Cathy Jordan on the Crankie Island Project: ‘It’s like slow TV, take time out and watch the story unfold’

Songs are woven into the fabric of our lives, caught in the corners and crevices of memory from childhood, fixed to key moments, and often embedded in our identity. And in Ireland our store of traditional songs is as wide as it is deep. Whether defined by geography, theme or style, these lullabies, love songs and tales of misfortune and unrequited love most often find expression in the midst of a musician’s repertoire or in the intimate surrounds of a singing session. But often they clamour to be heard amid the noise of contemporary life.
Cathy Jordan, the charismatic singer and percussionist with Dervish, has set her sights on gathering a song from every county of Ireland, each illustrated by an artist and then delivered to the listener and viewer by way of a crankie box, a vintage storytelling device that uses hand-cranked rolling images to add a visual component to each song. Sometimes simple, sometimes elaborate, the boxes can become almost like miniature theatres.
What started as a lockdown project in 2020, when Jordan began to explore songs from her native Roscommon, has now evolved, thanks to the support of the Arts Council, into a national Crankie Island collection embracing all 32 counties on the island of Ireland and involving collaborations with more than 70 musicians and visual artists.
“I’ve been aware of the crankie box for the last 15 or 20 years,” she says. “I’ve seen them in action in North America, and there was even a crankie-box festival in Canada last year. So I thought it would be nice to try them out.”
Jordan asked the visual artist Peter Crann to illustrate a Roscommon song that she recorded. His knowledge of artists the length and breadth of Ireland proved central. Collaborating after that to piece together the songs from each county and choose artists whose visual styles would complement the music was an intriguing challenge for the pair.
“It was a big Sudoku puzzle, you know”, Jordan says. Thematically, she was spoilt for choice, but that brought its own challenges. “There are an awful lot of emigration songs, so you have to not dwell too much on that. Then there are songs of the otherworld, of love and immigration, the Troubles and unrequited love. And stories of the daily tragedies that affect people in their lives. Stories of their own time.”
After selecting songs from each county, Jordan set about booking musicians to collaborate with her in each province, recording between four and six songs at a time. What has emerged is a picaresque ramble through our song tradition, with the quirky crankie-box visuals lending a fresh perspective to age-old songs, alongside two new compositions, one from Jordan, the other from John Spillane.
Working with musicians and producers as experienced as Donogh Hennessy, in Dingle in Co Kerry, and Dónal Clancy, in Ring in Co Waterford, helped to turn what could have been a taxing undertaking into an enormously satisfying voyage of discovery for Jordan. “I would send on rough arrangements in advance,” she says, “so that by the time we got to the studio it was an easier process and not as labour intensive, because we knew what the vision was.”
The project lit a fire in the bellies of many of the artists asked to illustrate a song.
“It’s just wonderful to see everybody’s different take on things and their different techniques and different styles, and how they approached it,” Jordan says. “The different paper, different boxes, the efforts that some of them have gone to. An artist in Strandhill imported a jewellery box from Japan that she wanted as the display box. Another artist made hers from melted-down milk cartons. Others were made out of tomato boxes, shoeboxes, stuff lying about the house. That’s the beauty of it: it has been an upcycling and recycling project as well.”
Crankie boxes originated in Germany, Italy and Spain; the roll of illustrations for a song can stretch to 12 metres long – imagine what an epic folk song such as Little Musgrave would have generated – and each artist needs to consider pacing, content and tone, not to mention sourcing suitable paper that will work well with the rolling mechanism of a crankie box. This has, in essence, been a meitheal, with a diverse group of artists and musicians working in concert to achieve a shared outcome.
Irish traditional music all too often exists at a remove from other art forms. The crankie-box project seeks to upend that. It calls to mind the exceedingly moving melding of music and visuals in the staging of I Could Read the Sky, Timothy O’Grady’s 1997 book on Irish emigration, when the singer Iarla Ó Lionáird, the fiddle player Martin Hayes and many others brought to life the beating heart of that book in music and song. The whole can be so much greater than the sum of the parts with such collaborations.
Jordan is acutely aware of the chasm that has often defined the relationship between Irish traditional and folk music and the visual world. “Traditional music lost out because it didn’t embrace video culture,” Jordan says, “and standing in the woods looking pensive wasn’t for me either. It just didn’t seem authentic or real or comfortable.
“But once the crankie boxes were there, it just seemed like a great marriage between two disciplines and two worlds. So often the songs are slow-burners, and they need something [visually] slow burning as well. It’s like slow TV that will, hopefully, allow people to take time out and watch the story unfold – and maybe have a few minutes of mindfulness as well.”
The archaeologist Richard Miles has said, when speaking of ancient cultures, that “they were us then”. Similarly, Jordan says, “there’s so much to learn from these songs from a social point of view – about the way Ireland was, the connection with our parents and their struggles and their hold on memories. For me it’s being part of something really much bigger than me.”
Jordan is about to take the Crankie Island project on tour. The potential for the boxes to extend their reach to schools and to communities in Ireland and abroad is immense, she believes. “It’s a start of an archive that I would see hopefully growing into the future, where other people would add more county songs. And, hopefully, some of the county songs wouldn’t be as well known, either. Then there’s the potential for things like shadow-puppetry to be used, too, so the possibilities are huge.”
Cathy Jordan is playing a series of Crankie Island Song Project concerts, featuring Rick Epping, Seamie O’Dowd, Claudia Schwab and Anna Houston, starting at Roscommon Arts Centre on Thursday, October 10th, followed by Sligo, Carrick-on-Shannon, Drogheda and Letterkenny, before ending in Newbridge, Co Kildare, on Wednesday, October 23rd