there are Jimmy Doyle tunes in Tune Archive, for example https://tunearch.org/wiki/Annotation:Jimmy_Doyle%27s_Polka_(1)

https://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle/arid-30975749.html
I'm copying articles here because so often when I look at older messages on Mudcat I find links that no longer work. But you may wish to see the photos on the Irish Examiner page.

Sliabh Luachra's cultural riches:

Wed, 15 Jan, 2020 -
Pet O'Connell looks at the region on the Cork-Kerry border that is such a renowned repository of traditional music and dance

It’s a long way from Ballinahulla, but Denis Doody is big in Japan.

Nearly 6,000 miles from his home near Ballydesmond, the intricacies of the late Sliabh Luachra accordion player’s 1978 album ‘Kerry Music’ now come under the scrutiny of eager students in the Pacific.

Fellow box player Bryan O’Leary is impressed by the appreciation for the music of his homeplace on the Cork-Kerry border, encountered during his 2018 tour of Nagoya, Kyoto, and Tokyo.

“They loved it in Japan,” says Bryan. “I thought I’d have to fill them in on musicians’ styles and the next thing, I was being asked ‘d’you know on Denis Doody’s album, on track two?’And they had Johnny O’Leary, Jackie Daly tunes... I was amazed.”

Bryan shares their admiration for the musicians in whose footsteps he walks - the likes of O’Keeffe, Denis Murphy and his sister Julia Clifford, known as the ‘Waivers’, and his own grandfather Johnny O’Leary

Not alone was the 2014 TG4 young musician of the year born into the tradition, but his academic education also encompassed a masters degree in ethnomusicology from the University of Limerick, his thesis examining the Sliabh Luachra button accordion-playing of Doody, Daly, Johnny O’Leary, and Jimmy Doyle.

But while Bryan is a proud purveyor of the area’s distinctive polkas and slides, he admits the deceptive simplicity of its dance rhythms means Sliabh Luachra as a regional style “can sometimes get undersold” as a ‘poor relation’ of the jigs and reels of Clare, Sligo, or Donegal.

As Matt Cranitch, who wrote a PhD thesis on fiddle master Pádraig Ó Keeffe and the Sliabh Luachra tradition, observes, the relative ease with which the notes of polkas can be played may be “inversely proportional to the difficulty involved in creating the appropriate rhythm and ‘swing’. And, unless the tune is imbued with these characteristics, then much of its real essence is missing.”

Not only are Sliabh Luachra’s signature polkas and slides often misrepresented, adds Bryan, but they have become an overly narrow definition of a style which has a far greater breadth than is commonly appreciated.

Bryan agrees that “polkas and slides of course are a massive part of the tradition and people of the area are very proud of them”. But he points to a wealth of distinctive barn dances, waltzes, reels, jigs, and hornpipes in the playing of Murphy and Clifford, O’Keeffe, and his own grandfather. “You don’t hear too many people playing them outside of Sliabh Luachra. There’s common repertoire that we all share with different traditions but there’s also so much material that isn’t fully appreciated yet and it needs to get the recognition it deserves.”

He highlights the fiddle-playing of the late Mikey Duggan of Scartaglin. “I called up to the house before he died to listen to him play by the fire. I was amazed - he was playing lovely jigs, reels, slides, polkas, and then he took off playing unusual waltzes that you wouldn’t hear outside this niche. If people in other areas only knew the wealth of the repertoire. We’re probably the most cut-off regional style and maybe we don’t get the same level of promotion.”

The musical intonation of Sliabh Luachra is something Bryan passes on aurally to his own accordion pupils. “In a polka or slide you can’t do it justice by writing it out on a piece of paper. It has to be developed by ear. When the emphasis is on the offbeat you can’t write that down - that has to be developed from listening upon listening,” he says. “You need to make the rhythm yourself and lean on the long notes, otherwise it doesn’t sound anything like Sliabh Luachra music.”

Bryan honed his own skills from years of listening and playing with masters of Sliabh Luachra music, though never directly from his grandfather.

    My earliest memories of Irish music are in his company because when I was young I used to be taken to some of his sessions, and in particular the one in Knocknagree, in Dan O’Connell’s bar, which he played in for close to 40 years.

“He would have played there in the earlier years with the great Denis Murphy but at the time when I was young going there I didn’t fully appreciate that. I had a first cousin the same age as me and if the music was in the front of the bar, we were out the back doing our own thing.

So I have great memories of the place but unfortunately I didn’t play with him and didn’t have a grá for music at that stage.”

His grandfather did, however, have a profound influence on his musical career, though it was a career that almost ended before it began.

“Henry Cronin taught me tin whistle in first or second class. I was absolutely useless at it and couldn’t bring out a note,” he admits. “There used to be mornings when he used to come that I used to be crying going down to school because I didn’t want to take the tin whistle.”

After his parents acceded to his requests to give up the whistle, it was the death of Bryan’s grandfather that sparked his interest in the music which had been around him all his life.

“It was the day he died it really affected me and I was so upset by it. He was buried in Gneeveguilla and I said to my mother that day ‘I think I’m going to start the accordion’.

“She probably thought I was bluffing a bit, but the following week I went down to Henry again, only this time with a new instrument.”

Classes followed with Nicky McAuliffe, a living encyclopedia of traditional music, who with his wife Anne was last year awarded a TG4 Gradam Ceoil lifetime achievement award.

Years of musical immersion saw Bryan learn from the likes of his aunt Ellen O’Leary, Jimmy Doyle, and Julia Clifford’s son Billy.

“And I was always listening to Denis Murphy or Pádraig O’Keeffe or Johnny and I nearly forced myself to learn by ear. At the start I wasn’t getting them fully right, but what really helped me in learning by ear was that I came to a session in Killarney, religiously every Sunday all through my teens, with Jimmy Doyle, Joe O’Sullivan and Paudie Gleeson, in Buckley’s bar. With myself and Jimmy there was a special connection straight away because Jimmy had been a great friend of my grandfather’s and a great disciple of his music. They grew up neighbours and Jimmy would have learnt all his early music from Johnny so it was a nice link because Jimmy would have passed the local stuff on to me.”

This passing-on of the local tradition is its lifeblood, and while the vibrant music Bryan now plays, including with the group The Conifers, is anything but old-fashioned, it is informed by his knowledge of generations that went before him.

“Some people say you should stop looking at the past but I draw my inspiration from the past,” he says.

Bryan traces the tradition through his grandfather and the Waivers of Lisheen, via their teacher Pádraig O’Keeffe and another seminal figure on the Sliabh Luachra landscape, Tom Billy Murphy of Ballydesmond. Labyrinthine connections make up the area’s cultural identity, and back another generation, O’Keeffe’s teacher was his uncle Cal Callaghan.

Cal picked up influences from the music of Scottish fiddle players he worked with in America, and from Corney Drew of Dromtariffe, who also taught Tom Billy’s teacher, Tadhg Ó Buachalla, known as Taidhgín an Asail since he, like Tom Billy, travelled the roads by donkey, both being blind or partially sighted.

Though some also played other instruments they were, to a man, fiddle players - a not insignificant fact, even in an area where the button accordion is now firmly established in the tradition.

“The fiddle was always the number one,” says Bryan.

    A lot of the research I was doing was based on the accordion music of the area, but you’re always learning about the fiddle music while you’re doing that because everything the accordion players did in Sliabh Luachra was based on the fiddle.

Regarding his grandfather Johnny, he relates: “Pádraig O’Keeffe gave him two bits of advice when he met him first: First of all was to play C#/D style accordion tuning. He felt that it blended better with the fiddle music. It all came down to what fitted better with the fiddle. “The second thing Pádraig O’Keeffe said to him was to leave off the bass because he felt that would overpower the tightness of the duet between the accordion and fiddle. All the stuff we have of Denis Murphy and Johnny is very sweet, and his accordion was always tuned tightly, like Jackie Daly did with Séamus Creagh - they wanted their accordions to blend with the fiddle - and Johnny would never use the bass when he’d be playing with Denis.”

“When I was doing my research I was lucky enough to interview Jackie [Daly] and Jimmy Doyle and it’s amazing listening to them, that they were completely immersed in the fiddle tradition. Jimmy Doyle said when he was young he used to obsess over Denis Murphy and used to try and imitate the Waiver at everything.

“One of Jackie’s main teachers growing up was a man called Jim Keeffe, who was a fiddle player that was a pupil of Pádraig, so he was listening to fiddle music from day one.

“In Johnny’s music you can hear some of the double-stopping that fiddle players do, the chording. He might hold down two buttons at once which creates a kind of a chord, a bit of a drone, and that’s taken completely from the fiddle music.

“All the accordion players when they were growing up there were so many fiddle players around, so Jackie struck up the partnership with Seamus Creagh, Jimmy Doyle and Dan Leary; Johnny and Denis Murphy - they were all playing regularly with fiddle players.”

By experimenting with bass, Daly “broke barriers, because even on his first recording, ‘Music from Sliabh Luachra’, the way he uses the bass is outstanding... Jackie was the first to make the bass acceptable in polkas and slides. The CD with Seamus Creagh broke more boundaries because they arranged the music. It was exciting and it brought something new to the table.”

To survive as a living tradition, music must constantly adapt and change, just as the polkas and slides of Sliabh Luachra are thought to have originally accompanied the quadrille dances fashionable across 18th and 19th Century Europe.

Bryan’s own music looks both forward and back, the title of his 2015 CD with Colm Guilfoyle repeating the words of Pádraig O’Keeffe, who when asked to describe his townland of Glountane once replied it was ‘Where the Bog Is’.

It would be an admirable attempt too at describing Sliabh Luachra, which literally translates as The Rushy Mountain, but defies precise geographical definition. Trying to pinpoint its location is akin to asking Google Maps for directions to Tír na nÓg, the late writer Con Houlihan of Castleisland having famously described Sliabh Luachra not as an exact place, but a “state of mind” whose location had become “a moveable feast”.

Though its soil quality may be poor, the wild landscape which provided shelter for Rockites, outlaws and various other rebels has proved fertile ground not only for musicians but writers and artists.

Bryan says the “creativity of the place” is witnessed in the Irish language poetry of Aogán Ó Rathaille and Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin, both from Gneeveguilla.

    I always think they must have drawn inspiration from the hilly landscape. I’m passionate about where I come from and I get inspired looking out my window at the hills and fields of the place.

The link between music, landscape, and people and is never more evident than in the playing of Denis Murphy and Julia Clifford, he says. “They kind of painted a picture in your head, and great imagery comes to mind for me when I listen to the older musicians - you’re nearly looking at the places they were from.

“Con Houlihan came out with a comment about Denis Murphy, something along the lines of ‘you can see the sun rising over Knocknaboul when you hear him play, and you can hear the cows being driven in for milking. He said he painted in marvellous colours, which a good musician should do because it should set you on a journey.”

Sliabh Luachra music and its musicians and dancers have indeed journeyed far afield. Though its heart may beat loudly around Scartaglin, Ballydesmond, Knocknagree, and Gneeveguilla, it is in the blood from Newcastlewest and Listowel to Rockchapel and Freemount, Killarney, Newmarket, and Kanturk, and its soul can be found wherever in the world its rhythms are played.