Garret Barry (piper)
He is credited with many tunes that are still in the repertoire of players of Irish traditional music such as ‘Garrett Barry's jig', ‘The Humours of Gl(e)in', and ‘I buried my wife and danced on top of her'.
According to his relatives, he was raised on a farm in the townland of Kylea, Inagh parish, on the shores of Cloonmackan Lough, in an area known as Garraí na Saileog or the Garden of Willows.
Contemporary with Garrett's adolescent years, a reputable poet and teacher, named Seamus Mac Cruitín (James MacCurtin), ran a hedge school close to the Barry farmstead.
MacCurtin claimed to be the last in a long line of hereditary bardic poets and also taught local children a wide range of subjects in what must have been very informal circumstances.
Tradition has it that Garrett Barry, on occasion, played for this albeit rudimentary but earnest establishment and must have acquired much of MacCurtin's enthusiasm for cultural subjects.
An old neighbour of the Barry family claimed that he had received some tutoring from a Kerry piper and some of the repertoire and style of that region are thought to have been prevalent in his music.
[13] In his early career as a travelling musician, despite his blindness and the lack of infrastructure, Barry seems to have exhibited a remarkable ability to avail himself to many hosting families over a large part of west Clare.
Other musicians, who had known Barry in their youth and acknowledged his legacy into the twentieth century were Thady Casey from Annagh, Hugh Curtin in Cloghaun Beg and Nell Galvin (née McCarthy) of Moyasta.
[16] Though born almost twenty years after the piper's death, Willie Clancy is widely believed to have exhibited much of Barry's style and repertoire through his father's insistent teaching.
[17] His interpretation of slow airs or laments, also of some jigs as improvised ‘pieces’, offered a contrasting vein of musical expression, no doubt informed by his knowledge of and ability to perform Irish songs as sean-nós.
[5] Stories claim that Gilbert made his old friend a coffin and brought his body back to Inagh cemetery for burial, though the precise location of his grave was unidentified and is still locally disputed.
Even Willie Clancy, a native of Miltown Malbay, who had learned much of Barry's music from his father Gilbert as a flute player, had grown up never actually having heard the Irish pipes.
[21] In 1936, the arrival of Johnny Doran, a traveller from County Wicklow, revived such interest in the pipes that Clancy and his friend Martin Talty were both moved to take up the instrument.
[6] Despite his alleged talent and influence, Garret Barry is surprisingly absent from Francis O’Neill's unique and comprehensive book, Irish Musicians and Minstrels (1913).
Between 1873 and 1905, O’Neill worked in the Chicago City Police Force and had access to numerous Irish immigrants who supplied him with considerable amounts of information concerning their native music.
Perhaps Garrett Barry's general involvement with private functions, lodging with those families who had more of a permanent stake in the land, meant that fewer people encountered him inside the relatively isolated community of west Clare.
