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Jenny Bach Interview

Narrator: Jenny Bach

Interviewer: Dáithí Sproule

Date: 11 May, 2018

DS: Dáithí Sproule

JB: Jenny Bach

[BEGIN JENNY BACH PART 01—filename: A1013a_EML_mmtc]

DS: I’m here with Jenny Bach to talk about the history of music and dance in the Twin Cities.

Jenny probably knows the date – is it the 11th?

JB: Today is the 11th of May, 2018.

DS: Brilliant. You even know the year. And we’re at the Celtic Junction.

JB: In Saint Paul, Minnesota.

DS: In Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States of America, Earth.

JB: Indeed. (laughter)

DS: So I start all these here asking people about their background. Are you born and raised here,

or are you from somewhere else?

JB: No, born and raised in the Twin Cities, Minneapolis environs.

DS: And your parents, what is their background? Are they from here?

JB: My father was born and raised in Wisconsin, and my mother was born and raised here in the

Twin Cities.

DS: Whereabouts in Wisconsin?

JB: A little town the other side of La Crosse called Coon Valley, a very Norwegian place. That’s

his heritage.

DS: Your surname is Bach. That sounds like a German name, we’d think of it as German,

Austrian.

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JB: It does sound like a German name, but it is a Norwegian name, and I know Bach had lots of

children and grandchildren and who knows where they went, but the small amount of research

and information I have on that part of my family is that it’s Norwegian.

DS: Brilliant. And your mother?

JB: My mother has some German on her dad’s side that’s pretty close, but her mom’s family

was here since the 1700s. That’s my one claim to two or three drops of Scots-Irish blood, but,

other than that, the Irish stuff that I’ve done is totally because it’s an adopted love of mine – as I

have Irish feet.

DS: Aha. Well, hang on.

(a pause)

DS: Part Two. We just checked we were functional. The way I look at it too is, say your earliest

childhood you remember, was music and dance present or at all a factor in your life, you know,

in your early years, under the age of ten, at school or at home?

JB: Yea, back in the day, they taught music in school. They don’t do that so much any more.

DS: Of course, yea.

JB: I took piano lessons, but I always had dancing in my heart. I was a dancer when I was

probably four. You know, tap, ballet and acrobatic was what everybody did at the corner dance

studio.

DS: Really, wow.

JB: I have little, very funky pictures of myself which I will not share with the project (laughs) of

me in grade school in dance costumes. I always wanted to be a ballerina and never did make that.

I was always better at tap dancing, which translated well into hard shoe Irish dancing. I had

dancing lessons. I sang in the choir in high school. I was in the dance line in high school, high

kickers, you know, and looked for dancing after I graduated from high school, which is a hard

thing to find, which is what eventually led me to Irish dancing.

DS: Did the idea of Irishness or Saint Patrick’s Day or anything like that impinge on you when

you were young, or was that nothing to do with your life?

JB: Nothing to do with my life at all.

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DS: Some of the other people who were raised in the Twin Cities talk about the German

community, the Irish community, whatever community. Was there an ethnic community element

in your life either, of any sort?

JB: Well, I identified more with my dad’s Norwegian heritage, but he’s only first generation

American. My grandfather came from Norway. My grandmother on that side came from

Denmark. They met and married in this country. So I grew up in the 50s, and I think a lot of that

culture stuff, I tend to think of it as coming through the mother, and my mom was American. Her

family’s been here for years and years and years, since the 1700s, and so there was nothing

particular about that. People would ask around here. It’s a very Scandinavian area, and the

question was, “Oh, are you Swedish or Norwegian?” The answer, of course, was, “I am

Norwegian.” But my dad didn’t necessarily encourage that. That’s what he came out of. There

are syttende mai, 17th of May, celebrations, and there is a Norwegian community, but we weren’t

really a part of it -- I was not a part of it.

DS: There’s something very refreshing about hearing about somebody who was American, like

your mother, (laughter) particularly for us, coming from Ireland, and there’s a simplicity, even

though we have our troubles in the North with the Protestants and the Catholics. There’s still a

simplicity about just being Irish, and then as soon as you come to America, people are always

something else. For somebody just to say, “I’m American.” That’s great. (laughter)

Did you go to college?

JB: I did. I went to La Crosse, Wisconsin State University at La Crosse, for a year and then

could not afford to go back, and then financed a year here at the University of Minnesota Twin

Cities campus. Then I didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I quit, and I went to work at various

places. After a while, it was the day of the Bachelor of Elective Studies -- nobody needs a

degree, you can do anything you want, and if you really want a degree, you can cobble

something together. But then it started to be that I couldn’t get jobs. I couldn’t apply for

promotional jobs where I was because I didn’t have a college degree. The day that somebody

with a physical education degree got to apply for an accounting series for promotion, and I

couldn’t even apply, that was the end. So I went back in night school, and years and years I took

classes in night school at the University of Minnesota, and then ultimately I had to quit work to

finish because there weren’t enough classes that I could take to finish my degree.

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DS: What year would this have been about?

JB: That would have been 1984, 1985. The fall of 1984 I would have quit and took my

retirement money and spent it to support myself and pay tuition. I think I had two quarters left,

two fulltime quarters left, and then my dad died, just as I was about to be done. So I didn’t finish,

and I had to go and do make-up tests. It was right before finals, it was in the spring, and so I

actually graduated in June then of 1985.

DS: But what about the Irish dance and so on? When did that start?

JB: Well, that actually started for me in the mid-70s, 74ish, after I graduated high school, so that

was probably after those first two years of university in Wisconsin and here in Minnesota. I was

looking for a place to dance, and I tried a lot of different folk dance groups, which is something

that’s always been interesting to me, and dance was interesting to me, and that was something

that was open to adults in community. I tried the Hungarian dancers, and I tried…Hungarian I

remember the most. There was International folk dancing, and they were all sort of ok. While I

was here, not going to school, and working – I was working for Abbott Northwestern Hospital,

or it was just Abbott at that time. I had a friend there, and she invited me to dinner at her house,

and while I was there, a friend of hers called her up and asked her would she like to go to Irish

dancing. We said, “No, no – we’re just sitting down for dinner, blah, bah, blah.” So that was

enough of that, but an hour later the friend called again and said, “Well, my ride didn’t come. It’s

now an hour later, are you done? Would you now like to go to Irish dancing?” So we both went,

and Nan’s friend that she was waiting for to give her a ride was Mike Whalen. Of course, Mike

Whalen seems to be at the root of everything. So we all trooped over to Saint Mark’s Catholic

School on Marshall Avenue there, and there were live musicians playing and a very welcoming

community. I remember Jack Fallon said, “I don’t care what anybody says about you – I think

you’re all right.” He’d just met me – I was like, “What?” (laughs)

DS: Somebody would have been teaching dancing there?

JB: Yes, I think it was Mary Hedlund at that time – her name was Hedlund – and Marie Ladwig,

which was Mary’s partner at that time.

DS: What was that name…?

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JB: Marie Ladwig. They were teaching, and I would guess that it would have been Mary

MacEachron, it might have been Jamie – there were a couple of musicians that were there. And

then, magic of all magic, we all finished this little workshop – they taught threes and sevens, and

we danced some dances, and then the Dayhills were in town, and everybody was going to go

down to Scanlon’s. “Does anybody want to go down and have some more music and dancing?”

DS: Straight after, that same night?

JB: Yea, straight after, that same night. So I went.

DS: And that was Scanlon’s in mid 70s?

JB: What was it before? Was it O’Connell’s before then?

DS: O’Connell’s, yes.

JB: Ok, it would have been O’Connell’s. Here were people, it wasn’t like something that was

over on the side that was a little remnant of, I don’t know, the old country or whatever ethnic

dance was. But this was something that was alive, and people were doing it out in public in a real

place. I just thought it was the best thing since sliced bread, and I got ready to leave, and some

person that I have no idea who they were, I’ve never met them again in my life, said, “Bye, see

you next week.” I thought, “Maybe you will.” And that was my friend, that was kind of the ring

leader of that experience, she was living in Saint Paul. I know now it was down where Ferns is,

down by the Cathedral. But I was a Minneapolis girl. That was far away, a land far away and

very strange, and they saw me on the bus home at midnight or whatever it was, and I had to

figure out where Saint Mark’s was and how to get there on the bus the next week, but I showed

up. I did a very Minnesota non-Irish thing – I showed up actually on time. I wasn’t on Irish time.

Anyway, that was the beginning of it all. I went back week after week. That was the summer that

Mary and Marie left and went to Ireland and tried to get certified as Irish dance teachers.

DS: Mooncoin as a group didn’t exist at that time?

JB: It did not exist, no. There was the Saint Mark’s ongoing thing. There is stuff that came

before me that you probably talked to other people about – the dances at the Commercial Club

and stuff earlier in the 40s and 50s with Leah Curtin and people that actually came from Ireland.

That’s not my time.

DS: So you learned your steps and your figures and so on at Saint Mark’s?

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JB: At Saint Mark’s, yea. We were all learning them all together. Mary – and maybe, Marie – I

don’t know where else she would have taken lessons – Mary and Marie took lessons from

Florence Hart, who was a Scottish teacher, because it was the closest thing to any Irish stuff here,

and somehow – I’m not sure I know how – somehow they got connected with an Irish dance

teacher in Chicago and later on in the process, after Mary and Marie parted company, and I got a

little more interested in step dancing, we would go to Chicago for lessons. We would drive to

Chicago and back in a day and go and get a lesson from Barbara McNulty.

DS: Wow, that’s devotion. To and fro in one day?

JB: Yea.

DS: My god.

JB: Yea, my god. (laughter)

DS: You must have liked it.

JB: Well, we were all having a good time, you know, so yea, why not?

DS: You know, there’s a funny thing that occurs to me, as you described getting into, instantly

getting in at the deep end that one night – Irish music, the session scene and the social scene was

in bars, went to bars before or after. Would that have been a new thing in your life? Would that

have been a change as well? The only reason I mention that…it’s interesting…I’m interested in

the things that are talked about, and I’m interested in the things that aren’t talked about, and

obviously we have to be discreet, what we’re talking about – talking about bars and drink and so

on. But on the other hand bars and drink are central to, were central to our community, so

therefore it just crossed my mind, did you have a more sober life before you got into Irish dance

or, you know what I mean? Any thoughts on that?

JB: No, I didn’t go out to bars very much. In college I did a little bit. La Crosse was a big town

to the people that came to that college from places like Prairie du Chien, other smaller towns of

two thousand or something, and La Crosse is probably fifty thousand something. Drink had

always been available to me. I mean, if I wanted a drink of beer my dad would give me drink of

beer, so it wasn’t something like where I turned eighteen and beforehand when people would go

out drinking…and that was a big deal in La Crosse, an eighteen year old drinking at that time,

beer anyway. I just didn’t find it very interesting, so it was not really a way that I socialized. I’m

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sure I went out for a few drinks, but anyway it was not really the stuff that I did. But it was

different to go in community. It wasn’t to go out and hope you’d find a date or something like

that, or that the alcohol itself was very interesting in and of itself, and I do have alcoholism in my

family, so I kind of keep an eye out for that. But it was really all more about the community and

the activity and what people were doing there. And yes, I did have some drinks, of course.

(laughter)

DS: You had one or two.

JB: I did.

DS: But the way you described it reminded me of my own life, because, in brief, I would have

been very studious and stay-at-home – hiding up in my room, doing my homework all the time –

I had to be thrown out of the house to go and visit friends, and then I was involved with the

singing and Skara Brae and so on, but still my father and mother didn’t have any interest in pubs.

Just like you said, they weren’t against it, it wasn’t there, I never went to pubs myself, I didn’t

know anything about pubs. And then as soon as I started going to the session scene…with you it

was the dance scene, with me it was the tunes, the jigs and reels. That was different from the

songs. As soon as I started going to sessions in Dublin, I knew dozens and dozens of people. My

father was totally astounded. The first time he came to the Four Seasons to a session in Dublin,

he said, “I couldn’t believe it. Everybody knew you, and you knew everybody.” This was such a

change. This instant community is such a wonderful part of the music and dance -- it’s great, and

dance.

JB: And the thing that I’ve always liked about it is it’s participatory. If you go out to hear music

in American culture generally, you’re going to consume music, listen to somebody else play.

Even when the Dayhills were playing the gig, they would invite somebody up on stage, they’d

invite somebody to do a step, and that was very attractive, and different, yea.

DS: And again that’s parallel completely to a turning point for me where I was interested in rock

and roll, rock and electric bands and all this stuff, and it didn’t really change my life in itself, but

I remember a pivotal conversation with a friend of mine and – I would have been about twenty-

three, twenty-four – I’d already been playing for years. And he said – this again was in Dublin –

he said, “If you’re interested in rock and roll, or you’re interested even in classical, you’re never

going to sit down with Pinchas Zukerman or Eric Clapton, or meet them. There’s always going

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to be this big gap between you and them. If you’re interested in Irish traditional music, you can

get on a bus, you can go down the street, and sit with the greatest musicians in the world.” And

even jazz was much more accessible – you could sit with the greatest people. And that isn’t

literally why I changed course, but it was definitely true, and the participation, being part and

close to other people who are in the same boat.

JB: And it seemed open. People could come, people could go. And some people, I’m sure, did

consume, but, you know, everybody has their part, whether you’re teaching language, or whether

you’re dancing or playing music, or whether you’re in the theater, or, I don’t know – there are

just a lot of parts.

DS: When did the Mooncoins start, or when did a formal dance group that you were part of and

an organizer of, how and when?

JB: Mary and Marie went to Ireland in 75ish maybe, maybe 76ish, and when they came back, in

that following January -- so it was in the winter then -- they decided they were going to form a

performance group, and they invited me to be a part of it. We used to meet over at Mary’s house

on Goodrich and practice, and our debut, if I’m not mistaking my memory, would have been in

March at Saint Patrick’s Day. We had our sign, and we went down and jumped into the parade

down in Saint Paul, and I think we might have had some…we did have some performances. We

did that all day long. I got terribly sick afterwards because, of course, it was cold and rainy and

miserable, and we were shouting and marching and going from place to place as people do. I

think it was that first Saint Patrick’s Day there was a céilí above the Green Grass Grocery, which

is on Hampden and Raymond, and it’s the Odd Fellows Hall now, or maybe it was then, but that

was above the Green Grass Grocery. It was packed. We were wandering around in our little

green dresses and little Irish tweed vests and hats and so forth. We chose green because we

didn’t think anyone here would know we were Irish unless we were wearing green. And I think

we all had our capes embroidered, but there was probably a lot of embroidery yet to do on the

dresses, so we looked pretty plain.

DS: Did somebody local make the dresses, or did you order them from somewhere?

JB: We had somebody local make the dresses, but that just means the dress, the material and the

seams and stuff, but we all did our own embroidery, some of us by hand, some of us better than

others. So we had that, and we went to the céilí, and I don’t even remember who was playing.

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They asked then if we would do a dance, because we were all these weird people wandering

around in green, and it was one of the first experiences of really being lifted up by a crowd in the

performance. There have been a few of those. Everybody was so excited, and it was so new.

Everybody was interested, and here was this dance troupe – my goodness.

DS: How many of you would there have been at that point?

For sure there were eight of us, because we could do eight hand, so I’m guessing maybe there

were another two or three, maybe thirteen or fourteen of us.

JB: Was Nick in it at that point, or did he get in later?

JB: No. It would have been Kevin Kline, Aidan Kelly, Ray Lynch, Roger Doyle. At the

beginning it was Mary and Marie, and then they had the falling out, and that’s when I became

more active as a co-leader after Marie left. Mary Hedlund, Marie, me, Virginia McBride…

DS: Was Mary Coy in it at that time?

JB: No.

DS: Who else would there have been? Beth?

JB: No, not yet. I’ll take a look at this picture because this is one of our earliest ones. You know,

I think Laura MacKenzie might have been in it at that point. Mm, that’s Laura. Oh, Sue…Sue,

who works at Saint Stephen’s. Oh, my gosh, Jimmy Mangan. Looks like Pat Vance. Oh, sorry

I’ve got to come over and take a look. So Kevin, Jimmy, Sheila, that’s me. That’s Sue – I can’t

remember Sue’s last name at the moment. Sheila, Laura – Laurie we called her at that point. I see

eight of us. That’s Roger Doyle.

DS: Lovely, and of course the costumes look so lovely, particularly compared to the

present…dare I express an opinion? (laughter)…abominations.

JB: We are quite subdued compared to the costumes of today, yea. So Nick and Mary Coy came

later, not that much later.

DS: So part of it was, you really loved the feeling of performance?

JB: It gave a purpose, you know. Well, I like community and being able to dance that way. I

wanted to be good, you know, and that was always a tension, well, how much do you have to

practice, how good do you have to be, how much do you take this expression of culture and

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make it a performance that has to be done in a certain way? I don’t know – probably those

questions are still out there.

DS: You were tied into the idea of Irishness now, no matter what, because of the Irish dancing –

dancing at Irish events and so on. How was that? Did that just feel natural?

JB: Yea, it did. It felt very natural, we met more immigrants, and in the early 80s the Mooncoins

went to Ireland.

DS: What year did the Mooncoins go first?

JB: I want to say it was ’82.

DS: And that would have been in the summer?

JB: That would have been in the summer.

DS: All of that means I must have seen you over there, although you may or may not remember

it.

JB: (looking at photos) Do I have any dates on those? I keep thinking it was ’82. I don’t have the

dates on those. Well, anyhow, we went to learn set dancing. We were some of the first people

that brought that back. Just last year or the year before, Mooncoins had their fortieth anniversary

– good lord – and they performed at the Irish Fair, and they asked some of us ancient former

members to dance with them, and I said, “Well, with my bad knee, maybe I could dance one of

the sets.” So I was going back through all my notes, because that would be one of the things that

I tried to do, would be just like the Coimisiún has, well they may have more now, but they had

three little books of céilí dances, and they had little figures, little drawings and described how the

dancers were to move. Well, when we did the set dancing, that’s what I tried to do for the group

– I would write it down so that we could remember what it was that we were supposed to do.

Preparing for this I was looking through my notes, so I go to the internet -- well, there are all

kinds of videos of people dancing, I thought, “Oh, this is way more fun, to go to Ireland and

make some friends,” which not everybody can do, I know. Anyway, that’s how we did it.

DS: Where did you go for the set dancing? Where exactly in Ireland did you go?

JB: Well, it started because there was an active Comhaltas branch here at that time, and we

hosted one of the Comhaltas tours that the Irish American Cultural Institute used to bring over,

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and on one of those tours were some set dancers – Paddy Monahan from County Galway, from

Ballinasloe, and Treasa Ní Cheannaigh was on that, the step dancer. Well, anyway, we asked

Paddy when he was here if we brought a group to Ireland would they teach us their set. We also

then went through Comhaltas and got the names of people in Clare and in Kerry – probably

Clare, I think we knew Séamus Begley anyway in Kerry.

DS: And you’d met him because he was over doing Comhaltas?

JB: You know, I don’t remember. And maybe we contacted him through Comhaltas, but Paddy

we had because he was here on the Comhaltas tour, and he would be delighted, of course, if we’d

come. So anyhow we went, and some other people we just wrote, and we ended up with Martin

Byrne in Ennis and his wife, Bridie, and then Paddy and Ena and his crew in Ballinasloe, and

Séamus Begley in Kerry. I can’t remember – these pictures here are all from Clare. Oh, and then

there was…a group called the Morrisseys used to come and play here at MacCafferty’s and Mary

knew them, and so through them we went to Tipperary and somehow found a teacher – maybe

that was Comhaltas too -- we found a teacher in Tipperary too, so we learned the Ballycommon

Set from her, the Kerry Set from Séamus, and the Ballinasloe Half Set from Paddy and the Clare

Set.

DS: And that was all the one trip?

JB: Yea, it wasn’t a long trip, it was amazing.

DS: Yea, you packed a lot in. Then you would have written down all these sets, would you?

JB: Yea, I would have written down all that stuff.

DS: Do you still have your notes that you wrote down?

JB: Yea, I found some of them – little red x’s and green x’s and o’s and things like that with

little dotted lines and descriptions of how to do it. That’s probably more intelligible than the step

dancing stuff I would write. I’m very visual, with words. Sheila Jordan and I go round and

round, because she’ll say, “The step goes da-da-dattin-da,” and I’ll say, “And the step goes, tip

and one two and three,” or something.

DS: Copies of some of that stuff, even if it was just a page or two, would be fantastic to have in

the archive. I’m sure Brian, his ears will perk up, when he hears that. Every person I talk to – I

just talked to Jamie Gans, because he was here, and we did an interview – I’m just so amazed at

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how brave you all were in going and making dates with all these people in Ireland and going to

their houses, and so on. I think that’s wonderful. I was too…I wouldn’t have done it in a million

years because I was too shy or too something, and, of course, that was the right thing to do, and

people must have been delighted that you came to them.

JB: They were delighted, and I don’t know if this is really true or not, but my sense of it was that

the 70s was kind of a renaissance of interest in Irish music and dance. Even when you read about

people in Chicago, the 30s, 40s, then they kind of drifted – it wasn’t as strong in the 50s into the

60s, and then the folk movement and various other things, and by the time it got to the middle of

the 70s people were interested. Martin Byrne at one point said to me, our teacher in Clare, “Well,

when I got your letter, I knew that it was going to be ok, that people were going to want to learn

this and continue on.”

DS: For our story of the music and dance in the Twin Cities, the 70s is the decade. There’s no

doubt about it. Everything circles round the 70s, and this moment is the first that I thought about

the fact that people talking about the growth of the music – music in general, culture – talk about

the 60s, you see. And even I would talk about the 60s because in the music the development that

happened in the 60s was immense and I was there, and I was watching it happening, but you’re

quite right, the 70s were an amazing decade as well, and it probably was a period when real

traditional music definitely blossomed, and dance, whereas the 60s, there was an awful lot of

what I would have known about, there was the folk groups, and guitar accompaniment, those

kind of developments, as well as rock and so on, whereas the 70s was when the real traditional

got up. The Bothy Band would be a fantastic example of it. Here you have a fantastic young

modern brilliant rocky, yet completely traditional band.

JB: Yes, even people stealing from the folk tradition… I can remember, and how I came across

it, I must have just been interested in the description, but I bought a Fairport Convention album,

and that definitely had some flavors of Irish traditional stuff in it. It might have been the first

recording I heard of, I think they have a recording of “Tam Lin.”

DS: Yea, that was great, and when you came back with the set dancing, well, sets weren’t done

here, you launched that.

JB: So we launched that, yea. We got a ride to the Philadelphia Céilí Festival on that – a couple

of times made some friends there.

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DS: And you went to Milwaukee too.

JB: We went to Milwaukee.

DS: How did you feel when you saw all these star, dazzling dancers at things like Milwaukee

and Philadelphia? They would have been very friendly to you, I’m sure.

JB: They were friendly, people were friendly. I would have to say that – I can’t tell you why –

but we all here in the 70s, it’s sort of my sense, that the people who did dancing long ago, and

then the people who started in the 70s, they all started together, and there was the sense that we

were somehow late to the party or imposters. We were all Americans or Irish Americans and

really when you look at the dancing kind of like it is now, little kids dance and little kids do

competition, and you retire when you’re eighteen. Maybe you go on and teach. And the music is

a little different. We had a lot of adult musicians and no kid musicians until these later years

here. And then you can get away with figure dancing, I think, so we would have been in our

early twenties, but really if you’re going to be a step dancer, that kind of needs to be imprinted

on your body. So I think that there always was a sense that we weren’t really as Irish or as good

as dancers in other parts of the country. There’s some pictures in my book – Mary and I went to

a feis in Cleveland to see one. Actually, I think it was an Oireachtas, just to see one. And there’s

a picture, we went down to Chicago to a feis, just to see one. The attitude of musicians from

elsewhere was different about the dancers. Here we were all one big community, but I can

remember one session in Caesar’s with some outside musicians playing in it, and the dancers

weren’t finished with their figure. We said, “Don’t stop, don’t stop,” and they were like, “Why

would we pay attention to you?” “Well, because the dance isn’t finished.” Our musicians would

have played on – those musicians were interested in their music.

DS: When I came over, which was ’78, it was very noticeable to me that the dancers and the

musicians were one community and hung out together, and the dancers were around at the

sessions whether they danced or not – they were part of the scene. And I thought that was very

nice, and it wasn’t really the case in Dublin, let’s say, and then on the east coast it was different

because the dancers were these elitist – elite, not elitist – brilliant dancers, but they were separate

in many ways. I like the fact that there was a oneness here.

JB: And one thing that I never realized until later because, of course, I came in totally ignorant,

but I thought it was so wonderful when I went to Saint Mark’s and they had people actually

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playing music and I didn’t realize… I don’t know if it was Patty Bronson or Laura MacKenzie or

somebody saying later, “Well, we were trying desperately to learn the tunes,” and they needed a

place to practice, and they needed us like we needed them. And to me it sounded as if they knew

exactly what they were doing, and it was only us dancers that had to learn our threes and sevens,

and all these strangers that kept crashing into each other.

[END JENNY BACH PART 01—filename: A1013a_EML_mmtc]

[BEGIN JENNY BACH PART 02—filename: A1013b_EML_mmtc]

DS: I meant to ask you too: did you do these qualifications or whatever, certificates for teaching?

JB: Oh, I did actually, yea.

DS: How did that work?

JB: Oh, my goodness. Well, we thought it was quite comprehensive, but nothing like it is today,

oh boy. I do actually have a TCRG certificate, signed by Tomás Ó Fearcheallaigh himself.

Somewhere probably in the early 80s, like ’82, ’83, I’m guessing, Mary, when she went with

Marie to learn dancing in Ireland, got her céilí dancing teaching certificate, and Marie got her

full certificate, which would be céilí and step dancing. So Mary decided she would go back

again, and we were going to open the school. We had Mooncoin going for a little while, and we

thought we would try and reach out to some young kids and do some teaching, so we decided to

start the Crossroads School of Irish Dance. That must have been going for a little while, and then

we thought we should be certified so that they could be in competition like everybody. We

studied. We had to go to Chicago to take the test. I don’t know if you could make a doctoral

thesis out of this or a dissertation out of this, but we used to make up words to the set dance

songs to remember them (sings): “This is the tale of three sea captains…” Anyway, we had all

kinds of silly words. You had to memorize the bars and the time signature, and you had to know

which tune was which, and then you had to be able to dance different rhythms, and you had to

teach. Anyway, we prepared all that, and we flew to Chicago to take this exam, and so that’s how

we got our certificates. My lovely parents, who supported me so much, I’m sure they had no idea

what was going on. I don’t think we got the results right away, because we got back and they had

had a cake made for us that said, “Congratulations, TCRG grads.” (laughter) It was very sweet.

15

Then we were able to enter kids into competition, which some kids did and some kids didn’t. But

we felt we were giving kids here more opportunity. We always tried to emphasize community

and performing for festivals and various things around and having a good time, besides doing the

competitions. And a lot of kids, if the culture isn’t around it, the closest one to do was Chicago –

try and talk kids and their families into going to Chicago…so a few of them did.

DS: What size would Crossroads have been? How many students would you have had at your

max?

JB: Oh, maybe twenty. (laughter) Then we had some kid kids and some adult kids. (looks at

photo) This is probably as big as it ever was.

DS: And, of course, for the recording, Jenny has her big photo album here.

JB: I would say twenty, twentyish, in the upper right, adults and kids. That’s probably as big as

we were. When we did stop doing that, the kids, of course, drifted off, but the adults stayed, and

that’s the genesis of the Knocknagow dancers.

DS: What would the years of the Crossroads have been then?

JB: Well, that’s a good question. I don’t know, I’d have to think about it. Roughly, late 70s or…

So this tea (in photo) is 1981, so I would say, ’78 to maybe ’83, ’84. I don’t know, somewhere in

there.

DS: But the Mooncoins continued anyhow?

JB: Mooncoins continued. They went longer while both Mary and I were there, and Mary left

first, and you’re going to ask me when that was – ah – late ‘80s maybe – and I stayed a few more

years after that. But then they kept going by themselves, and they went very strong for a while. I

think after forty years they may be struggling with some membership. Of course, there’s been all

this development of other schools and styles and new blood and all this stuff happening here.

DS: And how do you feel about that? It’s very different. It’s these big schools, and they’re all

competing a lot, and then it’s youngsters. It was noticeable too when we first met you that this

was a group of dancers that performed in a group with their costumes and so on as adults, which

really was not the norm, as far as we knew. You did Irish dancing as children and competed –

now maybe there’d be a few people even in Derry that I’d have been vaguely aware of, that

might have competed into their early twenties, but probably not, and then that was the end.

16

Separate from that then, you would have had people who went to céilís, which wasn’t the same

thing. In fact, when we went to céilís, we didn’t do steps. We walked around like contra dancers.

So it was striking that this was a group of people in their twenties, so that’s a huge thing about

the present boom, or the boom that has been around for a while, that people are so engrossed,

they’re so involved, and then they go to college, and that’s it, it’s all gone. It’s odd.

JB: Well, that’s a lot the way that… So the other world that I was in was tap and ballet and

acrobatics, and that’s kind of the same thing. That’s something that kids do, and then you can

open a dance school, and very few people do that. There’s no place to do that recreationally. So I

get off on my high horse of participatory culture versus consuming culture, and I think America

just consumes a lot of stuff, and we don’t create those spaces where everybody participates.

DS: That’s right. Did you ever read Erich Fromm?

JB: Yea, yea.

DS: So he had the famous book “The Art of Loving.” Did you read any of his other books?

JB: I don’t remember that I did.

DS: You can read a book, lots and lots of ideas, but sometimes you get just little ways of

thinking. So he had these expressions. One was activating and passivating activities. So,

activating, to take media, television is a passivating activity, you’re just going to sit there. Radio

is more activating, both for your mind and your body, you can walk around and so on. Then he

also had the idea of alienation. He was a scholar of Marx and Freud, and a very sympathetic

interpreter of Marx, that he was misinterpreted. I think it was Marx – maybe both of them talked

about alienation. An example of alienation and not alienation would be, you go into the shop and

buying a wrapped up piece of meat and bringing it home and cooking it. That’s completely

alienated, you’re alienated from the reality of what you’re doing, whereas going out a shooting

something, which I totally disapprove of, by the way, but you’re not alienated from what you’re

doing. So that’s your participatory thing I just connect with alienation, where culture is pre-

packaged and given to you as opposed to you actually doing it. It’s a huge thing. So as we talk

about traditional music as it continues in the Twin Cities and the sessions, the sessions are more

important than ever now. There are more of them, there are more people doing them. And it’s

pure, it’s totally participatory, obviously, and it’s folk culture – people working at what is really

17

an art form, and they are there mainly, seventy-five per cent of why they’re sitting there is this

art form. They want to play their tunes. They want to hear other people’s tunes. That’s why it’s a

pleasure, and it’s sort of incidental to a lot of people to the sociability actually and the drink.

There’s pluses and minus about what I just said about sociability, but anyhow a wonderful thing

– it is, as you say, participatory.

Did you feel as if things were changing while you were still actively involved in the school, the

dance group, your performing, what you were learning and so on? Did you get a feeling of eras

coming and going?

JB: No, I think it changed after I left. I can remember being in Sheila Jordan’s house, and we

had a bootleg copy of the Riverdance tape from the Eurovision. Everybody had been talking

about it, and somehow she got a hold of it. Somebody sent her one from Ireland or something,

and we probably had ten or fifteen people gathered in the house to see this tape. “Play it again,

play it again.” And that really was the beginning of the change.

DS: That’s a tape of the show, the big show?

JB: …of the original Eurovision with Michael Flatley.

DS: The Eurovision, right.

JB: The Eurovision competition that was the whatever it was, five minute entr’acte, that then

went on to become the show and has totally changed people…you know, we would never, the

whole time that I was doing Irish dancing, you would never do anything like putting your hands

up in the air, except to take somebody’s hand or something. Nothing like that in the step dance. It

was to criticize – “No, if you put your hands up in the air, you look like a Lucky Charms

commercial – that’s not Irish.” And all of the curls and the poodle socks. Well, Riverdance

wasn’t the costumes, but those have gotten way out of line, in my opinion. But that really

changed a lot. It changed the whole scene because that was so hot that everybody wanted to do

Irish dancing all of a sudden. We struggled, we were both working full-time, this was another

part of our lives, but I’m not sure we could have made a living out of making the school go or

doing that with the adult performing groups or something like that, whereas there were people in

Chicago and other places that do that. Maureen Harling, one of our teachers a little later in the

scheme of things, that’s what she was doing to earn her living, was being a teacher, but she

18

probably had three hundred kids in her school too. And then people moved here. There are so

many people here that came through on a Riverdance tour that met people and married people,

and that’s where some of the schools have come from. And then there’s a little bit of an Irish

scene, there are people that moved here for other reasons from other parts of the United States

that were teaching in their area, and that’s really when I saw the changes come.

DS: Did you feel bad about that?

JB: I don’t think I felt bad about it. I felt, well, this is the new thing. This is past my time. This is

what they’re doing. And in some ways it was very exciting. Riverdance in and of itself was so

exciting, and it was great to see things blossom. I wouldn’t be sitting here talking about this if the

Irish scene had withered, if there weren’t more music, if there weren’t more dancers.

DS: For me, people talk about Riverdance and its effect on the music and it being part of the ever

booming widening field of Irish traditional music, and it must be a reality, but to me it didn’t feel

like that for the music at all. I think there were practical things like musicians getting that gig, to

do it and making money, which is lovely, why wouldn’t they make money? But there was an

irony in it for me in that it wasn’t Irish music in the show, and, just as you have said that in the

dance there were essential differences because of the upper body, which was a huge aesthetic

change, likewise the use of these time signatures was also something that was completely alien to

Irish music. So it’s kind of funny that this thing, that had such a huge influence on Irish music

supposedly, didn’t actually have Irish music… I can’t remember whether it had any Irish music,

traditional music, in it. I think maybe people used traditional tunes for their solos or something

like that.

JB: No, I think our idea of exciting music was when you would actually change from a jig into a

reel, you know, you would change time signatures. And I think there was even something in the

era that changed music in the 70s. Sort of like me looking at the internet to find examples of the

Clare set because I couldn’t find my notes, now the whole idea of musicians being able…you

had to be in the session or travel around to get tunes from someone. And I can remember people

still would say, “I got these tune from so-and-so.” And then there was an explosion of everyone

making recordings and you could get tunes off records. And then maybe the Donegal style got

more like the Kerry style because you could all hear each other, so the rate of change, good, bad

or indifferent…

19

DS: Yea, there’s always change. What happened with the music was that people talked about it

getting more homogeneous, but actually it’s gone in the opposite direction again there because

now you could have somebody in Tokyo, and you do have people in Tokyo, who could become

experts on Donegal fiddling through the amount of stuff that’s in recordings and on the internet,

and not only can they go deep, deep, deep into local styles and personal styles, they can watch

the masters of Donegal fiddling on YouTube, and they can slow it down and they can see what

they’re doing. So, say if I was now in my twenties playing the guitar, I could now look at my

heroes on YouTube and analyze and see what they’re doing – slow it down and look at it and

learn stuff that I was never able to learn because it just wasn’t possible, literally impossible. And

now I could do it, and that makes a difference, you know, and probably raises the standard in

ways too, in certain ways, which is great.

JB: But in some ways it breaks those personal connections, which is part of community.

DS: I think people still do what you did – they go to Ireland and they see people, which is a great

thing, a wonderful thing.

[END JENNY BACH PART 02—filename: A1013b_EML_mmtc]

[BEGIN JENNY BACH PART 03—filename: A1013c_EML_mmtc]

DS: MacCafferty’s was a big gig place, but you would have danced in MacCafferty’s, would

you, as well as socializing?

JB: Not as a performance, no. Just as a place where we would go and hear music, and that was

the place where everybody played music by that time maybe. Anyway, it was a bigger venue, I

think, and there were more things going on than the Dayhills coming through now and again.

There was the Northern Star Céilí Band, and there were other folks. When the Hill 16 came, I’m

sure you folks played there, right?

DS: I didn’t play in MacCafferty’s much. I only played a few times in MacCafferty’s. I played

with the Northern Stars, and I might have played James and Paddy, maybe once or something.

And I don’t know what year MacCafferty’s stopped, but it was quite early on probably. Another

couple of venues or places where you performed we mentioned there. We had the machine off

20

for a second, and one of them would have been the Landmark Center. Were you also involved

with the IMDA?

JB: I was. We had quite a lot of adventures with Comhaltas. We started a Comhaltas branch

here, and there are some stories about that, but quite early on after a couple, three years or so, we

broke apart from Comhaltas, and we formed Irish Music and Dance Association instead. If I’m

not mistaken, IMDA was the organizer of the Landmark Center event, which is at Saint Patrick’s

Day for years and years now in the Landmark Center in downtown Saint Paul. There was always

this big semi-organized parade that starts in another part of the downtown and finishes at the

Landmark Center. In their big courtyard, people come pouring in after the parade, and there were

all kinds of musicians and dancers that would perform throughout the morning and into the early

afternoon. I danced several years there, and then after I stopped dancing I was stage manager for

a few years, and that was fun.

DS: I think it was Nick Lethert described the Landmark Center, and his involvement with

Irishness would have come before yours, and he said that what was great about the Landmark

Center was that before that maybe the Irish music had been associated in many people’s minds

with just the drunken debauchery, as it were, on Saint Patrick’s Day, and now the Landmark

Center was presenting it as a cultural event that you bring the kiddies to and this is lovely and we

have this wonderful culture, beautifully presented.

JB: That’s true. It was beautifully presented. There are family marching units -- and it’s always

cold. Maybe once or twice we have a nice Saint Patrick’s Day, but cold and grey and sleet and

various things. Anyway, I think it might have been the year that I marched for the Festival of

Nations in my Irish dance costume, and somebody exploded a green smoke bomb. I thought,

“You know what? I don’t need to do this any more. No, no, no.” But yes, that’s a very good

observation, I would agree with that. I think we should also, since it’s about to be destroyed, talk

about O’Gara’s, if nobody has talked about O’Gara’s on Snelling and Selby, which when I first

came into the scene… You know, it must have been after those sessions at Saint Mark’s, those

dancing sessions where people would then go out and have a drink. There were Sunday night

sessions there for a long time after the Mooncoins started, and people would go. And the first

time I went, there were a lot of rebel songs, it was about that era, and then after a while, there

were sessions, and that was really just a great place for the community. There were stories about

21

Peg Flanagan, who was working there as wait staff, and back in the day they did not allow their

wait staff to be on premises when they were not working. So we would sneak Peg in, and we

would hide her behind the coats in the back room, so that she could be there with the music and

the dancing. Yea, in a tiny little space, it’s like the kitchen, you know, it only works when you’re

squished together and there’s no room to move, and that’s the best.

DS: Yes, it was small and tight in the booths. That was the session place when I came here,

although the first session I was at in O’Gara’s was midweek. It was Wednesday. I’ve discussed

this with people, and it had to have been a Wednesday night. Myself and James and Paddy had

come, and there was a session, and then Thursday night we had a gig somewhere, but O’Gara’s

was the session place, and it was the very place that I’m telling you I was aware of the dancers,

yourselves, standing around, shoulder to shoulder, (laughter) while we were playing, which was

a lovely scene.

Any memories of the other session places? Because after O’Gara’s stopped working out, we did

try Caesar’s. That must have been a few years we were in Caesar’s.

JB: I think so, yea.

DS: We’re not a hundred per cent definite of having any particular photo from Caesar’s, that we

can be sure is Caesar’s, which is odd because it definitely was going…

JB: I think, if there were any, that David Aronow would have them because he was a picture-

taking fool back in the day, for years and years. And now in the era of phone he’s back at it…

JB: …because everybody takes pictures.

DS: And you mentioned the Renaissance Fair? Did you do that much?

JB: We did it for several years, yes. We had different costumes, and I’m not sure why we

thought that was a good idea, but maybe we were asked. That was hard work to go out and dance

on grass. The figure dancing was most effective because step dancing is good in a small place

with a hard floor. We’d been out there for a few years before they even built the Irish cottage out

there, then they wanted to put us by the Irish cottage, but that was great fun. I’m not sure it was

the best representation of Irish dance, but they were looking for movement and color. But we had

great fun being out there. We camped over and would sing songs into the night.

DS: Oh, really. And you’d do many sets in the one day, many performances?

22

JB: Probably do – I’m going to guess four maybe. So we’d have time to wander round, then

we’d have to meet by different places on the grounds, and some of the very haunting things that

happened – the Morris dancers are probably better suited to do the Ren Fair, and after everyone

had gone home they would do this particular dance. I don’t remember much about Morris

dancing, but they have a Betty, so someone dressed in women’s clothing leads it, and they would

play this little haunting tune, and they would make like a little parade of the ten of them through

the grounds. There were a couple of things that they would do at the end of the day, really old,

old things.

DS: You had different costumes for that, did you say?

JB: We did.

DS: What were they like?

JB: They were long green skirts with two bands of gold at the bottom and a peasanty-looking

shirt and a gold cloth cape that would go from one shoulder to the other hip that was just folded

in half. And I think that we had little waist bands with maybe three or four eyelets in the front,

and the gents wore sort of rust-colored, short – what would you call them? – short below-the-

knee pants and the long socks would come up – again sort of peasanty kind of shirts, and we had

good times out there too.

DS: That was the 70s and the 80s, was it?

JB: Yea, it was.

DS: I think I’ve only been once at that. I might have been once long ago, and then once in the

last few years – it was kind of fun. The grounds that they have now anyhow – I don’t know what

they would have been like a while ago – but they’re very nice.

JB: Very nice. It’s like a lot of things too: if you go to the same festival year after year after

year, it loses some of its magic, it becomes too much the same.

DS: Have you done any singing of Irish songs or playing, by the way, before I forget?

JB: Bar songs. (laughs) Singing along. Ballads. I did think for a while I should play the whistle

or the flute, so I took a few whistle lessons from Laura MacKenzie, and I have sat in the briefest

of times with not a big session, but just tried to play with somebody else. Then for a while I did

23

try and play the flute. I have my grandfather’s – my Norwegian grandfather who played in the

Coon Valley Orchestra – I have his wooden flute and played that a little bit. You know, I’m just

not a musician, I’m a dancer. I thought it would be great to be a musician because I could be a

musician for the rest of my life, and I’m not sure I’m…well, right now I need a knee

replacement, so I’m not much of a dancer. (laughs) But that doesn’t seem to be my calling.

DS: Yea, I don’t dance and I love dancing. I love seeing people dancing. I really, really enjoy it,

but I’m lining it up for a later incarnation. I’ll dance, I’ve no doubt about it.

JB: And the other thing, since I might donate the pictures, is that somehow because of all our

involvement in the Ren Fair with the Morris dancers they organized, as my recollection, a

mummers convocation, let’s say, one January, and the Mooncoins were invited to participate. So

Beth Vance wrote this marvelous play. The mumming plays that happen at the beginning of the

year are all about life and rebirth, so there’s sort of tomfoolery that’s involved, and someone

dies, then the doctor comes and brings them back to life. She made great fun of ourselves – it

was a very fun thing, but I had pictures of that, of Big Head and Little Wit. I was Mary

Mooncoin, and I forget the name of all the characters, but Beth is a nurse in real life, and she

played the medical person that came and brought the man back to life. We did that play a couple

of times. We did it at the convocation, or whatever you call it. I don’t think it was for the public,

it was just for the groups that came. And then there was a big dinner or something like that, is my

recollection. That was one thing that I had forgotten about till I was looking through

photographs, on the way to come here.

DS: Was that different from the Strawboys who made an appearance… (laughs)

JB: The Strawboys, let’s see.

DS: At my first wedding.

JB: That was very fun, that was my fault, my fault.

DS: Well, it was brilliant.

JB: It was very gracious of you to say it was brilliant.

DS: It was great.

JB: Let’s see. I think that is where the Strawboys came from.

24

DS: Some of that look is used in the mummers plays.

JB: Yes, yes. So the Strawboys, we made pointy hats and stapled fake straw, whatever you get at

the craft store and made skirt things. And yes, I think they were definitely from that. We used

them also – we used to dance for the Festival of Nations, so that’s another thing that we did for

several years – the festival in Saint Paul that plays up everybody’s different ethnic heritages, and

we did that for several years. One year they had a theme of weddings across the world, and so if

you have a wedding dance tradition, they wanted you to present this. Well, by this time, we’d

had some teachers in Chicago, and we’d had our feet wet a little bit, so we did what is called

choreography, which is different than dance drama in the competition world. The choreography

is like a figure dance except that it tells a story, and they generally have a lot of dancers in them

as opposed to eight to ten in the normal figure dancing world. So I choreographed this thing

called “Jenny’s Wedding”, and we had a bride and a groom, and we had people in rows, and we

had a priest, and we had other dancers in rows as if they were in the church, so the couple gets

married, and they dance round and go outside the church and dance around, and they come into

the home, dancers passing into the new space, and then we danced a little bit of a traditional

something or other, and then, bam, in come the Strawboys, which is a tradition, as far as I know,

on the west coast, a lot in Clare, where people come in and disrupt the festivities and sometimes

steal the bride, or demand things, demand drink and food if they weren’t invited. Some things I

have read say that sometimes it can get kind of serious. But, you know, I’m not sure it’s any

worse or any different than… There are traditions, not so much in the Cities here, but not even

that far out of the Cities, but there are traditions of people stealing the bride away from the

reception.

DS: Yea, I think that’s in a lot of different cultures.

JB: Anyway, so the Strawboys came there and then, as Dáithí points out, when he was first

married, I thought it would be a brilliant idea…

DS: …and it was.

JB: (laughs) …to have some Strawboys…

DS: An eruption of Strawboys.

25

JB: …an eruption of Strawboys at his wedding reception, and it was a bit of a surprise to all, and

the people who were doing it said, “Are you sure this is ok?” “They’ll love it.” (laughter)

DS: It was fantastic.

JB: And that’s not the area of Ireland that you are from, but anyway.

DS: That’s fine, and we’re not in Ireland any more.

JB: So yes, we did do that. And we did “Jenny’s Wedding” at my wedding. I made my husband

walk through the steps, and he was a great sport about it, and then the Strawboys came there too.

DS: And whatever happened to those Strawboy costumes?

JB: Oh boy, they probably disintegrated by now. Mooncoins may still have some remnant of

them because – this is twenty years ago that I was married –

DS: This is another possible item for the…

JB: Yes, I might have a dance costume they could have if they’re still interested.

DS: That would be amazing.

JB: I thought of trying to give it to the state, but the state didn’t seem too interested.

DS: It will probably end up being a question of space. So many wonderful ideas have come out

of this library business. Those old costumes were just so beautiful, and of course they remind me

of the feis in Derry when I was young.

Did you ever come across Donncha Ó Muineacháin?

JB: Oh yea, Donncha, sure.

DS: Did you meet him?

JB: Yea, I think he came on Comhaltas tours.

DS: Yes, that’s right, he would have.

JB: And do you know who else is still around? I just had met with Mary Hedlund, now

McNeive, and she had a Treoir magazine – which, number one, who knew that Treoir still

existed? – and on the cover was Bill McEvoy, who was a big Comhaltas guy and Treoir guy

from New York that just did a lot for that organization, and Labhrás Ó Murchú, and they’re both

26

elderly gentlemen at this time. But it was so fun just to see them. And those are other stories –

we didn’t cover all the Comhaltas shenanigans and the other shenanigans with Chicago

musicians and dancers and so forth.

DS: They came up here on visits, didn’t they, or you went down there too?

JB: Maybe we got connected with them through Comhaltas to begin with and somehow a whole

troop of folks came up – Liz Carroll and Noel Rice – why Liz Carroll would have come from the

southside and Noel Rice was from the northside, I don’t know, but a bunch of people. And we

had a weekend together, and that was through Liz how we got connected with Maureen Harling.

DS: Yea, she was a very close friend of Liz’s.

JB: That’s who we studied with mostly to get ready for our teacher exams, along with Jackie

Scanlon, who we met in Clare when we went to Ireland, and we actually flew Jackie here to

teach us some dances and stuff. I’m not sure we went to more than one midwest Comhaltas get-

together. They were trying to elect officers, and there was a big controversy between…would the

officers be from the northside or would they be from the southside. We were there till two in the

morning trying to resolve it.

DS: In Chicago?

JB: Yea, in Chicago. Labhrás blew his top…

DS: You were there?

JB: I was there! Yes, and Liz Carroll and Marty Fahey and Maureen were all waiting outside,

they wanted to go for a drink, and it was two in the morning before we could get out of there, oh

my god. Kevin Henry suggested, after we had come to an impasse twenty times on some vote,

“Maybe we should let everybody there vote,” and that was when Labhrás lost it, and he said,

“Don’t you think everyone would have brought a whole band of people if there wasn’t just a vote

for each branch, but for every person that was in the room?” I don’t even remember how it was

resolved, but we were very glad to leave.

DS: So you were an officer of Comhaltas? You were an official something-or-other?

JB: I was an official something-or-other.

DS: How many years would that have been?

27

JB: Just a couple of years, two or three. I helped organize one Comhaltas concert, which was

very successful and made a lot of people mad (laughs) because it was oversold.

DS: People couldn’t get in?

JB: Well, they could. Some people had to sit on the floor. I’m not even sure how we oversold it.

DS: What was the venue? Was it Saint Mark’s?

JB: No, it was the O’Shaughnessy at Saint Thomas. It’s a nice hall.

DS: Is that still the same hall, or is that a new version of it that’s there now?

JB: You know, I haven’t been in it for so long, I don’t know. Anyway, all kinds of adventures.

All kinds of mistakes.

DS: We want to hear about the mistakes. (laughter) We want to hear about things that went

wrong.

JB: Well, I’ll tell you what went wrong at the Philadelphia Céilí Festival.

DS: Ok, I’d love to hear this.

JB: Oh my gosh, well, I won’t name names, but this was after we’d come back from Ireland, and

this is one of our tickets to ride, our claims to fame: we were invited to come to the Philadelphia

Céilí Festival and show off these set dances and we were going to dance a half set from

Ballinasloe. It was very fun, we traded some sets with the Philadelphia Céilí Group. We were

hosted in people’s homes, and I would still say looking back that the Philadelphia Céilí Festival

was big. There had to have been hundreds of people on the grounds for the evening concert.

DS: It was great fun, I was there… We’re now talking about ’81, ’82, are we?

JB: We could be.

DS: Because I think I was at it when you were there.

JB: So we got up. The musician who was assigned to us – not one of our musicians – the place

was lousy with musicians, so they assigned this musician to us – plays, and we’re counting out

our bars and we get started – eight, twelve, sixteen bars into it, and something goes south. We’re

all off with the music. We stop. The musician starts again, the same. Three times, and finally we

get through with it. Of course, we felt terrible. Here we are on this big lit stage, all the way from

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Minnesota. It was the first time probably that we were at the festival, so it’s a big exciting thing,

there was a huge crowd, and we looked like we didn’t know what we were doing. Had I realized

what was happening I would have had the guts to go and make a joke into the microphone and

speak to the musician, but I couldn’t. I was just too in the moment to realize it, and I went down

the stairs, and I forget, what’s Donny Golden’s sister…?

DS: Eileen.

JB: Is it Eileen Golden? Eileen Golden said, “Oh, rats and frats, that musician, he was switching

between 9/8 and 6/8.” He’d get going for sixteen bars in 6/8 and then launch into some other

tune. It’s like, “Oh, my gosh, that’s what was happening.”

DS: Who was the musician, do you remember? You can say – say it – into the mic.

JB: Joe Burke.

DS: Jooooe Burke. I was there. This is all terribly familiar. I think I was there witnessing the

thing.

JB: Oh, we were so embarrassed. I was mad at Joe Burke for years – I’m probably still mad at

Joe Burke.

DS: What would have happened? Why would he have done that? Drink? You can say it into the

mic! He would have known the dancing so well. Some musicians aren’t thinking of dancing,

they don’t know, but he would known what he was doing. In fact, my earliest visits to the east

coast festival – Philadelphia, Snug Harbor – did you ever do Snug Harbor? A few of those things

anyhow were the first times I was near those great dancers, the east coast dancers. I pointed out

the fact that I loved it. I loved seeing them. They were fabulous, and it was very, very enjoyable.

But I remember noticing then, and since I played with Liz and Billy in later years, they know all

about playing for dancing. Billy or Liz, or Billy and Liz together know all about tempos and

what is good for the dancer and they’re watching, and both of them can dance, so that makes a

huge difference. One of the bees in my bonnet is the connection between the dance musicians

and the dancers as they dance, and what difference it makes if the musicians know the dancing,

and slightly even more so, if the dancers know the music, and they’re really dancing to the

music. Something is lost when the dancers don’t really know anything about the music.

JB: There’s this lovely description in the book “The Northern Fiddler”…

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DS: That’s a fantastic book.

JB: A fantastic book. One of the comments – I forget the author – but anyway, talking to some

musicians, and I would say it was probably Clare musicians, but I think everything happens in

Clare, some of the musicians were playing music, and they were all like on one side, huddled on

the side of the kitchen, and I think it was the author, even without the dancers there, they were

making room for the dancers.

DS: Oh, yea, yea, yea, yea, that’s a nice idea.

JB: Because it’s, around the house and mind the dresser, and that’s because the dresser was

likely to smack you in the bum because it was a tight space.

DS: Well, excruciating experiences are part of our lives as performers or as people in general, we

always have these things. But the one thing about those – I felt early, from when I was quite

young, that if you have your worst possible experience, then everything is uphill. Seriously, you

know, nothing could be that bad again, therefore you get to a certain point where you can’t be as

affected emotionally by some bad experience. That’s the way I was.

JB: Then there’s those close calls. Maureen Harling choreographed for us a dance called

“Meeting at the Crossroads”, so that was a choreography that was really just for twelve people,

I’m not sure there was much about, quote, meeting at the crossroads, as opposed to the dance, the

Irish wedding dance choreography that I did, where it was tell the story. This was just shapes and

figures for twelve people. We did this at the CSPS Hall – the Czech Hall, which is not the Czech

Hall any more. I think it’s something else now, but down on West 7th.

DS: It’s still there.

JB: There are just some of those dances with where you go and who you end up with as a partner

at various points – sometimes it’s pretty regular and makes sense, not always, and especially

when you’re doing a choreography, you want certain shapes to happen and it’s not like a figure

dance where you always come back with your partner, stay with your partner. Something

happened, and two or three of us were in the wrong place – two of us were in the wrong place. A

figure dance is closer and more regular, and if you make a mistake, even to just quickly change

places is easier to do. Well, we were spread out all over the floor. There was some place where

we came together with four of us in the center, then of course we didn’t realize it at the time,

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what was going to happen, it was like, “Oh, my gosh, what’s going to happen now?” Then Ben

and I were in the middle and just switched places like that. (sigh of relief)

DS: Saved the day.

JB: Saved the day. And there was a wonderful time we did a performance, the Mooncoins did a

performance for some kind of a ballroom dance place, dancing all together or something.

Anyway, we went on the Saint Patrick’s Day season type thing, and we were dancing the High

Cauled Cap, so stamp stamp clap-clap-clap. And they had the most odd space. It was a square

room and had some kind of a beam or structure that came that came down a little bit from the

ceiling that went all the way around, and we were in the middle of it, and we did the clap-clap-

clap, we heard clap-clap-clap echoing from the ceiling. (laughter) Everybody looked up, which

you wouldn’t do, you’re not supposed to move your head like that. It probably happened two or

three times until we could control ourselves from looking up. Oh, that was funny. Sometimes

those dances get – you must find this with tunes – you know them so well you can play them in

your sleep, or that you can always do them. Mary and I one time were asked to do a step at the

CSPS Hall at a céilí. Maybe we decided that we would do something that we hadn’t done in a

while, or maybe we hadn’t been dancing together for a while, I can’t remember. We decided

we’d dance this hornpipe, and we agreed that the steps would be in a different order than the way

that we had learned them. We went out there, and, by god, in the middle of it we both at the same

time went back to the original order. Who would have known? – they just came out that way.

What are some other bloopers? Oh, well. (laughs) There was a blooper, we danced in the indoor

park – what was that place called in downtown? – an indoor park at the top of some office

building in downtown Saint Paul. We were to dance there, and we were in our Renaissance

costumes, and Sheila had been to the bathroom and somehow dragged out with her a piece of

toilet paper on her skirt, and nobody noticed it till she was out dancing her solo and left this piece

of toilet paper behind on the floor. Oh, no. It was very silly.

DS: Yes, a few pieces of toilet paper have been dragged out in public all right over the years.

JB: And I lost my skirt in the Land of the Loon Festival – almost lost my skirt. It came

unsnapped or unpinned or some darn thing. So Janet Jackson’s not the only one with wardrobe

malfunctions.

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DS: Ice skaters seem to have lots problems in their skimpy costumes, and they’re swirling

around.

(a pause)

JB: In Iowa, this show in March, and what a terrible time to have Saint Patrick’s Day in this

country because it’s always a mess. There was snow on the ground, and it must have been

warmer weather, and it just made for this fog, this terrible, terrible fog, and we drove down in

several cars, and the dancing car got there first. The first part of it was to be broadcast on the

radio, and Mary and I were like the MPR, Minnesota Public Radio, fundraisers: “Well, let me tell

you a little bit about this – now, Mary, what do you have to say about that?” and we were waiting

for the musicians to come. She would talk, and then she’d say, “And, Jenny, what could you say

about that?” and I would talk a little more. And we had a nice show. Oh, there’s another one too.

DS: Was that the Plough and the Stars?

JB: I don’t really have a clear idea in my head where the demarcation is.

DS: There was some story about them going and maybe Jamie was driving and it was in a fog,

and they ended up driving quite a distance in the wrong direction, or something like that.

JB: I don’t know if it was the wrong direction, but, no offence, but the musicians are always

harder to get. The dancers, they’re there on time. They get in the car, they go. The musicians are:

“When is so and so coming?” “I don’t know” “Sam, he’s not up yet – oh, really?” It’s like, come

on, people – but anyway… (laughs) In fact, that’s one thing that I learned after dancing for a

while. I would get nervous, you know, because I wanted people to be there twenty minutes ahead

of time or half an hour ahead of time to make sure to do a little bit of a warm up and all that, and

people would always show, they would always show. Anyway, then coming back was the worst

one, worst part of that, because that was in the dark, and Kevin drove all that way, oh my gosh.

We were just so lucky to come home.

DS: Yea, driving after a gig or after a concert is terrible. I hate it.

JB: There was a great time, this was just me, and I was invited to be the teacher. I went up with

the Northern Stars or the Plough and the Stars – oh, it must have been the Northern Star Céilí

Band at that time – and they had a gig up in Duluth – in March, of course. And it was in the

Kitchi Gammi Club – were you there?

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DS: Yes. Because I remember the negotiation with the guy who was our connection, who was

running it. He was a very nice guy.

JB: We went up and did the teaching, and they fed us, but they put us in some room in the back

on the third floor, away from the real people. We did a nice job for them, I think. Then we

thought we’d go out and have a drink afterwards, but it was too late – it was almost closing, and

the weather was terrible, of course. So they very graciously said, “Would you like to spend the

night?” and we said, “Oh, that would be so much safer, a wonderful idea.” So we all had these

rooms upstairs, and I had my little shower and hopped into the bed – and the phone rang. It was

like, “What the heck?” So I pick up the phone, and somebody says, “Is this one of the dancers or

musicians?” I said, “Yes.” Well, this was the staff, and they were down in the member locker

and would we like to come down for a little night cap, because they heard we wanted to go for a

drink. So I went knocking on everybody’s door: “You want to come down for a drink?” So we

did that and had a nice time with them and left in the morning.

DS: I don’t remember details, but I remember we really liked that trip. You know, when you’re

setting a thing up, and you’re wondering how’s it going to work out and so on, and everything

was really nice.

JB: It was lovely, and I impressed the attorneys that I worked with at that time who couldn’t

even get a lunch invitation to the Kitchi Gammi Club – big fancy estate tax attorneys, you know.

“Oh, I went up to do a gig at the Kitchi Gammi Club – yea, they let us stay over.” “What! I can’t

even get in the front door.” (laughs) I remember in particular we were all very tired, we must

have stayed up late with the staff or something, but we had breakfast, and then we drove home,

and there was some shortcut that was on a smaller state highway, and I remember we just had the

radio on, like classical music – it was like driving through a postcard, with big pine trees and

probably some snow still on the ground and it was lovely.

DS: Were you at the gig in the Joynt that we did – the Northern Stars in the Joynt. That was a

very memorable gig in the band’s history. I remember Eileen McIsaac was there. There were

dancers there, because we had dancing in the place where we were staying afterwards and Eileen

broke her foot.

JB: Oh.

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DS: An ankle or something.

JB: She broke her foot in MacCafferty’s one time too.

DS: It was great, a wonderful gig, so you weren’t at that one?

JB: No, I wasn’t in that one.

DS: And I think they were along for the trip, I don’t think they were going to dance – or maybe

they were, I can’t remember. But anyway that was really fun.

JB: Crazy stuff anyway. On and on it goes. That might be the end. (laughs)

DS: Well, that’s fantastic. You’ll think of another ten good stories after.

JB: I’m sure I will.

DS: The whole project will continue hopefully, unless something goes terribly wrong, and we’ll

keep on doing interviews. The idea of doing one on the dance would be a great idea. I was very

aware at times that I knew something about the music, but even though I’ve been around the

dancing, I didn’t really know about the dancing or didn’t understand a lot of the details. And of

course Sheila had a generation of people before your time that she was talking about. A lot of

them I didn’t know, so we should have a special thing on the dance.

Well, that was fantastic, Jenny – wonderful, thank you. We’ll have a look at the photos and you

should really sit down with Brian. All right, bye.

JB: Bye.

[END JENNY BACH PART 03—filename: A1013c_EML_mmtc]