Sweeping Through the Classics

Episode 90-Sweeping Through the Classics
The inseparable Down the Broom and Gatehouse Maid
This Irish Music Stories episode aired Monday March 2, 2026

https://shannonheatonmusic.com/Episode-90-Sweeping-Through-the-Classics

Speakers

>> Shannon Heaton: flute player, singer, and host of Irish Music Stories 

>> Sorcha Costello: traditional Irish fiddle player and teacher from Tulla Co. Clare
———
I’m Shannon Heaton.

[ Music: “Rockabye by Firelight,” from Production Music made for Irish Music Stories
Artist/Composer: Matt Heaton ]

And this is Irish Music Stories. The show about traditional music, and the bigger stories behind it.

[ Music: “Down the Broom,” from The Primrose Lass
Artist: Sorcha Costello ]

Like how some things just go together. Like Sorcha Costello’s fiddle and E Minor and F.

>> Sorcha: The lower strings on my fiddle in particular are a little bit more warm and boomy. And I enjoy that. So if I can, I often change the key and bring it down there.

>> Shannon: And some tunes just go together. Like Down the Broom and the Gatehouse Maid

>> Sorcha: There’s some tunes that you can’t play them without another tune. They’re set.

>> Shannon: Like Down the Broom and the Gatehouse Maid

>> Sorcha: Whatever session you go to in East Clare, that set is going to be played, Down the Broom” and The Gatehouse Maid.

>> Shannon: Irish dance tunes are often put into sets: two or three tunes played, medley-style, to keep the music going on a bit longer for the dancers. And to offer some variety as players move from one melody (one mood) to the next. When you pair different tunes together, you get a conversation going with the music. And with the other players.

In informal session settings, sets of tunes are often invented on the fly. And in performances, dances, or on recordings, you think ahead to what might sound nice together.

The change from Down the Broom into the Gatehouse Maid really works. It flows. It’s iconic.

[ Music: “Meaning of Life,” from Production Music made for Irish Music Stories
Artist/Composer: Matt Heaton ]

But this set—and putting tunes together into sets—is not as old as time. It used to be that a tune would fit together with a particular dance. And you’d save the tune til you got a chance to play it with the specific dance

[ Music: “Blackbird,” from Cover the Buckle
Artists: Kieran Jordan & Sean Clohessy ]

No change into a second tune. Just the pairing of melody and choreography. Then when people started recording music in the 1920s, the music kinda separated from the dance. Because without the dance context, it wouldn’t necessarily hold the attention of casual listeners. Even with gorgeous rhythmic style and melodic variation,

[ Music: “Pound the Floor,” from Production Music made for Irish Music Stories
Artist/Composer: Matt Heaton ]

And even when really skilled accompanists joined in (like Jack McKenna and Mark Callahan, who played guitar with Hughie Gillespie), when they started spelling out the tunes’ inherent harmonies, that still wasn’t enough to sell these 78rpm disks, which held about 3 minutes of music.

In the 1920s the producers at Decca and Columbia Records who didn’t know much about Irish music really wanted those three minutes to sizzle. So they’d bring in piano players to bash along with the fiddles. They were totally in the wrong key. They totally obscured the performances. But they didn’t know. They didn’t care. And they got the guys to include two or three tunes on a single side rather than just one. That’d be more variety, more bang for the consumer buck.

Those records made in New York were being sent back over to Ireland, which was helping to keep the interest—to reignite interest in traditional music. And then over in Ireland, the Public Dance Halls Act of 1935 banned informal house dances. So people had to take it out to the clubs and the pubs.

People started organizing Céilí bands and public pub sessions, and things got more commodified. More commercial. More slick.

The performance and the dance bands came up with exciting medleys of tunes, to keep things lively for the dancers and the punters

I’m sure Sligo superstar Michael Coleman didn’t know that when he recorded rhe Tarboltan with the Longford Collector and Sailor’s Bonnet, that it wouldn’t just sell records. I would become an enduring session, and dance, and performance staple. Same with Paddy Killoran when he put Down the Broom with The Gatehouse Maid. This is a set of tunes Sorcha Costello has ben hearing her whole life.

>> Sorcha: Interestingly enough when I go to think about playing it in ‘A,’ I instantly want to play it faster than I did in E Minor.

[ Music: “Down the Broom,” from Zoom recording

>> Shannon: Sorcha grew up in Tulla in East Clare and learned tunes from her mom Mary MacNamara (who plays concertina) and her Uncle Andrew (who plays the accordion).

>> Sorcha: I grew up in the most musical household possible where the front door was literally left open, physically left open, and musicians would just walk through every day.
>> Shannon: Sorcha definitely would have heard Down the Broom and the Gatehouse Maid. And other classic pairings—some of which came first from the older players around Clare.
>> Shannon: So, some of your mentors—and your mom’s mentors, helped to establish a few iconic sets or parings of tunes, like sets of tunes.. I’m thinking Tulla Ceili Band like the Peacock’s feathers hornpipes; Joe Cooley’s, Cup of Tea, Wise Maid…
>> Sorcha: Yeah there’s classic sets that exist in the sessions around here in East Clare, but also that have been officially recorded by the Tulla Ceili Band, by Paddy Canny, by Martin Hayes, by of course my mom Mary and by my Uncle Andrew.
>> Shannon: And you were also kind of surrounded by unusual versions of tunes where you live.
>> Sorcha: For sure, but I didn’t realize that until I went to play them anywhere else. Always thought what we played was normal until you go outside of East Clare and then suddenly realize what you play is absolutely not normal. We love to play things in different keys. We love to play things a little different. That book that my mom Mary brought out, Sundays at Lena’s, really goes into the unique versions and why they exist/how they existed. It’s really special to East Clare

[ Music: “Celtic Grooves,” from Production Music made for Irish Music Stories
Artist/Composer: Matt Heaton ]

>> Shannon: Learning regional versions of tunes and being surrounded by standard sets has given Sorcha a classic Irish music education. But she’s also gotten into new compositions.

>> Sorcha: I do write new tunes. It’s a new enough endeavor for me, but I decided to get brave and sit down and just try it. And my main aim was that, number one, it didn’t sound exactly like another tune, which is pretty difficult in the tradition because there are thousands of other tunes. And also that it still sounded traditional. I didn’t want to go and compose something that wasn’t in my style, in my roots, for starting off anyway. I wanted something to sound traditional and like it had been around for years.

[ Music: “Jig for Georgia,” from The Primrose Lass
Artist/Composer: Sorcha Costello ]

>> Shannon: But in addition to new tunes like this one, Jig for Georgia, Sorcha’s still got time for the classics.

>> Shannon: On your album the Primrose Lass you recorded Down the Broom with…>> Sorcha: Yes, the Gatehouse Maid. Those tunes are the ones that always go together here.
>> Shannon: Yeah, so why include this iconic set? Like, hasn’t it already been done?
>> Sorcha: I feel like it’s part of my DNA. And whether it’s done or not previously didn’t really bother me, because it’s about how I approach it rather than it being something that’s “oh here we go again.” You know, putting it in a different key can always give a tune a little bit of a fresh lift and sound to it.

[ Music: “Meaning of Life,” from Production Music made for Irish Music Stories
Artist/Composer: Matt Heaton ]

>> Shannon: No matter the key, Down the Broom and the Gatehouse Maid have been part of the Irish dance music DNA since November 1937, when Paddy Killoran recorded the two tunes together. James Morrison had recorded Down the Broom in 1922 with the Cameronian; and Monaghan piper Willie Clarke had also recorded Down the Broom in the 1920s. But it was the Down the Broom/Gatehouse Maid pairing that really stuck.

Junior Crehan (who was born almost 90 years before Sorcha Costello and about 50 kilometers from her home in Tulla) said he heard Paddy Killoran playing those reels together when he’d visit his wife’s hometown of Miltown Malbay. So this set has been a thing—and a Clare thing—for a long time.

And the tune Down the Broom has been in play for much longer still.

[ Music: “C Chimes,” from Production Music made for Irish Music Stories
Artist/Composer: Matt Heaton ]

Leitrim piper and fiddle player Stephen Grier included it in his music manuscript collection in 1883. Before that, pipers and cleric James Goodman had included it in Volume 2 of his music manuscript, which was an incredible project. This was a collection of pre-Famine Irish tunes that wasn’t known about until his death in 1896, when the entire Canon James Goodman six-volume collection just showed up at Trinity College. There’s no record of an executor, or a relative, or an agent. All this music that he’d compiled in the 1850s and 60s just showed up at the library.

There were these two musicologists who helped present the Goodman manuscripts, Hugh Shields, and later his collaborator and widow Lisa Shields. They said that Goodman got Down the Broom from the music manuscripts of 19th century Dublin bookseller John O’Daly

[ Music: “Barbara Allen,” from Production Music made for Irish Music Stories
Artist/Composer: Matt Heaton ]

John was born in Waterford in the year 1800. When he was 26 he moved to Cork, where he met and married Ellen Shea. They moved with their growing family to Kilkenny. The Dictionary of Irish Biography was the only source I found that mentions their kids — no other mention of their six sons and four daughters, only five of whom lived beyond childhood.

Times must have been trying for old John as he set up in Kilkenny. He worked for the Irish Society. He taught the Bible for a while. And then in 1833 he opened his first bookstore. He’d become passionate about Gaelic myths and history—probably a good way of finding some magic, and of explaining and finding meaning through the deaths of your children; a way of finding some perspective, of mulling over something bigger and much older than current struggles; and a good way of avoiding Anglo-Irish influences, to which John was becoming increasingly allergic.

John O’Daly began translating and selling Jacobite poetry with metrical translations and manuscripts of Oisín and other Fenian poets. Even back then it was a pretty niche kind of a project.

[ Music: Reprise, Meaning of Life ]

In 1845 the O’Daly family moved to Dublin, where John opened his shop on Anglesea Street. He stocked history and music books, political pamphlets, rare manuscripts, and his Jacobite poetry translations. He edited and published song books with translations and biographical sketches. After his wife Ellen died in 1849, he remarried the widow Mary Murphy and had one more daughter

His Dublin shop, which moved location twice in his 33 years in business in Dublin became an important hub for established Irish scholars. It might have been a pretty specific crew. But the Celtic Society and Ossianic Society had meetings there. Supporters of the Young Ireland movement and readers of The Nation also flocked there for his Gaelic and his political materials that championed independence, reform, and cultural revival.

John really bucked 19th-century Ireland’s Anglicization trends. He was a pioneer of the Gaelic revival. Despite mass emigration and a really dwindling Irish book-buying market during and after the Great Famine, he clung to his mission and his shops, from Kilkenny to Dublin, for over 45 years.

But Gaelic publishing, and sustaining a family and all the losses—probably not an easy road. But John kept that home going, for old scholars and Young Ireland sympathizers. They all gathered at O’Daly’s, like the record store in High Fidelity. There was a devoted audience for his rare Irish manuscripts and bilingual gems.

And there’s still an audience for Down the Broom, the tune that John O’Daly handed to James goodman, at some point before 1855, when the two men were involved in the Ossianic Society, when O’Daly was honorary secretary and Goodman was a contributing editor.

Like most old traditional folk tunes, which might have been COLLECTED from a player, Down the Broom has mostly stayed in the Irish music repertoire because it’s been passed on aurally.
This is a social, LIVING tradition. And passing on tunes directly, from one musician to the next, is a very social way to keep melodies alive—and it leads to a lot of variations and different variants (like, totally new tunes), as it moves from one player and one locality to the next. And when this happens, names of tunes can get confused, or they can change.
There are other Down the Broom-ish tunes out there.

>> Sorcha: Um, have you ever listened to the album “The Ewe with the Crooked Horn” by Colm Gannon, Jesse Smith, and John Blake. They record a version of “Down the Broom” that’s quite different in its melody, but the name of it is “Down Through the Broom.”

>> Shannon: Turns out that Colm/Jesse/John variant is sometimes called the Old Down the Broom, or the Broomstick—a lovely, related tune, with a similar feel. The Clare piper Willie Clancy recorded it—on the album it’s called Miss Galvin’s Reel, but he says the name The Broomstick, spoken, on the recording. And Sliabh Luachra fiddle players Julia and Billy Clifford recorded it. They called it The Thrashing Reel.

Flute player Catherine McEvoy has a great version of that on her 2001 album The Kilmore Fancy. The beginning of it starts like this

[ plays A part ]

So if we put that against the more well-known Down the Broom, the one that Sorcha Costello recorded, you can hear that the tune does line up in certain phrases, but it’s pretty divergent in others.

[ both versions put together]

Catherine didn’t have a name for the tune when she recorded it. She called it Gan Ainm (no name) on the album. When I asked her about it, she said she thought her brother John, a fiddle player, got the tune from fiddle and concertina player John Kelly Senior from West Clare.

So meanwhile back to Clare for this tune. Which is where Junior Crehan said he first heard Paddy Killoran playing it with the Gatehouse Maid.

Catherine and John McEvoy also traced their version of Down the Broom to Seáinín Mhicil Ó Súilleabháin who was a fiddle player from the Blasket Islands.

[ Music: “Little Bird Lullaby,” from Production Music made for Irish Music Stories
Artist/Composer: Matt Heaton ]

He was one of the last inhabitants there, before the Irish government ordered the final evacuation in 1953. A very sad situation. This young man had died on the island in 1947, because he couldn’t get treatment for meningitis in time. After that, Blasket Island people started moving to the mainland and to America.

Six years later, Eamon de Valera (he was the Taoiseach) ordered the final 30 residents to evacuate. The remaining islanders were mostly very old people, and there was so little communication or emergency assistance available to them. But closing the last of this Irish speaking homeland of farmers and fishermen who didn’t want to leave the remoteness and the silence—that was some sentence. Most of the final islanders just curled up and died after leaving. They weren’t ready to let go of old ways.

They didn’t want the services. They didn’t want want advancements. They probably didn’t even want the more common, newer version of Down the Broom. They wanted the Old Broom, from the old Blaskets.

[ Music ]

Yellow and orange broom grows wild all over the Blasket Islands. Many believe the broom has healing properties. There are old tales and folk cures, calling broom lucky, cleansing, protective. It represents a clean sweep, or a fresh start.

Broom is also associated with fairies, who can bring good luck or cause great harm. People used to burn broom at seasonal festivals to ward off evil and protect farm animals against witches and malevolent spirits.

Even though most sweeping brooms were made out of broomcorn (which is a different plant), some made “besom” brooms—smaller cleaning tools out of our broom here. And used it to sweep thresholds to protect against evil. And littler broom tool is linked with “broom dances,” or brush dances, which people used to dance to encourage crop growth. And which people still sometimes do at weddings. Basically rhythmic steps around and over a broom, to symbolize stepping over a threshold, stepping into a new life.

And we still observe some of these superstitious rituals. We still tell these fairy stories. Because we all need a bit of magic. And there’s enduring magic in the old Down the Broom tune—and the stories and the music bundled in it.

[ Music: Reprise, Dark Low Jig ]

For sure, not all old ways are worth holding on to. Innovation and evolution—even moving off the island can lead to better times, to more opportunities, more ease, less suffering, greater understanding.

And new stuff can be fun. There are some great modern Irish tunes. Some of which, like Sorcha Costello’s, are trying to have a little bit of that old DNA in them. And some of them are full of syncopations and funky little turns. They’re meant to be new, and some of those little jobs can bring festival audiences to their feet.

But of course, beloved homelands, even remote, treacherous ones, will remain the preference for some. Same with old stories rich in metaphor and magic, like the ones that John O’Daly translated and published.

Old tunes and old sets of tunes can still ring true. They can offer some balance and sense to current tunes and trends. They can offer a bit of time-tested quality. Because some things still just work. Like Down the Broom and the Gatehouse Maid,

>> Sorcha: Down the Broom is an endlessly giving tune. Every time I listen to it, I hear something else, even if it’s the same recording. It’s full of notes, it’s full of rhythm.

[ Music: Reprise, Pound the Floor ]

it’s full of character andI think moodiness because of its key, being minor. But it also gives me those warm fuzzies that I look for when I listen to music

The first part and the second part are quite similar in their structure of rhythm. Going from the first part to second part and second part to the first part, I feel like it’s all very much in the one feeling. It’s all very much in the same rhythm, in the same vein. So if I was teaching this tune,I would say establishing the rhythm is the most important thing, and that can be done in the first two bars. Because you have everything you need. Like there’s so much detail within the first two bars alone. You could use it as a model for teaching rhythm to anybody who’s learning to play a reel.

>> Sorcha: Are we gonna try and play it together?
>> Shannon: That’s a nice idea. If you wanted to do it once in A I could join you
>> Sorcha: I’ll try it. Probably should have played it once before.. Haha.

[ Music: “Down the Broom,” from Zoom session & remote recording along with it
Artists: Sorcha Costello & Shannon Heaton ]

[ Music: Reprise, Meaning of Life ]

>> Shannon: Thanks to that old bookseller John O’Daly, we’ve got Down the Broom—with all its glorious rhythm and moodiness—that we can enjoy together in person. Or remotely in Tulla, and over here in Boston.

Following his death in May 1878, John O’Daly’s extensive book collection, together with some remaining manuscripts, was auctioned over three days. A lifetime of work, distributed in 72 hours, all over Dublin.

Some of his treasures are still surfacing. And with each little find, there are plenty of mysteries to consider and to unravel. Whether you try ‘em out in A minor. Or down in E. Or F. Or Eb.

[ Music: Minor Complications, from The Primrose Lass
Artist/Composer: Sorcha Costello ]

Irish Music Stories was written and produced by me, Shannon Heaton. Thanks to Sorcha for this outro music, a great tune called Minor Complications. And thanks for the Down the Broom chat. Thanks to Matt Heaton for the production music. Thank you Catherine McEvoy for the info on the Broomstick variant. And Thank you to the generous supporters who continue to kick in to help me make this show, so that I can keep it free and available for everybody.

Thank you for listening. There are plenty of other IrishMusicStories episodes. Hope you’ll give some of them a listen or a re-listen, and share them with friends and family. For more information about this podcast project, for playlists, or to kick in to help build the show, just head to IrishMusicStories.org