The Blockers reel

Ohhh, I love this tune. It’s not the easiest thing to pull off on a fiddle, but Frankie Gavin makes it sing and swing on DeDannan’s "Mist Covered Mountain cd. The A Part is pretty straightforward once your ear learns to like those c and f naturals. The B Part, however, throws that jumpy string crossing at us in the first measure (you can play the notes as in measure 5 if measure 1 is just too tricky). And then the fingering gets a little tight going from measure 3 to 4 (and again from measure 6 to 7). I’ve tried jumping from the E to A, with my index finger, or holding the E and A, at the same time, and the latter seems to work a little better for me.

So, this Sean Ryan fellow was quite a fiddler from County Tipperary, a key figure of the IRTRAD revival during the 1950s and 1960s. The Companion to Irish Traditional Music says he wrote more than 250 tunes, including Glen of Aherlow, now a popular session tune. Maybe we could just submit Sean Ryan tunes for a week…. 😉

Will

Hey Will, I love this tune, I don’t know why Frankie put it in D, but it’s great in the original key.

Sean Ryan named it "The Blockers".

and here it is:-

X:1
T:"The Blockers"
C:
L:1/8
Q:380
K:Gmix
M:4/4
z6 A2 |: Bc dc BG (3GAG | =FD CD FG Ac | dg (3gfg fg ag | fd c^A =A=F (3FEF | Bc dc BG (3GAG | \
=FD CD FG Ac | dg (3gfg fg ag |1 fd cA G2 A2 :|2 fd cA GA Bd |: g2 dg Bg dB | cB cd cA FA | \
DG (3GFG FG Ac | Bc de fd ef | g2 dg Bg dB | cB cd cA F2 | DG (3GFG FG Ac |1 BG AF GA Bd :|2 BG AF G2 A2 | \
BG AF G4 | \

Came across this setting which a friend sent me as a "Gan Ainm" which he wanted a name for. Its original source was one of those mirror sites (http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/music/abc/mirror/kirby98.fsnet.co.uk/__/__From_De_Dannan_1.abc), which thankfully exist to save otherwise lost material.

Does anyone know what ‘blockers’ refers to? Is this a sportsball reference?

Picked the setting in "The Hidden Ireland: First Selection of Irish Traditional Compositions of Sean Ryan", 1985
compiled by Brian Ryan.

I suppose this is the original version, but I just noticed the indicated key was D major which of course doesn’t make much sense, I changed it to GM.

In his tune collection (vol. one) Paddy O’Brien (from Co. Offaly) calls this tune
"The Banshee’s Lament for the Mangle Pit" and says that he learned it from Sean Ryan
who told Paddy that it was composed on Halloween night (Samhain).

But https://thesession.org/tunes/131 is a jig with (almost) the same name.
It is a version of the jig "Young Tom Ennis" (that appears in O’Neill’s) but the story given
in the comments is that Paddy O’Brien (Tipperary) named the jig for Martin Hayes.

I’m told that Paddy O’Brien (Tipperary) and Sean Ryan were cousins.
It could be that Sean Ryan decided to rename his tune to "The Blockers" so his cousin Paddy
knew that the name "The Banshee’s Wail …" was free to be reused. ??