May the Road Rise to Meet You

Smoking. Drinking. Gambling. Courting. Roving. Fans of one or all of the aforementioned will enjoy Clean Cabbage in the Bucket (Llumina Press, 414 pp., $21.95), a collection of road stories edited by Dennis O'Rourke, a Nashvillian and veteran Irish musician. O'Rourke and his co-contributors—fellow performers Frank Emerson, Seamus Kennedy, Robbie O'Connell and Harry O'Donoghue—have emerged, scarred but enlightened, from the Irish music wars, which started during the folk revival of the early '60s and continue to rage today.

For O'Rourke and his expatriate colleagues, a career in Irish music came with certain consequences. In America, Irish stars were few and far between (The Clancy Brothers notwithstanding), and the genre promised little more than a meager living and a life of lousy sound systems—the book's subtitle, And Other Tales From the Irish Music Trenches, is telling.

But life on the road also has a positive side, not least of which is the camaraderie these five musicians share. The opportunity for storytelling is another plus. Expatriate Irish culture has an oral tradition that's as strong as its musical one, and O'Rourke and company have held forth in legendary haunts like The Dubliner in Washington, D.C., and the Kevin Barry Irish Pub in Savannah, Ga. The publicans (as Irish pub owners are known) who run such places don't invite you back if you can't spin a yarn, and the stories in Clean Cabbage, which run from hilarious to heartbreaking, have a practiced rhythm that comes from years of entertaining in often less than ideal circumstances.

O'Rourke's "Dog Biscuits," for example, tells of an unfortunate night at Liam's Irish Tavern in Framingham, Mass., during which the singer comes to blows with a well-lubricated heckler. O'Rourke's prose and comedic timing are compelling as the tale of a good night gone bad unfurls. "So there I am," he writes, "plying my trade with a will, joy in my heart, my voice soaring on whiskey wings, and all these good things happening around me.... And then a fight breaks out."

Other stories are more poignant than pugilistic. In "Bob Packer," Harry O'Donoghue recounts the last days of a Florida publican who left his job with a Detroit automaker to found the Harp and Thistle Pub in St. Petersburg. As Packer lies dying, O'Donoghue and his band sing a mournful standard, "The Parting Glass." In the book's saddest moment, the author includes a moving verse from the song as he describes the hospice worker's last actions.

O'Rourke and company can be forgiven if Clean Cabbage's writing doesn't always rise to Joycean standards. The occasional abuse of exclamation points, italics and quotation marks, for example, probably results from the need to overemphasize when telling a story to a chattering crowd. It's a quibble when compared to the wealth of tavern anthropology that these tales represent. Pour yourself a Guinness, put Robbie O'Connell's Recollections Vol. 1 on the hi-fi (several of the authors are well-represented on iTunes), and relax into this engaging collection of war stories.

Dennis O'Rourke discusses and signs Clean Cabbage in the Bucket at Davis-Kidd Booksellers 7 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 7, and he performs at Norm's River Road House 8 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 12.