February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
With fireplace blazing and chandeliers low, forty invited guests sat down to a formal pheasant dinner and an evening of toasts, stories, laughter and a few tears in honor of local fiddler and traditional music impresario Larry Reynolds and his wife Phyllis.
Reynolds was praised for his generous and unflinching devotion to traditional Irish music in Boston, a devotion that covers half a century. He follows in the footsteps of other prominent men and women to receive the honor, including poet Seamus Heaney, politician Billy Bulger, former Consul General Orla O’Hanrahan and University of Ulster president Gerry McKenna.
“Larry got two standing ovations during the evening, putting him on a par with Seamus Heaney, whom we honored back in 1997,” said Philip C. Haughey, chairman of Harvard’s Friends of Celtic Studies, which hosted the event. The group raises funds to help graduate students carry out research on ancient Gaelic texts.
Joining Haughey and the Reynolds at the soiree was Dr. Patrick K. Ford, head of Harvard’s Celtic department, Tomas O Cathasaigh, professor of Irish Studies, and Friends committee members Gene Haley, Mary McMillan and Elizabeth Gray.
Representing Boston’s Irish community were Isolde Moylan, Consul General of Ireland, David and Pat Burke and Robert Collins of the Irish Foundation, Mike and Liz O’Connor and Brian O’Donovan of the Irish Cultural Centre, and Seamus Connolly, head of the Gaelic Roots program at Boston College. Comhaltas officials Barbara Davis, Jimmy Roche and Tom Concannon also attended.
Connolly, considered one of Ireland’s finest fiddlers, praised the work that Reynolds and his family has put into Irish music over the last fifty years.
“I don’t know of anyone outside of Ireland who has done more to promote Irish traditional music than Larry Reynolds,” Connolly said. “He has helped scores of young musicians fresh off the boat, giving them money out of his own pocket and setting them up with gigs. When I first came here in 1975, he gave me my start.”
Connolly also credited Reynolds for helping to make Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eireann such a vibrant group with chapters all over the year, of which Boston’s is among the largest.
“The Irish government should give Larry an award for the way he’s represented Ireland in America. He is one of Ireland’s best living ambassadors,” Connolly said.
That Reynolds is held in such high regard comes as no surprise to anyone who has lived in the Boston area. He moved here from Ballinasloe in 1953, bringing with him the great musical traditions of East Galway that other musicians like Patsy Touhey, the great piper from Loughrea, brought to Boston before him.
Reynolds arrived at the height of the Dudley Street era in Roxbury, when numerous Irish dance halls created a vibrant dance scene that lasted into the early 1960s. He played with Paddy, Johnny and Mick Cronin from Kerry, Brendan Tonra from Mayo, and a host of American born players like Joe and George Derrane and the late banjo player Jimmy Kelly. He later formed his own groups, the Tara Ceili Band and the Connacht Ceili Band, before devoting himself solely to Comhaltas starting in 1975.
Reynolds also did several gigs for Harvard’s Folk Dance Society during the early 1950s, traveling across the Charles River with musicians Tom Senier and Dessie O’Reagan and dancer Mike Cummings. Reynolds never imagined he would be honored fifty years later.
“I was very proud to be honored by Harvard as a proponent of Irish music,” Reynolds says in retrospect. “For me, it’s a sign that Irish traditional music is now on a plateau where it belongs.”
Set subhed:
Harvard’s Irish Connections
Harvard’s connections to the Irish community date back to 1896, when Chaucer scholar Fred Norris Robinson taught the first Gaelic course in America at the college.
Robinson grew up in Lawrence, a mill city north of Boston that was so heavily Irish it even had its own Irish language newspaper, notes Dave Burke of the Irish Foundation. An active member of the Irish community, Robinson helped to welcome Dr. Douglas Hyde to Boston in December 1905, and took part in numerous activities hosted by the Gaelic League. He taught Irish and Welsh at Harvard for forty years before the school formally created a Celtic Studies department, thanks to a donation of $51,000 from philanthropist Henry Lee Shattuck on behalf of the Charitable Irish Society.
Thanks to Dr. Ford and Phil Haughey, the Celtic Studies Department today remains active in the Irish community at-large. It has partnered with Boston College’s Irish Studies Programs, and supports local cultural groups like Sugan Theatre. Each October it hosts an annual colloquium that features the latest research of Celtic scholars and graduate students from across the world.
The Department has recently initiated an effort to endow a lecture series in honor of Professor John V. Kelleher, another native of Lawrence who was department chairman from 1962 to 1984. Kelleher is credited, along with Eoin McKiernan and others, of helping to establish Irish Studies as a legitimate discipline in American colleges. Now retired, Kelleher continues to inspire students of Celtic Studies, Ford noted.
Reynolds, meanwhile, continues his role as Ireland’s ambassador of Irish music, a duty he has also passed along to his sons Larry, Michael and Sean. As comfortable on a college campus as he is in a dance hall or pub session, Reynolds and his good friend Seamus Connolly are now regular attendees at the gatherings hosted by the Friends of Harvard Celtic Studies. When they take out their fiddles and start up a few tunes, it brings smiles and nods of approval from the Celtic scholars in their midst.