Button Accordionist James Keane in Coatesville Concert

By Denise Foley

Champion button accordionist James Keane showed up on the spare wooden stage at the Coatesville Cultural Society Saturday night to introduce his new partner—fresh from Recananti, Italy, the new Keanebox accordion, produced by Castagnari Accordions to his specifications. And he made that shiny new cherrywood squeezebox with its claret-colored bellows work for a living.

But between the jigs and reels and one haunting lament (Lament for the Battle of Augrim, a tune punctuated by a battle jig), Keane, who helped bring traditional music back from near obscurity in Ireland in the 1960s, told stories like an old-time seanachie. One intent, it seemed, was to restore the many tunes written by famed Galway accordionist Martin Mulhaire to their rightful composer.

“A lot of his tunes are performed by people playing them under other names,” Keane said.

Keane himself learned one as a boy after he and his father heard the reel played at a Fleadh Cheoil in Clare “by a performer playing on a truck at the top of O’Connell Street in Ennis.”

“My father said it was called ‘Morning Mist,’” Keane recalled. “I recorded it a couple of times, and years later I was playing it at a festival in Snug Harbor New York when I was approached by Martin Mulhaire himself. He said, ‘You played that tune very well. But I composed it and that’s not the name of it.’”

In fact, Mulhare has written the song for his wife prior to their marriage, and “Morning Mist” was originally called “Carmel O’Mahoney Mulhaire’s.”

Ironically, said Keane, many years later he was back in Ennis and that same music truck was parked at the top of O’Connell Street. “I was invited on stage to play, and I decided to play that tune,” he said. “So it ended up coming ‘round full circle.”

Opening for Keane was a group of young trad musicians who earned a standing ovations when they played last month at the Philadelphia Ceili Group festival—flutist Emma Hinesly, fiddler Caitlyn Finley, and guitarist Sean Earnest.

The man who had to hide his own music from his schoolmates called the trio “as good as I’ve ever heard.”