When the trumpeter Miles Davis released a seminal album called Birth of the Cool in 1957, it traced the development not of coolness in general, but of a specific jazz variant so named that emerged in the years after the war.
Well, in broadly similar vein, a Wicklow reader has written to me offer insights into the origins of an Irish cultural phenomenon from a slightly later era.
That one incorporated not just music but dance, conversation, and a whole way of life. It also, crucially, had a linguistic element. I refer, of course, to the birth of the Craic (so spelt).
Yes, as everyone over 30 knows, the craic was pre-existed by a thing called “the crack”, a term used in northern England and Scotland for centuries, with a similar meaning.
Craicing the Case – Frank McNally on the origins of a cultural and linguistic phenomenon
Frank McNally on a grand stretch in the evenings, a new Dublin restaurant and ‘Gloomsday’
Drum role: Alison Healy casts an incredulous eye over a much-loved Christmas carol
Kindred spirit: Áine Ryan on the joys of reliving a Christmas childhood through her grandchildren
Indeed, even the Irish variant was still spelt crack when famously measured at 90 – still the national record – on the Isle of Man, circa 1968, by the late Barney Rushe.
And when trying to explain how crack became craic (a spelling now increasingly common in Britain too), I have often joked that it emigrated from England to Connemara in the 1970s, before gradually going native.
But Charles Callan from Wicklow town has a very specific memory of when he first saw the spelling craic in print. It was in the window of a pub in Galway, on a poster advertising a musical event, “in the second half of the year 1969”.
The venue was the Cellar Bar on Eglington Street, which in the tradition of Liverpool’s Cavern, sounds like just the sort of a place where a new popular phenomenon might emerge. (Although, as Joe notes in passing, the Cellar was and remains “neither a cellar nor below ground”. That’s Galway all over.)
[ ‘When my boss said ‘what’s the craic?’ I thought he was talking about drugs’Opens in new window ]
The act being advertised was a trio called Íde, Nolan, agus Dolan, of whom, Charles remembers, the last-mentioned was a Joe Dolan. But not that one.
This was “Galway Joe” (1942 – 2008), who despite also being one of the famed Sweeney’s Men with Andy Irvine and Johnny Moynihan, was reduced to needing a geographical prefix to distinguish himself from the Mullingar species.
Anyway, on that pub poster, CRAIC took the form of an acronym, written vertically, with the acrostics standing for “Ceol”, “Rince”, “Amhrán”, “Imeartas”, and “Comhrá”.
Which may imply that the spelling was already common in Galway, but either way, also usefully illustrates the wider parameters that Irish crack/craic was taking on vis a vis the English/Scots variety.
Perhaps the most crucial local addition was imeartas, meaning “sport, play, playfulness”.
I’m reminded that in a small book about Ireland some years ago for the Xenophobes Guide series, I offered the Freudian analysis that there were three parts to the Irish psyche: “the conscious, the subconscious, and the bit that does things for the craic”.
I also lamented that the compunction to do things for the craic was not yet recognised as a defence in Irish courts, although it should be.
[ Who will set us free of the bogus Irishness of craic?Opens in new window ]
But getting back to Galway Joe, he was a songwriter of some note, whose most famous ballad, adopted by the Dubliners and others, was Nelson’s Farewell: “Oh, poor old Admiral Nelson is no longer in the air/Toora, loora, loora, loora, loo.”
My correspondent also tells me Dolan could be “agonistic” on occasion and jokes that he might have preferred “Imreas” to “Imeartas” for the Craic acrostic.
It means “strife, discord, quarrel”, which, I suppose, can be part of the craic too on occasion. Or at least it was on the record-breaking occasion in the Isle of Man, where police had to intervene and some of the protagonists spent a short spell in the cells, pending the return ferry to Dublin.
The great lexicographer of English slang, Eric Partridge, mentions the question “What’s the crack?” in one of his dictionaries, calling it “Anglo-Irish” and saying it was “heard on a major civil-engineering construction site in Lancashire since ca. 1976.”
But while we’re in that general neighbourhood, Charles Callan also points to the possible influence of one Schnitzer Theophilus O’Shea, “the celebrated exile and Irish language poet” born in Wigan.
Well, strictly speaking, he was born in the head of his creator, Dónal MacAmhlaigh (1926 – 1989), a Galway man who moved to Kilkenny and later emigrated to England as a labourer before finding a vocation as a writer, mainly in Irish.
[ The etymology of "craic"Opens in new window ]
Schnitzer was one of his fictional characters, whose poetry collections are said to have included “Who Is Humphrey Deegan?”
When I try to find that online, AI assumes I’m asking it a question and insists on telling me about a real-life Humphrey Deegan, a hotelier in Clonakilty.
But the fictional one used to speak at a lot of cultural events in Britain, where his hosts once included an organisation called CRAC. That stood for “Ceol, rince, amhránaíocht, cohmrá”, apparently. According to MacAmhlaigh’s footnotes, it was “a sort of People’s Festival held annually in Birmingham”.
