Let the busy world be hushed: Music filled his every day...
In his latest column, Let the Busy World Be Hushed, Fr Jason Murphy remembers the late Fintan McManus in his own special way...
The sun’s rays danced on the rippling waters of Lough Erne as the boy sat aloft on the back street of his home overlooking the wide expanse of the lake below, tying tight the broken fishing line he had used as strings to put the final touches to his makeshift guitar. It was made from a wooden cigar box he had watched empty over the months previous as it sat on the shelf of McBrien’s shop not far from his home in the townland of Corradillar in Co Fermanagh.
The waters too lapped rhythmically along the shores of the peninsula in this place where music was borne along its waves, a peninsula that stretched out as far as it could reach from the far side of the New bridges, before the waters separated it from the elusive Trasna island in the middle of the lake to the near side of the shore at Derrylin. It was here his mother’s people rowed on cots to sing and play music at spraois in little houses dotted around.
Songs that filled the caverns of his mind that he had heard his mother Rose and his aunt Molly sing when people gathered in, old melodies handed down from one generation to the next at firesides in the little thatched homesteads around. Folk songs too, heard on the wireless, artists like John Denver who sang songs that resonated deep in his heart. Melodies were held prisoner in his mind, as his fingers tapped and his feet danced in every borrowed moment, yearning to be set free in the strumming of his guitar, to infuse the air around the Lough, as with all the music that ever was played, scenting it with the sweet aroma of song and story, breathed in by the people of Fermanagh since first it was that generations past around these shores danced and sang.
On that back street of his home, he picked out the first chords of the tunes he had heard, the purest music he might ever play, innocent and naïve, uncorrupted, the music of a boy and his makeshift guitar, tentatively plucking the strings, which once caught perch and bream from the waters below.
As for all who grow with the years that pass, they draw water from the well of childhood and, in all his days to come, he would seek to recapture these moments in the music he played and composed, 'Trevor’s Rooster', 'The Guns of the Magnificent Seven' and 'The Bouzouki Player's Nightmare', reels that reminded of those boyhood evenings sitting at the side of his mother as she sang in the company of neighbours or alone on the shore with his guitar, pure and unaffected, only the talent of his forefathers resonating through the strings.
He was a quiet boy, the younger of two, born to Francie McManus, fine and tall from one side of the lough and Rose Gunn from the other. Hers was a family steeped in music and so it was that music filled his every day. All that breathed around the shores influenced his playing from the call of the curlew to the rustling of the reeds. From these days as a boy growing in view of the lough to his days in university, music formed part of all the friendships he knew.
For it was a language that formed deep and lasting bonds whenever musicians were to meet. There was no need for talk about the weather, a handshake sufficed as Fintan picked up his guitar, while another eased air into an accordion and another familiar face readied their flute. The instruments themselves provided the introductions, embracing each other in a symbiotic dance of air and strings that warmed the spirit and carried him back to the ceilidh houses all along the lough.
As they years passed, he created a sound that was his very own in the guitars he gave life to from sheets of finest wood, painstakingly over time, cutting and inlaying to form the perfect sound. Bouzoukis too from cedar and spruce with ebony along the fingerboards. His mother’s cousin, Paddy Gunn, made fiddles too in his days as a boy for men who learned and played by ear.
So it was that creativity gurgled through his veins, yearning to be set free. Though a genius, he shunned the limelight and, in his playing, faded into the background, giving others the centre stage. He was the essence of humility despite his talent, playing for the love of music, as he played in quiet company, his wife at his side, in the midst of ordinary people who sat in the corner of a bar.
So it was that his creativity was wrought in silence, by the shores of Lough Erne where the curlew might be found, time alone to hear the cuckoo or the nightjar sing a song, and spend time in the caverns of the mind, to hear what re-echoes within its chambers and the music that abounds, if we each dare to listen as with the boy and his guitar.
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