“If It Weren’t For The Music”

joHn Kennedy and Kennedy’s Kitchen

by Cynthia Connell Davis

“Dinner and play,” joHn Kennedy replies to my request that he talk about the band. We are at the Chicory Café in downtown South Bend. “We meet every Thursday night and have dinner and play. We give up half the rehearsal time for dinner. The social side comes first.”

They are not only playing and rehearsing; they are also connecting with each other and embedding the music back into the social fabric it came from. “The main reason to have a band – bring the audience into the kitchen.”

joHn Kennedy himself made a long odyssey to get to Kennedy’s Kitchen. In 1927 his mother and her family came to the USA from Drummacarry, Ireland, a “smattering of houses” in Northern Ireland too tiny to be called a village. The family faced hardship and long hours of work; there was no time for music. Kennedy grew up hearing his mother, father, and father’s twin brother sing Irish-American songs from the sound tracks of The Clancey Brothers, Tommy Makem, and others. But there were no choirs, no public singing. Other than family singing, the music was lost.

How close to NOT singing and playing did he come? Close. In high school he played, but not music; he played football.

There are stories in his family about a fiddle that belonged to his great-grandfather, Joseph Harvey, back in Ireland. “Where is Joseph Harvey’s fiddle?” is like asking, “What happened to the music?”

“I didn’t get the family heritage. They had to work. There was no time to keep up the inheritance.”

But then, “Fate played its hand,” says Kennedy. He joined the Peace Corps and went to Chili. He found a culture like the Irish culture he’d come from but had never known.

It’s your job!

In high school, he had some guitar lessons, but he didn’t take to the guitar at that time. It was when he got to Chili that he discovered a communal culture that resembled his own Irish communal culture. This is a culture called by anthropologists “high context;” i.e., the members, in a nuanced way, pay attention to the social life, especially distant family relationships.

The Peace Corps had monthly mental health checks for its members. There was music and presenting songs. At one point, Ron Tollen, a man from the neighboring town, arranged for a musical presentation in Santiago. The role of music in societal relationships became clear to Kennedy. He was and is painfully shy; he had to overcome his shyness to respond to the urging to get up and sing. And sing he did! He sang the only song he could think of: “Springtime in Indiana.”

Suddenly he felt the exhilaration of singing with other people and in front of an audience. It wasn’t only about the response of the audience; it was also the connection with others that was forged by the music.

It was compelling. Suddenly he realized, “It’s your[my]job to be the center of attention!”

It was life-changing. He got a guitar and learned some Chilean. At first, he was self-taught. He learned habits he later had to unlearn. He also learned the truth: “Everybody will have a song. There will be a family sing,” meaning that the musicians and the audience will come to know each other. Music binds us together.

Visit Kennedy's Kitchen

Joseph Harvey’s Fiddle

If a story is a home we build for our souls, the story of Joseph Harvey’s fiddle is a castle, an estate.

When Kennedy was 36 years old, his mother urged him to visit his grandmother and collect her stories before she died. He now has 20 hours of her on tape. Born in 1916 and brought to America by her parents when she was 12, she died at the age of 102. In 1947, she returned to Ireland to visit her father, Joseph Harvey, before he died.

Joseph Harvey lived in a two-room cottage with nine children and three other adults. They were poor.

Kennedy asked his grandmother what toys the children played with. She replied that they played with the only thing they had – words. “She could sum up whatever she talked about in a fine line,” he said.

Joseph Harvey had been given a fiddle by a boat owner when his brother had died by drowning. A boat This fiddle hung on the kitchen wall. It was the only musical instrument in the surrounding townland.

In the winter in Ireland, darkness comes on by 4:00 in the afternoon. Joseph Harvey would take the fiddle from the kitchen wall and play. People from nearby houses probably came over. It was “a family sing.”

As the story has it, when he was dying, Joseph Harvey was surrounded by loved ones insisting, “You have to play us a tune!” He played “Trumpet Hornpipe” on his deathbed.

After he died, the question of the fiddle’s whereabouts generated several stories. Kennedy said that it’s curious how the interest in what happened to the fiddle has gripped the imaginations of his family. One version – the one his grandmother believed – holds that the fiddle was put under Joseph Harvey’s deathbed. The cottage was subsequently abandoned for a while. Upon returning, the family found the fiddle under the bed in shards.

Another story holds that someone took it to Scotland. Yet another maintains that it was brought to America when the family moved here.

It’s important for people to have the story. In the story, there’s knowledge about what we’ve lost. Kennedy memorialized it in the title track of the band’s first CD, “Joseph Harvey’s Fiddle was Left in the Rain.”

“If It Weren’t For The Music”

I bring to the interview wonderful memories of concerts by Kennedy’s Kitchen. Kennedy enriches the experience with stories about the tunes that are themselves often stories. One time, telling the audience about the importance of music and dance in Irish culture, he mentioned the passionate, volatile nature of the Irish. . . and their quickness to express their differences. “If it weren’t for the music,” he said, “the Irish would have killed each other long ago!”

“That Sounds Like Us”

The band needs no introduction; they are ubiquitous. To anyone whom I told that I was writing an article, the reply was either, “I have heard them” or “I have heard of them.” They sometimes play in my mind. Yet, Kennedy takes none of it for granted. He is continually rediscovering the sound of Irish “high context” culture and bringing it to life on stage.

He says something unexpected: “It’s easy to hide behind one’s voice.” He means that a person can easily go through the motions, lose the present moment, and not stay on that edge. Not take the risk; not be vulnerable.

He invokes the three-year-old child, unselfconsciously at play, absorbed in wonder. “The castle falls down; there is instantaneous forgiveness.” As the African proverb that hangs on his wall urges us, “If you can walk, you can dance. If you can talk, you can sing.”

He continuously defies the doom of music lost, so there will always be some of that joy. “Every day I sing very loud. It brings me back to myself, to who I imagine myself to be.” The aim is always to get to that place where that special something happens because you are standing in that place. Because then, “That sounds like us.”

Let yourself be brought into Kennedy’s Kitchen at Fiddler’s Hearth on Wednesday nights.

joHn Kennedy - Music Binds Us