An Early Wake Read Free Page B

“So you’d know little about the history of the place? Did you know this Old Mick?”
    Maura shook her head. “I never met the man, I’m afraid. And I kind of hit the ground running here, so there hasn’t been a lot of time to ask about what happened before I showed up. What are you looking for?”
    Rose set two mugs of coffee on the bar in front of them. Tim smiled his thanks, and Rose’s blush returned. “As Rose here said, I’m a student at Trinity in Dublin—do you know it?”
    “I haven’t seen Dublin yet, only this part of the country.” To be fair, Maura
had
seen the airport and the bus station, but she didn’t really think those counted. After arriving on a red-eye flight, she hadn’t noticed much about the scenery she’d passed on her way to Cork.
    Tim filed that fact away. “I’m doing an arts degree in musicology.” When Maura stared blankly at his description, he explained, “It’s the history of music, and to finish I have to write a dissertation—that’s a long paper—so I’m here fer the research. The department requires we know a bit about playing music, and I’m not a bad aul player m’self, but what I’m looking to do is teach music history and theory. Do you know anything about Irish bands?” He looked hopefully at Maura.
    She hated to disappoint him again, but she’d never been particularly interested in music. “You mean all that tin whistle and fiddle stuff?”
    Tim smiled. “That’s the traditional side of things. Which is all good and well—and some of the tunes go back for centuries, so it’s interesting to see them surviving today and still being played. But what interests me now is more the contemporary scene, and how modern musicians have borrowed elements of the old forms and made them into something new.”
    Maura glanced quickly at Rose, who had to know more than she did. “Like the Saw Doctors and the Cranberries,” Rose volunteered. “Is that what you mean, Tim?”
    The names meant nothing to Maura. Were those current bands? Or ancient history?
    He nodded vigorously. “Yes, but they’re not the only ones. Where do you come from, Maura? Did you mention Boston?”
    “Yeah, I grew up in South Boston.”
    “Grand—then surely you know of the Dropkick Murphys?”
    Maura smiled. It was impossible to grow up in Southie and not know the Dropkick Murphys; impossible to work in any local bar and not hear their songs in the background, over and over. “Them I know.”
    Tim beamed. “Well, there you go. They’re American, of course, but there’s still that element of the traditional in what they write, what they perform, even today. Maybe it’s in the genes, but that’s a study for a different department, for sure. What I’m looking at is the evolution of recent Irish music over the past couple of decades and its debt to the traditional.”
    “That sounds interesting,” Maura said politely. “But where does Sullivan’s fit?”
    Tim looked incredulous. “Do you not know? Sullivan’s was the heart of the music scene for this end of the country, back for a decade or more in the nineties.”
    Back in the nineties, Tim would have been in diapers. Why would he be interested in the music? But then, Maura didn’t claim to understand how colleges worked. She had a vague idea that when you wrote a paper you had to do something that hadn’t been done before. In that case, writing about the history of Sullivan’s definitely qualified. Maura searched her memory and couldn’t recall anyone mentioning music and Sullivan’s in the same breath, although now that she thought of it, there were some posters of bands tacked up in the little-used back room . . . “Here? But this is the middle of nowhere!”
    Tim nodded. “It is that, but who’s to question how these things come about? In its day, Sullivan’s drew players from all over. It was Mick Sullivan brought them together, and he sat in often enough. Or so I’m told.”
    Old Mick had been a musician? One