Jig Daddy
by Geoffrey Himes
With his black, double-row accordion resting on his left knee, Billy McComiskey took a moment between tunes and surveyed the scene at the Cellar Stage at St. John’s United Methodist Church of Hamilton Friday night. The 53-year-old man with the brushed-back, salt-and-pepper hair has been the center of Baltimore’s Irish folk-music scene since he moved to town more than 20 years ago.
When I first came here to get married there wasn’t much music, he said. There was a lot of interest but not much music. Now look at all these great musicians and they are all from here. When they go up to New York, the New Yorkers gather round them with tape recorders.
McComiskey waved his arm at the eight musicians arranged in a semicircle on either side of him. There were his remarkable contemporaries: Donna Long, the pianist for Cherish the Ladies; Laura Byrne, flutist and founder of the Baltimore Irish Arts Center; Myron Bretholz, the percussionist for Sodabread; and Peter Fitzgerald, the banjo-picking host of the Thursday-night sessions at J. Patrick’s. But even more encouraging was the presence of a new generation of players: singer-guitarist Pat Egan, fiddler Jim Eagan, piper Eliot Grasso, and accordionist Sean McComiskey, Billy’s son and a member of OMalley’s March.
Eagan and Grasso played several sparkling numbers from their recent solo albums (At Reavey’s House and Standing Room Only, respectively). Long accompanied Billy McComiskey on a pair of bubbly, button-accordion jigs that he wrote for his grandmothers in Ireland, and he accompanied her on Luna, her gorgeous ballad for redwoods activist Julia Butterfly Hill. The group’s two Irish natives helped each other out; Egan played rhythm guitar on Fitzgerald’s tenor-banjo treatment of Sally Gardens, and Fitzgerald played mandolin behind Egan’s rich baritone vocal on The Ballad of Capel Street, written by Ireland’s Mick Fitzgerald.
But the energy lifted an extra notch every time the McComiskeys, father and son, kicked off another set of reels on their matching squeezeboxes. The lilting melodies were carried by the fiddle, flute, pipes, and boxes, but the driving rhythm came from the guitar, banjo, piano, and bodhran (the Irish hand drum). And out from the wings came two college-age step dancers, Annie Hurley and Jordan Dudney, whose busy feet banged out ringing percussion notes on the stage’s wooden floor and then kicked high above their waists.
