Don Sullivan (c.) and his Gypsies - Fergus O'Byrne, Denis Ryan, Gary Cavanagh, and Dermot O'Reilly

By Jack Deacy

Up at one of the wooden tables near the stage at the old Sheiling pub, the two old Irish Women sat quietly like Samuel Beckett dolls, their hands clasped together in the rosary position, heads of hair gone cemetary gray with age and faces covered with a disciplinary stillness, probably learned at morning mass or afternoon stations of the cross. 

If patience was a virtue to some it was surely a sacrament to those two still lifes who sat there in their top coats waiting for the music to come on.

Up on the stage there was a movement. A group of five young roughly bearded Irishmen who go by the name of Sullivan’s Gypsies came out of a room and spread themselves across the stage. In their hands they carried the tools of folk music - a fiddle, a tie whistle, a guitar, a banjo and a mandolin.

As they were introduced one by one, the tow old Irish women at the wooden table glares away in motionless examination.

There was an enormous man names Don Sullivan, the leader of the group, a man out of the County Tyrone in Northern Ireland who calls the roadside his home; a man with a wit that comes at you like a brick and a baritone that you would not argue with.

There was Dennis Ryan with fiddle under the arm and tin whistle stuck in the back pocket, a tall fellow with an altar boy’s face beneath a black beard and a lovely, gentle, Tipperary manner about him.

And then there were the three Dublin men.

There was Gary Cavanaugh, whose face can go from the look of innocence to the look of the bedroom rogue in one quick transformation, a fellow who sings with a country kind of carefree manner, his hands stuck in behind his belt.

There was Fergus O’Byrne, and quiet man with the John Lennon eyeglasses who plays the banjo like he was born with it, and sings with the kind of freshness not to be found in those plush night clubs downtown.

And, finally, there is Dermot O’Reilly, whose mane seems to have music in it, and whose hands are two the be best guitar hands to come out of Ireland.

The five of them are now ready to make their music, when they start into a rousing song called "South Australia," there is a real musical tightness to the interplay between fiddle, banjo, tin whistle, mandolin, and five voices.

At the wooden table, something very strange is beginning to happen. One of the old Irish women now shows a sign of life; if you look closely you can see one of her thumbs keeping time with the music. And on the other old one there is a hint of a smile beginning. It is amazing. The music Sullivan Gypsies make is alive enough to bring the living dead back to life.

The set goes on, and Don Sullivan, his head a rough sea of black curls, is up at the mike singing his own song about tinkers poteen (homemade pot still whiskey), and as he sings it you can almost taste the stuff.

At the table after the set is over, Don Sullivan and Dennis Ryan sit themselves down beside a mug of Guinness and a double vodka and orange. Someone tells them about the transformation that took place in the two old Irish women.

"Well, that’s all very nice, but I often sang to quieter audiences than them two," Sullivan said. "I was once on the road between Dungannon and Omagh. It’s only 29 miles and it was early in the morning now, and me going along singing away. I’m passed by the hedge and don’t catch a cow staring right out at me from the field. You know how cows stare, very quiet like, Then I sees another one begin to stare and so I goes into the field and begins to sing to them, So there I am in the early morning singing out to about 500 cows and everyone of them staring up at me. The quietest, most polite audience I ever hand, God knows."

The audiences at the Old Sheiling Pub, at W. 207^th St. And Post Rd. (Near Broadway) in upper Manhattan, are livelier than a field of 500 cows, and this weekend it will be much more so because Sullivan’s Gypsies will be making the music there.