Shortly after we moved to Chicago in the mid-1970s, my then-wife and I visited a North Side Irish pub to drink beer and listen to the music, provided by a trio whose repertoire consisted of standards associated with so-called ballad groups, known by that name across the pond if not in America. During a break I struck up a conversation with one member, remarking politely that we were enjoying the music. "It's shite," he snapped. I had the impression that he wanted to be playing the hipper kind of Irish folk then finding its way to these shores.

Like so many of us of that generation, I was introduced to traditional Irish music through the most famous ballad group of them all, the Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem. (The same can be said of Bob Dylan, by the way; his early compositions sometimes borrowed melodies from that source.) A decade later, I found the Dubliners, also a ballad group but a rougher, more defiant, authentic-sounding one, via their album More of the Hard Stuff. I listen to it even now, many thousands of records later. It remains among my favorites in any folk genre.

The Clancys & Makem, then living in New York City, introduced their music to an urbanizing Irish population that till then had little interest in the nation's rural music of another era. The Clancys/Makem approach was half true to the old style, half to the kind of stage-Irishness we Americans used to encounter in everything from faux-Irish characters in movies and on television to cringe-inducing Irish Spring soap commercials. The bloody realities of Northern Ireland's Troubles would be arriving soon enough, when the maudlin ignorance dissipated at least among sensible people and a more reality-centered assessment of a nation of imperfect human beings emerged. (Here I pause to recommend Fintan O'Toole's scathing We Don't Know Ourselves [2022] for a check on popular fables about Ireland. An Irish political journalist of international reputation, O'Toole contends that the new Ireland is a considerable improvement over the old one.)

In my own case, I grew up with Irish ancestors on my mother's side. Like so many, they sailed over during the mid-19th century potato famine and found their way through Canada into America. If they thought of themselves as equal parts Irish and American, I never heard a whisper of it. When I discovered Irish folk music in my 20s, I was drawn solely to that music's many attractive qualities, not to any residual nationalism attached to a country I had never lived in or even visited, or for that matter had any particular desire to. As one Irishman put it succinctly in something I read not long ago, "You're Irish if you're an Irish citizen. And if you're not an Irish citizen, you're not Irish." He had had it up to here, I inferred, with American tourists boasting of Irish roots.

Which brings me to the Dublin City Ramblers, the stars of this two-disc retrospective on the occasion of their half century on stage, in pub, and at concert hall. Few bands of any kind survive that long. As I gather from the liner notes, that's three generations' worth of line-ups. Remarkable.

Beyond that, they're a ballad group -- surely the longest-living one ever -- stylistically situated between the Clancys and the Dubliners. More instruments, fuller arrangements than either of the just-cited, but many recognizable numbers from the same pool. As Irish performers from the Chieftains onward created a more sophisticated presentation of traditional music in the 1970s, they expanded the repertoire and dug up their own informants for the songs. With the ballad groups, formed mostly to encourage sing-alongs (dry-throated or lubricated), there are practically none of the variations characteristic of traditional songs in the wild. You hear one "Whiskey in the Jar," "The Irish Rover," "Whistling Gypsy" or "The Parting Glass," and you've heard them all, or at least their lyrics and melodies. Thus Irish folk is transformed into trad-inflected pop designed to be instantly familiar.

There are still ballad groups (e.g., the popular High Kings), but approaches to the native music have changed over the decades, most famously in the days of bands -- as opposed to groups -- that dominated the scene over much of the latter half of the last century. (I think of the Bothy Band, Boys of the Lough, Patrick Street, Planxty, De Dannan, Altan and others less celebrated.) Theirs was an orchestral formulation, with pipe and fiddle tunes -- all but vanished from the ballad groups -- restored to prominence and carried in fresh arrangements along with a proper respect for the non-standard but genuinely traditional variants of songs and ballads. The younger players who participated in what was marketed as "Celtic music" (though in ethnomusicological fact there is no pan-Celtic music; some historians argue that Celts themselves may have been something of a literary invention) demonstrated a deeper, more learned engagement with this antique music than most who labored in ballad groups.

I exclude Liam Clancy, Tommy Makem and the Dubliners from the list of the unaware, by the way. Modern-day, post-Celtic Irish artists such as the band Lankum and the solo singer Lisa O'Neill definitely know their stuff.

Yet ballad groups produced and still produce material that even those who congratulate themselves on their superior taste can enjoy in spite of themselves. If you permit yourself to tolerate a degree of hokeyness, romantic nationalism and dopey stereotype, you can also appreciate that beneath it all these are fine songs and the performers are music-business pros who know how to sell them, "sell" being not necessarily a criticism in this context.

Over time, the groups have incorporated more and more material from folk-informed Irish songwriters, currently and notably the estimable John Spillane. Among the most successful of the prior generation was the late Pete St. John, a gifted figure, some of whose creations are routinely mistaken for artifacts of distant vintage. His gorgeous, much-covered "The Fields of Athenry," which shows up early in the CD under review, is one example. He also claims the title tune, another outstanding composition, except for....

In it St. John wrote a line that strikes some attentive listeners as objectionable. The objection, specifically, is that it is racist. (I'm not quoting it here; if you don't know what I'm referring to, you can look it up.) Yet the song feels so perfect otherwise that one is reflexively protective of St. John's intentions. The narrative is related in the voice of a Dublin working stiff called Sean Dempsey, and one wants to believe that the writer is trying to sing the world of Dempsey even when the latter is expressing lamentable sentiments. I don't pretend to know who's right. Listen to the song and make up your own mind.

[ visit the Dublin City Ramblers online ]