The Ramblers' Sean McGuinness chatting with the crowd.
When you listen to local bands playing “Flight of Earls,” “The Fields of Athenry” or “The Ferryman,” you can bet they owe at least some of their sound to the Dublin City Ramblers.
The Ramblers, founded as the Jolly Tinkers in 1970 by banjo player Sean McGuinness, his brother Matt, and Pat Cummins, has had many iterations since they were long-haired Irish balladeers, looking not unlike the Dave Clark Five, on RTE. Pat and Matt are gone, as is longtime frontman Patsy Watchhorn (no, not dead–retired or soloing), but their influence lingers on. And the Ramblers are doing more than lingering on. With eight gold records behind them, they’re still performing, touring and recording. They’ll be at the Irish Center on Saturday night, rocking out—in a manner of speaking—with the Camden County Emerald Society Pipes and Drums.
We talked this week to Sean McGuinness, who has reconstituted the Ramblers with Derrick Keane on guitar and Tom Miller on bass. Though McGuinness is now lead vocalist, it’s tough to tell the difference between old Ramblers and new: They all have the same tight harmony and classic tenor banjo sound that acknowledges traditional roots.
“Over the years there’s been a lot of changes but we always keep the authentic sound,” said McGuinness. “Nobody is ever disappointed, not for the last 97 years.”
And, oh yes, the sense of humor is the same.
McGuinness, like most Irish musicians, comes by it all genetically. His mother studied music in London and played the piano. His father sang and danced. He grew up in Dublin, not rich, not poor. “My mother used to say to me, with all the crime going on, ‘When we were growing up, we’d leave the hall door wide open and anybody could drop in and nothing was ever taken.’ And I said, ‘Ma, we had nothing to rob!’ Of course they made sure that we never went short.”
But with the hall door wide open, especially at Christmas, the McGuinness house was music central. “People would come in a sing a sing and have a drink. We lived in a city housing estate, but everyone knew they could drop in at McGuinness’s.” He and his brother would play, his sister would dance. “I never realized at the time,” he says, “that someday I was going to make a living at it.”
In 1970, he actually had to make a crucial decision regarding his music career. . His boss at what is now Eirecomm gave him an ultimatum: “He said, ‘Sean, something has to go.’ So the job went and I started doing music fulltime.”
And never looked back.
The Ramblers recently re-recorded some of their old hits, like the immigration anthem “Flight of Earls,” in part because an old friend—Irish immigration activist Ciaran Staunton—urged them to. “In 1985 when we released that, immigration was colossal,” says McGuinness. “People were leaving for Australia and American. At that time, there was something to go to. Ciaran Staunton has been working for years on legalizing the Irish in America and he rang our manage, John Ryan, and said, ‘Tell Sean McGuinness to re-release that song.’ It seems fitting. Right now we have the worst government we’ve had in 100 years. The country is destroyed at the moment—economy-wise, healthwise—but we’ll sing our way through it.”
And he encourages the rest of us to sing along. “Some new bands out there insist on the bar being closed, but we like people drinking and joining in the singalong,” he says. “We do requests too. If we know ‘em, we’ll sing ‘em.”
