Kay Parley is a colleague who wanders through the same misty corridors of the past where I often sojourn. In one of her recent columns she rejoiced in her discovery of the group of performers who call themselves Celtic Thunder. I am mightily pleased by them as well.
The stagecraft of the group is as modern as tomorrow, but the musical skills of the featured male performers and the instrumentalists who support them reaches into the past where the hallmark of vocalists was respect - for their listeners, for the place where they sang and for themselves. Kay must have been delighted to see for the first time performers who were well-scrubbed and well-groomed and who sang in rich, full-throated voices. Having an old-fashioned sense of the proper and improper, Kay would have found nothing offensive in any of their tuneful lyrics.
For people who have been overexposed to creatures who look like they need to be bathed, barbered and properly dressed, meeting Celtic Thunder for the first time is a blessed experience. And they don't sing rude and crude or unintelligible lyrics. And they don't sing through their noses.
I don't know exactly when howling, wailing and gurgling through a purpling proboscis became the accepted standard of musical entertainment.
I know my saintly father, gone these many years to sing first tenor with the best of heavenly choirs, would have noticed immediately how good, tuneful music was being afflicted and would have snorted, "An abomination!" Then I think he would have urged Saint Peter to garner in all the musical miscreants and send them to the place where they would be prodded forever with red-hot pitchforks. That's what I would do in the here and now, if I could.
In those dear, dead days beyond recall (except by people like Kay and me) performers behaved and dressed appropriately. I remember the gentlemen of the choir dressed in their Sunday suits. These suits were for special occasions only, including the very last one.
When I see old photographs from the Dirty Thirties, I wonder about the men in rough trousers and suit coats. I think perhaps the jobless man or struggling farmer has been forced to wear the coat of his Sunday suit in place of a jacket he couldn't afford. I guess his shoes were packed with pasteboard insoles. I think, for the sake of family pride, he hoped to have another suit and a good pair of shoes when the undertaker laid him out.
Those were bad times, but there were good people. When the singers sang they played on the strings of your soul and made you see visions of a better world to be. That is what I remember. So does Kay.
