Your Libraries

His life was gentle; and the elements
So mix'd in him, that Nature might stand up,
and say to all the world, " This is a man!"

(Shakespeare: Julius Caesar, V, in, 73-5)

“A Celebration of the life of Jerry O’Callaghan”
Jim Aherne will give a recital on Tuesday November 25, 2008 at the City Library, Grand Parade at 7.00 p.m. He will play music that Jerry would have introduced him to over the years.

                          

The death of  Jerry O’Callaghan, Dominic Street in July has been a sad loss to his family and all who knew him. Jerry was a great friend and benefactor of the music library. Since the library opened he has given us constant support and encouragement. At 4.45pm on a Friday evening Jerry would check in to see if we needed anything from his vast store of wisdom and recordings. He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of music and an enquiring mind; he wanted to share his love of music with all. He promoted neglected Cork singers, set up gramophone circles, and believed in the power of music to transforms people’s lives. He was an avid collector, a traveller and raconteur and he was always trying to perfect transfers to CD to enhance the true power of the human voice. He was a gentle unassuming man with a relaxed and philosophical attitude to life. Ní bheidh a leitheád ann arís.

Jerry O’Callaghan was born in Fairhill in 1927, the youngest of five children. He had two brothers, Paddy and Christy, and two sisters Anne and Eileen. When he married he went to live in Dominic Street, beside the Butter Exchange. He is survived by his wife Kathleen and his five children, Joan, Veronica, Bernadette, Dominic, Jacinta and eight grandchildren.
   His uncle Sean O’Callaghan was the famous songwriter from Washbrew Lane. He worked for Fords in Dagenham in the late 40’s and early 50’s. When he came back to Cork he worked for Lunhams, until they closed, and then for construction companies. He had a very keen interest in sport and he played soccer.
Jerry inherited his love of music from his mother. He would take his gramophone out to the fields in Fairhill with a group of friends and hold a session there. His mother took him to the Opera House regularly as a child and it was here that he developed his love of music and opera in particular. His favourite singer was the Russian baritone Igor Gorin and he had a great admiration for the violinist Joseph Hassid. It wasn’t all classical music either. He regularly played Peggy Lee singing “Wearing of the Green” and Elvis. He collected records, especially rare 78s and gramophones. His beautiful blue gramophone which became his logo was patiently and lovingly restored by Jerry himself. His gramophone featured on RTE “Family Matters” in 1994 at The Lough Gramophone Circle.
He was always experimenting with technology, hoping to improve the quality of his transfers. In 2006 he bought a Sony TC 200 reel to reel player in Columbus, Ohio for $4. This machine was similar to the one that Cork Local Radio first used to play stereo in Cork. He did a recital “Stereo 1” in the music library last year using transfers from this player. He was always searching for ways to improve the quality of his work.
 For his 80th birthday his family sent him on a trip to Venice. He loved the opera, the architecture; and he marvelled at all that he saw. He travelled widely in his later years looking for rare 78s. He travelled throughout Ireland, to London, New York and San Francisco collecting records and equipment. He had a wonderful collection of rare 78s in mint condition. It was his wish that The Rory Gallagher Music Library would have this collection when he died. This rare collection is a rich addition to our library.

Jerry had a vast knowledge of music and an enquiring mind. He had a Preiser LP of the baritone Joel Berglund. He discovered that one track came from a private recording of an orchestra conducted by the King of Sweden, Frederik IX. He had to go to the Swedish Embassy to get more details about the background.
About a week before he died, he rang me about a new Margaret Burke Sheridan CD which the library had just bought. He was so excited to discover that Hubert Greenslade who had accompanied La Sheridan on two tracks had also accompanied Rita Lynch for some of her recordings. He was also critical of two of the transfers and he presented two better transfers made by himself, plus a very rare recording of Sheridan singing “Galway Bay” to the library! He was absolutely thrilled to meet Ann Chambers, Sheridan’s biographer, during the music library  30th birthday celebrations.

Jerry assisted by Jim Aherne invented his own reproduction system called The Calaphone System. Using a record deck and amplifier with special noise reduction facility, he produced really excellent transfers that enhanced the qualities of the human voice and reduced background hiss. The music library is really honoured to have a collection of about 600 CDs of these transfers. He made his own needles using dark oak from door frames.

The library’s Cork Music Archive has some very rare recordings of Cork singers transferred by Jerry. He recognised talent wherever he saw it and had a special interest in local singers. He worked actively to promote singers like William Dunlea, Rita Lynch, Kevin Owens, Charleville and Timmy Murphy, Inniscarra. He regularly visited William Dunlea in his home. He transferred and played his recordings at gramophone recitals and was actively involved in the St. Mary’s Road Library /Cork Music Archive biography project. The book written by Jim McKeon “William Dunlea – The Voice of Erin” is to be published before Christmas by the Cork Music Archive, Cork City Libraries.
He greatly admired the voice of Macroom born soprano Rita Lynch. He co-presented programmes with Rita in the music library and the Aula Maxima, UCC. RTE Local Radio did a programme with Jerry, Rita and Jim Aherne where they spoke about record collecting, gramophone circles and Rita’s life in singing.
Jerry was involved in the setting up of many gramophone circles. Fr Kevin Lanigan asked Jerry to set up the North Cathedral Gramophone Circle in 1987. This was set up in August with the help of Jim Ryan and Jim Aherne. It is still going strong twenty one years later in the Presbytery of the North Cathedral.
He was involved in setting up gramophone recitals in the Music Library, Grand Parade, St. Mary’s Road Library and in the 80s the Lough Gramophone Circle with Pat Egan. He became actively involved with Active Age Week and the Bealtaine Festival celebrating older people. He regularly contributed to recitals at the Academy Gramophone Circle, Blackpool Community Centre, Cobh Gramophone Circle, Tory Top Library & Hollyhill Library.
In the county he started the Bandon Gramophone Circle with Dan Joe O’Mahony in 1996. And in 1998 he set up the Skibbereen Gramophone Circle with the help of Dermot Begley.
A social officer from the HSE asked him to organise a musical activity in the Glen, so in 2005 Jim & Jerry set up the Glen Gramophone Circle in St Brendan’s Day Centre. He gave the first gramophone recital to raise funds for the Cork Alzheimer Association in the Imperial Hotel in the eighties and regularly played for the patients in Windmill Road. He kept regular contact with Tommy O’Brien and Jack Barry.

He always quoted Michelangelo’s famous words that every block of marble has a statue inside, and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it. He lived this philosophy. He chipped away at the stone until he found the true form within. He carried this belief in the true potential of every human being through his entire life. He has left us all with a profound belief in the power of music, and in music’s continuing ability to raise us above the ordinary in our everyday lives. He will be missed, most especially by those of us who were touched by his real and genuine love of life and music.
Ar dheis lámh Dé go raibh a anam uasal dhilis.

Jerome O’Callaghan

On Aloys Fleischmann
of the Cork Cathedral Choir

As a boy of about nine or ten years old I was privileged to become a choir boy at the Cathedral under the direction of Aloys Fleischmann, whose name I thought up to last Tuesday was Albert or Bert. The first impression I got was of a kind man but strict. I was impressed by the hat he wore - it appeared to me to be very large but it fitted very well. In the library where we practised I remember he would turn to the door, turn quickly to the choir and say “Ve have crow!” I must admit I was on one particular occasion ‘the crow’. You would walk to the front and he would say ‘I vig your ear’. He would wig your ear. His wife, Tilly, as she was affectionately called, as a boy I thought was very unassuming. But she gave the impression of being very kind. She always carried her handbag on her arm. She played the organ and played very well indeed. Herr Fleischmann was very fond of a song by Max Reger: ‘Marias Wiegenlied’ (‘Mary’s Lullaby’). When I matured a bit I often wondered whether he and Bert knew each other in Germany . He was so fond of the song that he arranged it for organ and it was played by Tilly and for a time after her demise. One memory from the early sixties: Bert had gone to Mass at the Cathedral one morning. On his way home, he took a rest and sat on my window sill. I presumed he was waiting to be picked up and brought home. I had bought an LP of the Impromtus of Schubert in a sale. I remember Bert putting his head very close to the window. I opened the window very carefully and increased the volume. I think it was Impromptu No 3. I was delighted to have given him that unexpected pleasure.

Just before the renovation of the cathedral began in the 1990s, we found a box in the Presbytery ready to be thrown out. Inside it I found a tuning fork which was looked quite old. Neddy Evans, who took over the choir after Bert, said it wasn’t his. So I assumed it was Bert’s. In the same box, we found a jam jar with marbles. Fr O’Flynn of the Loft used marbles to cure deficiencies in speech: he made people with a stutter practise speaking with some marbles in their mouths - the cures were miraculous. One in particular was Fr Curran, a Dominican from   Mulgrave Road in Cork . As a young man Fr Curran had a speech problem but Fr O’Flynn cured him with his special method, which became known as ‘the marble system’. A ‘marvel system’ in fact: I remember Fr Curran as the greatest orator on with “Fulton Sheen”.

Given the year that’s in it, with Cork as European Cultural Capital, Jim Ahern and myself would be delighted to present these to the Fleischmann family given the enormous contribution they have made to the culture of the city we love.

Jerry O’Callaghan
Cork , September 2005