HONORARY IRISHFOLK : Their Roots Aren’t Green, But These Local Bands Are at Home on Foreign Turf

Mention of St. Patrick’s Day does not bring a twinkle to Dan Cartmell’s eye, nor does it make Margie Mirken want to break into a jig.

It isn’t that these Orange County musicians turn into grinches at the sight of green. Actually, Cartmell’s band, the Bold Fenian Men, and Mirken’s group, Blackthorn, see more green--of the negotiable type--around St. Patrick’s Day than they do the rest of the year. It’s the one season, they say, when it becomes economically advantageous to be what they are: players of traditional Irish folk music.

Lucrative as the holiday may be, both musicians sound a wee bit jaundiced in their recollections of St. Paddy’s gigs past.

Mirken talks about an unusual banjo improvisation during a St. Patrick’s Day performance at a packed Mission Viejo restaurant about 10 years ago. Already feeling claustrophobic as revelers crowded the low stage, she watched in horror as a wobbly looking woman came within a tipsy dance step of crashing into her expensive guitar and Irish harp. Instinctively, she turned the banjo she was strumming into a billy club.

“ Thwack. Straight on with the banjo in the kidney,” Mirken recalled impishly. “Actually, it wasn’t a vicious jab. Just a subtle reminder.”

Cartmell is succinct in summing up the typical St. Patrick’s gig experience: “Green beer . . . what a bore.”

“It’s probably the worst day of the year to play,” said Cartmell, a mandolin and banjo player best known in local arts circles as an actor and director for the Grove Shakespeare Festival. “Everyone’s blitzed out of their mind. Most of ‘em are Newport lawyers who want to hear “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” and you want to take the Tennessee Thumper to ‘em.”

(The Tennessee Thumper, Cartmell explains, was a baseball bat that he kept behind his amplifier, just in case, back in the days when the Bold Fenian Men (pronounced feen-ian) played at a particularly rough bar in San Juan Capistrano. He also notes that things are better at the Harp Inn, where the Bold Fenians will play this St. Patrick’s Day. With a clientele that is more than 50% immigrant Irish, the Costa Mesa pub “has been an exception,” Cartmell said. “It’s fantastic.”)

If Cartmell and Mirken seem dismissive of those whose vision of St. Patrick’s Day is limited to shamrocks, leprechauns and “Danny Boy,” perhaps it is because they possess the zeal of the converted. For the most part, the family trees of Blackthorn’s members and the Bold Fenian Men are rooted not in Ireland, but in places like Russia, England, Wales, Germany and France. (Jerry Siggins of the Bold Fenians is the exception, with ancestry hailing from County Sligo. But the family has been in the United States for more than 200 years, Siggins said--long enough to have assimilated any trace of Irish tradition out of his suburban Southern California upbringing.)

For most Americans, St. Patrick’s is a day of pleasant pretending, a day when anyone can be honorary Irish. For the members of Blackthorn and the Bold Fenian Men, the important, year-round thing is honoring the Irish and the sad and lovely, comical and fiery brand of traditional folk music that Ireland has brought to the world. It is a matter of some commitment.

“We’ve always asked ourselves, ‘What are four Americans doing playing this music?’ ” said Rob Williams, a dark-haired former rock ‘n’ roller who at 37 is the youngest member of the Bold Fenian Men (the others are in their early 40s). “But I’ve never felt like a pretender playing it. I know I’m not Irish, but I genuinely love this music. I’ve cried listening to it. It’s so sensitive and honest and emotional. The way the Irish can make you laugh or cry at the drop of a hat is an incredible gift.”

Whether played by natives or by Yankee enthusiasts, traditional Irish music is not something you’ll hear in every Orange County bar that sports a green sign and an Irish name.

“I’ve always seemed to manage to find bands, but it’s very limited,” says Gerry Mackey, proprietor of the Harp Inn. A robust-looking man with silvery hair and a full, trim beard, Mackey came to the United States from Ireland 11 years ago. He opened the Harp Inn three years ago, featuring live music four nights of week on a small, green-carpeted stage where flags of Ireland and its provinces serve as a backdrop.

“If there’s a decent Irish group, they usually find their way to me,” Mackey said while pouring a glass of wine for a customer. “Most of the Irish groups would be (native) Irish.” The Bold Fenian Men, he says, may not have much Irish blood, but it is the most tradition-minded band he books.

There is more than one way to dip into Irish tradition, as the radical differences between the Bold Fenian Men and Blackthorn make clear.

The Bold Fenians play the spirited, rowdy music of the pubs, drawing on the repertoire of such popular Irish folk groups as the Clancy Brothers, along with some more contemporary sources. The Harp Inn is a social center where people come for a chat, and not necessarily for a concert.

“It is one of the noisiest bars in the United States,” said Cartmell, “but that’s what a pub’s about. It’s a public meeting house.”

That doesn’t faze the Bold Fenians, who chose their name for its fiery connotations (the Fenians were a secret band of Irish revolutionaries who tried overthrow British colonial rule in the mid-1800s). “We’re all aggressive musicians, a real come-at-you band,” said Siggins.

With Siggins, Williams and Cartmell singing boisterous harmonies, and Harvey Harriger thumping out a firm beat on upright bass, the band, which holds forth at the Harp every Thursday night, is able to cut through ambient noise with a round of sea chanteys and rousing rebel songs. They’ll also essay the occasional ballad, including “Green Donegal,” a pretty, wistful tune composed by Siggins that is the lone original that the Bold Fenians play.

As for Blackthorn, co-founders Greg and Margie Mirken decided long ago that it wasn’t meant to be a pub band.

“We stay away from the rousing, banging-the-beer-on-the-table type places,” Margie Mirken said. “We want to play the beautiful tunes, with all the different timbres and nuances. There’s a lot of intricacy, and in a bar nobody hears that.”

Where the Bold Fenian Men attack with guitars, bass, and a mandolin or banjo, Blackthorn interweaves an assortment of delicate instruments--including hammered dulcimer, which can produce a tone like rainwater on a pond, harp, concertina and violin. If the Bold Fenian Men play some old tunes, Blackthorn reaches back even further, playing folk-dances from 1700 or so. It’s a classical approach to folk music, with an affinity for the graceful traditions of a concert band such as the Chieftains. Blackthorn’s Celtic music takes in songs from Scotland as well as Ireland.

The hallmark of Irish music is melody, and, for most of these Americans, it was something in the Irish airs that captured them.

“You’ve got such a simple idea, such a simple melody, that has such a profoundness to it,” said Blackthorn’s hammered dulcimer player, Patti Amelotte, at 29 the band’s junior member. “Maybe it’s because it comes so clean from the heart.”

Greg Mirken, 41, and his wife, Margie, 39, were established bluegrass players and music-shop entrepreneurs before Irish music began to take hold of them about 12 years ago. A trip to a Chieftains concert was one catalyst. Around the same time, they met another couple, Jeff and Gale Peach, who had become fans of Irish music while living in the Northeast.

“We would get together at each other’s houses in these sessions where we’d eat a lot, then play a little music,” said Greg Mirken. A lot of those tunes were Irish. When the Mirkens found out that Gilhooly’s, an Irish-themed restaurant in Mission Viejo, was looking for an Irish band, they declared themselves fit for the job, which turned into a regular weekend gig.

The Peaches left the band after a few years, with David Walker coming in on violin. Like Amelotte, who joined two years ago, Walker, 39, was trained in classical music and turned to folk seeking a freer, more spontaneous way to play.

The Bold Fenian Men also took shape in the late ‘70s. Siggins, by then, had been fond of Irish music for more than a decade--hooked, he says, on his first hearing of a Clancy Brothers recording of an old tune called “The Mermaid.”

He went on to a career as a singer and actor, with Irish music remaining a hobby rather than a paid pursuit. One Fourth of July, Siggins found out that the Queen Mary was looking for a folk duo to entertain people while they waited in line. Siggins recruited Cartmell, a former classmate from the Cal State Long Beach theater school, and taught him some Irish songs. Cartmell had been playing in bluegrass bands since his teens.

“I was looking for something with a little more punch, and Irish music filled the bill. I was rather bored with bluegrass, which isn’t very political, and doesn’t have 800 years of culture that the Irish (music) does,” Cartmell said. After the Queen Mary gig, “it just took off from there. We started trying to be more authentic.”

Williams, who had played with Cartmell in a folk-pop band, leaped at the chance to play with him in an Irish group. Like Siggins, he had fallen for Irish music at first encounter as a teen-ager, collecting records but not performing Irish folk in public. Harriger, a childhood friend and bluegrass band mate of Cartmell’s, rounded out the band.

How valid and authentic can Irish music be when the players weren’t born or raised to it? It’s the same sort of question that white blues musicians have had to confront, as have such World Music converts as Paul Simon and David Byrne. In the best cases, cross-cultural travelers have broken down whatever barriers exist to make inspired music.

“I used to worry about it more than I do now,” Blackthorn’s Walker, a round-faced, red-haired man who manages the computer network at UC Irvine, said when the question of authenticity came up. “I can see there are definite differences between the way I would play and an Irish fiddler would play. But I’ve got a style, and I play in it.”

“I do have to kind of fight that feeling: ‘What’s this silly American girl doing playing Irish music?’ ” said Amelotte.

The Bold Fenian Men have been able to test their authenticity in front of the substantially Irish audiences at the Harp Inn, where they have been playing since last summer.

“I wasn’t intimidated, but I started asking myself what the real Irish were going to think about this. I gradually gained confidence with the warm reception we got,” said Williams, who tries to sing lyrics in an Irish brogue (Siggins, on the other hand, makes no special effort to mimic the Irish accent; the same open-ended philosophy prevails in Blackthorn, where Amelotte goes for the accent, but other members don’t).

Both Blackthorn and the Bold Fenian Men like to meld their Irish performances with some American folk touches. “One thing we can excel at is harmony,” said Cartmell. “A lot of the traditional Irish bands don’t spend a lot of time on their harmonies--they sing unisons. Our American influence of harmony is something we can add that’s helpful to the music. It’s a little give and take--but more take.”

At some point, converts to Irish music also have to address how they will handle the politics that underly much of the traditional repertoire--songs chronicling centuries of Irish struggle to overcome British dominance.

Blackthorn likes to keep the politics at a distance. “People expect you to do songs about the politics over there, but we made a conscious decision and we almost never do anything political,” Margie Mirken said.

“I barely understand the politics today. How can I understand what was happening 400 years ago?” The Blackthorn repertoire does include aching songs about poverty and forced immigration that reflect, as Mirken puts it, “sociological fallout from years of tyranny and unrest,” but the band stays away from rebel songs.

Not so the Bold Fenian Men, whose very name is political, and whose style thrives on that Irish revolutionary fire. “Listening to some of the lyrics to the rebel songs; they’re very inspiring and very spirited. You can’t help but like it,” says Harriger.

The fact that some of the repertoire includes fight songs of the outlawed Irish Republican Army has raised some eyebrows, members say. Knowledgeable listeners, says Siggins, will realize that the songs refer to the old-line IRA that helped Ireland win its independence in the early 1920s. It’s similar in name only, he says, to the contemporary IRA that employs terrorist tactics to undermine British authority over Northern Ireland.

Siggins hummed a sample line from a song the Bold Fenians sing: “I’m off to join the IRA, and I’m off tomorrow morning.”

“It’s hard for me to say those letters,” he said after a pause. “They’re such a bunch of murdering hooligans. A lot of people hear that now and perk their ears: ‘What the hell are these guys (saying)?’ The Irish know that we’re talking about the old stuff.”

“I pause to think of the repercussions, because of what the IRA has become,” Williams said. “I try not to get too involved in the politics. I don’t know a lot about it, and I feel it’s for the Irish, among themselves. They’re the ones who have had the struggle so long. It’s none of my business. I enjoy (the rebel songs) on a musical level.”

Both Blackthorn and the Bold Fenian Men are playing for enjoyment and fellowship, rather than for money and fame.

“There’s not enough clubs around (featuring Irish music) for us to make a living,” said Cartmell. In any case, all of the Bold Fenians have other full-time pursuits--Cartmell with his acting, Siggins with acting and a regular singing gig in a barbershop quartet at Disneyland, Harriger with his job at a wholesale warehouse store, and Williams with pre-law studies at UC Irvine.

Blackthorn, after 10 years of steady, weekly jobs, including a seven-year run every Sunday night at the Old Dana Point Cafe, has been playing more sporadically during the past year.

“Blackthorn could work more than it does if it weren’t the laziest band in the universe,” Margie Mirken said. “The way it works (in traditional folk circles) is that you have product (i.e., an album), and then you hustle. We don’t have product, and we certainly don’t hustle.”

The band did get its taste of on-the-road glory years ago in a brief tour up the California coast, Greg Mirken recalled. It landed a concert in a San Luis Obispo park that a local radio station broadcast live.

“They’d set the stage up right next to the restroom,” deadpanned Mirken. “In the middle of a sensitive ballad, you’d hear, ‘ kerflushhh .’ ”

Blackthorn’s laid-back, small-is-OK approach shouldn’t be mistaken for a lack of commitment to the music itself, Margie Mirken said. “. . . We try to make a serious statement, and the statement we make is that it’s beautiful, beautiful music, and a beautiful culture.”

Who: The Bold Fenian Men; Blackthorn.

When: The Bold Fenian Men play Thursday, March 14, and Sunday, March 17, at 9 p.m. Blackthorn plays Sunday, March 17, from 1 to 5 p.m.

Where: The Bold Fenian Men are at the Harp Inn, 130 E. 17th St., Costa Mesa. Blackthorn is at Millie O’Malley’s, 1301 5th St., Santa Monica.

Whereabouts: To the Harp Inn: Take the Costa Mesa (55) Freeway, Pacific Coast Highway or Harbor Boulevard to Newport Boulevard; turn east on 17th Street. To Millie O’Malley’s: Take the San Diego (405) Freeway to the Santa Monica (10) Freeway, west. Exit at 5th Street and follow four blocks to intersection on 5th and Arizona.

Wherewithal: The Bold Fenian Men: Free on Thursday, $3 on Sunday. Blackthorn: $3.

Where to call: The Bold Fenian Men: (714) 646-8855. Blackthorn: (213) 394-4647.