In praise of the pub session
…a beginner’s guide
Pub music sessions work something like this: a bunch of musicians turn up with assorted acoustic instruments (almost certainly guitars, fiddles, squeezeboxes of various flavours and tinwhistles, but quite possibly ranging to exotica like the hammered dulcimer and even the odd harp) - and then play whatever they like. Past these basics, there is then the question of ‘who plays next?’. In most of my local sessions, it’s ‘whoever wants to’, but in others there is a benign monarch of the session who picks someone and says “It’s you”, and in yet others it’s a simple round-robin.
In case you’re wondering, nobody gets paid - neither the musicians for playing, nor the publican for allowing them to play. This tends to mean that whoever set the session up in the first place has had a little fireside chat with the publican - and the best sessions have enthusiastic support from their host publican. It also means that the musicians who turn up are there for the pure pleasure of playing - all of which sets up all the conditions for a really wonderful atmosphere.
Once a session is off and running, it’s totally in the hands of the musicians who turn up. This means that everything - the mood, the music, and the banter (in Ireland, the philosophical home of the session, craic)- can change week by week: usually, a session will produce good music that even a folk-sceptic would find hard to resist, though at the extreme, you can have a ‘flat’ evening.
Then, just occasionally, when everything happens to turn out exactly right, ‘magic happens’ and it’s a privilege to be there, whether you’re playing or not.
