Amongst fans of traditional Irish music, it is almost a given that the Bothy Band were the greatest folk band ever. The recent death of founder Michael O’Domnhail got me thinking about them, and listening to their music for the first time in many years.

As bands go they had a short life, just three albums, and a couple of after-the-fact live recordings. They suffered badly from the sort of poor management that ruined many 70’s bands, and the lack of any North American market ultimately led to their premature collapse.

Still, their reputation for brilliance is undiminished 30 years later. It is hard to imagine how revolutionary they were now. These days every folk band plays fast, complex instrumental sets, and no self-respecting Celtic act would appear without their vital bouzouki player. However, in 1974, Bothy founder Donal Lunny was still inventing the instrument’s style, and the tunings that we all play today. If you listen to the other big acts of the time, like Planxty and the Chieftains, you realize just how ahead of the game the Bothies were. Members like piper Paddy Keenan, fiddler Kevin Burke and flutist Matt Molloy are still acknowledged as virtuosos today and the handful of tunes the Bothy Band recorded are required learning for any aspiring Irish musician. O’Domnhail’s open tuned guitar caused a revolution, as he discovered a way to create drone tones more sympathetic to pipes and fiddles than standard guitar chord sequences.

More interesting, perhaps, is that the Bothies, (unlike, say the Chieftains), were unapologetic about separating instrumental music completely from its roots as dance music. They played with tempo, counterpoint and harmony as they saw fit, creating a driving rock-based sound that bands like Danu, Altan and Lunasa and hundreds of other Celtic bands have embraced with fervor.

For me, nothing sums up their brilliance more than their setting of the reel ‘The Maids of Mitchelstown’, which appeared on the album ‘Out of the Wind and Into the Sun’. Unlike most of their sets, it consists of just one reel. It starts with a series of guitar chords, playing an out of time hook. It is a surprise when the flute starts playing the actual tune – all of a sudden the hook makes sense. A little while later Kevin Burke’s fiddle joins in, sliding around the fiddle in harmony. Somewhere along the way you realize the fiddle and the flute are actually playing two different versions of the ‘Maids’; such is the genius of the playing and the arrangement, that you could listen to the piece dozens of times and still not realize this.

All this creates a sound that is almost otherworldly, beautiful but very, very bleak. It somehow conveys loneliness better than any other piece of music I have ever heard. An Indian acquaintance of mine once tried to explain how certain ragas are associated with the seasons of the year. For example, a scale, or a certain sequence of notes would indicate ‘summer’ to a knowledgeable listener. If the same metaphor could be extended to Irish music, (the blood in the veins of so much Newfoundland music), then ‘The Maids’ is definitely a winter tune. I can’t hear it without thinking of an iced-up landwash, or a windy and empty road, or a snow-swept barren. I have played around with the tune many times – you can speed it up, and give it a more jaunty air, but the tune remains isolated, drained of the joy that drives so much traditional music. I believe the Bothies instinctively understood this. Their ability to reach a common understanding of a melody, and then to enhance each other’s interpretation of it is unparalleled. Despite the wildness of so much of their music, ‘The Maids’ is a masterpiece of restraint.

I sometimes wonder who wrote the jigs and reels and waltzes and hornpipes I have spent so much time learning. As a rule, tunes with titles like ‘The Maids’ are usually a little happier and more celebratory, a la the standard ‘Buffalo Gals’. It occurs to me, in my currently reflective mood, that the writer of ‘The Maids of Mitchelstown’ was perhaps not a young man, excited about a ‘buxom lass’. Perhaps he was much older, or far removed from Mitchelstown. Maybe the ‘maids’ only existed as the sad remnant of a happier time. You have to wonder. I do, anyway. Instrumental music, especially the ‘weird’ tunes that weren’t suited for dancing, were kept alive for another reason. For most of traditional music’s history, the prevalence of a given tune required a string of people to love, learn and pass on the music. If no one loved it, or found it devoid of meaning, the tune was quickly forgotten.

‘The Maids’ resonated enough for both Matt Molloy and Kevin Burke to learn the reel in the 1960s, and then bring it to the band for the perfect arrangement years later. They knew exactly what it meant, enough for it to be as powerful thirty years later as the day they recorded it.