I'll tell you a thing about Westport. I had no business being there.
It was the start of September, that week where the summer's clearly packing its bags but hasn't actually left, and I'd driven up to Mayo to look at a secondhand harmonium a man was selling that turned out to be a wreck (the harmonium, not the man — the man was lovely, the harmonium had mice). So there I am, harmonium-less, a long drive home in front of me, and I think, sure I'll get a pint before the road. Octagon, then down a side street, into a small pub I won't name because the lovely thing about it is that nobody knows about it and I'd like to keep it that way.
There was no session on. Let me be clear about that. This was not a billed, advertised, "trad every Thursday" session. It was a Monday. There was just a corner with a few chairs and, slowly, over about forty minutes, instruments started appearing the way mushrooms appear after rain.
Here is who was there, as best I can reconstruct it.
A young one with a fiddle, German, doing a walking tour of the west, barely a word of English on her but a LOT of words on the fiddle. Two lads from Cork who'd come up for a wedding that wasn't till the Saturday and had run out of things to do. An older man, local, banjo, said about nine words the entire night and every one of them was funny. A woman from Donegal with a tin whistle in her handbag like other people carry keys. A French fella on a bodhrán who — and I say this with love — had clearly bought the bodhrán that afternoon. Me. And a few more who drifted in and out, including a couple who I think just came for the toilets and stayed three hours.
Eleven of us, give or take. Not one of us had met before. NOT ONE.
And here's the thing I keep turning over in my head. There's a moment, in a session of strangers, that I don't have a good word for. It's the moment where it stops being a load of individual people who happen to be playing in the same room, and becomes a thing — one thing, breathing together. You can feel it arrive. It's not when the music gets good. The music was rough as a badger for the first hour, all false starts and "do you know this one?" and three different speeds happening at once. The moment comes later, and it comes from somewhere underneath the music.
For us it came around the second hour. The Donegal woman started a slow air I didn't know, and the room — without anyone deciding — got quiet for her. The Cork lads stopped messing. The German girl found the harmony by the second time round. And when it ended nobody clapped, because clapping would have been wrong, and instead there was that little silence that means everyone felt the same thing. That's the thing nobody tells you about a session. The best bit is often the bit with no music in it at all.
After that we were a band. I don't know how else to say it. Strangers an hour before, and now the banjo man would catch my eye before a change and we'd land it together like we'd rehearsed it for a year.
You know what was coming. Around half ten the French fella, who by now had genuinely improved on the bodhrán through sheer enthusiasm and a couple of pints, says — in English better than he'd let on all night — "the bog one. Do the bog one." And the Cork lads light up because of course they know it, everyone knows it, it's the rattlin' bog, and the German girl doesn't but it doesn't matter because the rattlin' bog is the most welcoming song ever written for exactly this situation. A cumulative song is a song that teaches itself to a room. By the third verse she had it. By the flea verse — and the flea verse is the CLIMAX, I will keep saying this until I die — she was LEADING it, this German girl who'd had nine words of English at eight o'clock, bellowing "the flea on the feather on the bird in the egg in the nest in the hole in the bog" like she'd been born in Clare.
That's the magic and I'm not even being romantic about it. The song does a job that no amount of small talk could do. You cannot stay a stranger to a person while you're both shouting about a flea. It's chemically impossible. The bog seals it.
We finished late. I missed the reasonable hour I'd promised myself by a wide margin. And here's the part that gets me. We swapped no numbers. Nobody added anybody on anything. The German girl walked off into the dark towards her hostel, the Cork lads back to their wedding, the Donegal woman put the whistle back in her handbag like nothing had happened. I'll likely never see a single one of them again.
And that's not sad. I thought it'd be sad, driving home, but it isn't. Because for three hours in a pub in Mayo, eleven people who owed each other nothing made something together and then let it go, the way you're meant to. The session doesn't need to last. That's the whole point of it. You build the thing — verse on verse, stranger on stranger — and then you let the green grass grow all around, and you go home better than you came.
I never did get the harmonium. Best wreck of a trip I've had in years.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002 (Seamus)
P.S. — Rattlin was on the windowsill when I got back near two in the morning, perfectly awake, perfectly unbothered, as though he'd known the whole time I'd be late and had simply chosen not to worry about it. I sometimes think that cat knows more about how a night will go than I do. I gave him a bit of the good ham and we sat in the dark a while. Neither of us said anything. It was grand.