Padraig O’Keeffe

Pádraig O’Keeffe was born in October 1887 in Glounthane, near Scartaglen and Castleisland, Co Kerry. His father, John, was a school principal and he was the eldest of nine children. His mother, Margaret O’Callaghan came from a musical family and his uncle, Cal O’Callaghan, was a well-known fiddler.
After training in Dublin he became a schoolmaster in the local national school, but the job didn’t suit his bohemian temperament and fondness for drink and he was dismissed in 1920.
But as a music teacher he was dedicated and respected. He could read and write both tonic solfa and staff. He passed on hundreds of old tunes to his pupils, neatly written out on copybook pages. His most famous pupils were Denis Murphy and his sister Julia Clifford of Lisheen.
Seamus Ennis first met him at Easter, 1946: “Pádraig was a man well over average height, slightly stooped, with an old cap and gabardine giving the impression that he had once been a fine and much heavier figure of a man. Living alone and its consequential neglect had pulled him down a bit, but in no way detracted from his wit and strong hearty voice.
“His voice was versatile and he was a very good mimic of local characters and learned folk in his anecdotes of which he had a remarkable fund.
“His face was loose and flabby and extremely facile and some of his grimaces were excruciatingly funny. His laugh was a sort of a snort – a nasal explosion which was itself a further cause for mirth.”
Pádraig O’Keeffe never married, but called his fiddle “the Mrs.” It gave him no trouble at all: “just one stroke across the belly and she purrs,” he would joke.
Like Donegal fiddler John Doherty, he often travelled without his fiddle, but pubs like Lyons and Horans in Castleisland would always provide him with one. He used to travel by foot, to Knocknagree and Ballydesmond where he’d stay for a fair or pattern “and be found where the porter and the music were at their best.”
Flowing style
Ennis described his technique as “a light, agile, flowing style with a wonderful pulsating vigour in the dance rhythms, with a tendency to gay, wild abandon in the slides and polkas.”
He added: “I am no expert on the bow, but I remember Pádraig finishing his fast music on the up-bow and I’ve noticed his pupils do the same.”
While he could be gay with the polkas and slides, his music also had something of the lonesomeness of East Clare and he was a master of the slow airs. “No-one would ever play an air on the fiddle the way he played it,” according to box player Johnny O’Leary, who played with him regularly in Castleisland.
“He had many slow airs,” recalled Seamus Ennis: Lament for O’Neill and Lament for O’Donnell were great favourites and O’Rahilly’s Grave and The Banks of the Danube and others – all strangers to me at the time. Another old piece we asked to hear again and again was called in Irish Suas an Cnoc – Up the Hill, and was a variant of my grandfather’s tune The Trip We Took Over the Mountain.”
When playing the old lullaby The Old Man Rocking the Cradle, He would take the big iron key used to lock the pub’s door, place it between his teeth, using it as a variable mute against the bridge of the fiddle. He would hold his audience spellbound as he made the fiddle utter “Mama, Mama” at the end of each melody line.
He died on February 22, 1963. A bronze bust erected in his honour stands in the village of Scartaglen, inscribed: “Last of the fiddle masters of Sliabh Luachra.” His memory is celebrated each October bank holiday with Padraig O’Keeffe weekend in Castleisland.
Discography
The Sliabh Luachra Fiddle Master, Pádraig O’Keeffe, RTE
Kerry Fiddles, Pádraig O’Keeffe, Denis Murphy, Julia Clifford, Topic 1977