I got a handwritten letter in the post on Tuesday.
The envelope just said "Seamus" in shaky blue biro. No return address. Just Ennis postcode. I thought it was junk until I opened it and recognized the handwriting immediately.
It's from Mick Hennessy. Mick from Cruise's, the session musician I mentioned in the earlier shrine posts. The one who used to play The Rattlin' Bog back in the 90s when I was a younger lad just discovering music.
I haven't seen Mick in maybe ten years. We lost touch. Life happened. But his letter arrived right after all the Late Late Show madness, and he wanted to share something.
I'm going to quote some of it (he gave me permission — I called him up immediately):
"Seamus, I saw you on the telly with that song. It made me cry, which I'm not ashamed to say. I used to play it, you know. In the sessions. Some of the lads thought I was mad bringing in a song that nobody knew, but I couldn't help it. It was alive. It FELT alive in a way that other songs didn't. I gave it up for years because nobody seemed to care. You get tired of playing to an empty room, if you understand me. But now look at you. Look at what you kept alive when it would've been easier to let it die."
He also wrote about getting older — he's nearly 70 now — and about watching music change, watching tradition get forgotten, watching young people not know the songs that meant everything to people like him.
"But you're proving something," he wrote. "You're proving that the old things aren't dead. They're just waiting. They're waiting for someone to believe in them hard enough. That's what you did. You believed hard enough. And now it's not just you anymore."
The letter ends with an invitation to play together at some of the sessions again. Real sessions. In real pubs.
I called him immediately. We're meeting up next week. First time in ten years.
I never knew what I was part of, when I started this shrine in 2003. I just knew I loved the song. I didn't know I was keeping a whole world alive.
But maybe that's what faith is.
— Seamus