 about 200 acres of bog above Gneeveguilla — at the townland of Knocknageeha — broke loose and slid south. It moved through the dark for four days, finally coming to rest on New Year's Day. The Donnelly family, eight of them, were drowned in their cabin. The slide is still there in the landscape if you know where to look. East Kerry calls it the Moving Bog. It is one of those stories the place hands over once you have stopped long enough to be told.