root salad Tommy McCarthy
The traveller singer has been quietly making an impression. Colin Irwin hears his story.
A
mong the various high-profile events which captured our imaginations at last year’s epic Sidmouth Folk Week, an Irish travelling singer made a succession of low profile appearances, quietly winning the hearts of all who heard him with his lilting voice, gentle manner and persuasive banter.
Tommy McCarthy may never take cen- tre stage at the Ham Marquee but as a rare flagship for a dying tradition, a reper- toire of little-known songs and a style that’s earned comparisons with the great sean-nos singer Joe Heaney, he’s an impor- tant figure alright.
From the small town of Birr, County
Offaly, in the centre of Ireland, he’s a dis- tant relative of the great uilleann piper Johnny Doran – celebrated in Tommy’s own song Felix And Johnny Doran fea- tured on his warming debut album Round Top Wagon – but still feels humbled by the reaction to his songs, most of which were learned from his mother Mary and his grandfather John McCarthy.
Until he was 14 the only life he knew was the road… with the family’s songs as the soundtrack. “When me grandmother died she had eight children and the youngest was three months old, so me mother reared her brothers and sisters as well. Me grandfather used to go away to the fairs and me aunt would put down boards and have dances in the back yard. We had a great time. Being in the middle of Ireland, people from the west would stop off on their way to Dublin all with their own songs, so thousands of songs passed through. Me grandfather was a great performer. He loved all types of singing. He hated it when the radio and television came out. Said it was a conversa- tion killer. He wrote all kinds of songs, me grandfather. He was ahead of his time.”
His sporadic formal education ended completely at nine, but he nevertheless became an avid reader and writer, largely teaching himself (“I don’t think I did a bad job of it”) before joining his mother in London, working on market stalls. The family has had a stall on the Portobello Road for 40 years, he says proudly. “There’s not a lot I don’t know about bric- a-brac – that’s my game. But I turn me hand to anything; cleaning windows, clearing rubbish, anything. Travelling peo- ple get a bad name but that’s not all of us. Nobody thieves in our family. If you stole a matchstick me uncles would kill you…”
He has sung all his life, faithfully mir- roring the gentle style beloved of his mother (who died last year) but, apart from occasional family weddings he never
sang in public nor ever expected to. It was a revelation when somebody mentioned that they might like to hear some of his ‘old songs’ at one of the weekly sing - arounds at Cecil Sharp House.
So he took a bus to Camden Town and
hasn’t looked back since. “Not everybody likes the old songs, especially young peo- ple, but I got the shock of me life when I went to Cecil Sharp House. The genuine love I found there for the songs and for travelling people blew me away.”
That was in 2008 and his reputation has grown rapidly since, leading to appearances at Sidmouth, Whitby (he’s booked back at both this summer) and London’s South Bank (sharing a stage with Dogan Mehmet at last year’s Folk Against Fascism fête) and an introduction to Ron Kavana which resulted in recording the Round Top Wagon album.
“I had no idea people would be inter- ested. Even in me own family people would say ‘What you want to sing those old songs for?’ Me brothers and sisters don’t sing. They’d know the songs but they wouldn’t sing them. I’m proud me own people kept these songs going. We were the news carriers.”
The Round Top Wagon album also gave him the opportunity to sing for the first time with accompanists, who include the piper/whistle players Mickey Dunne and Blackie O’Connell. “I didn’t think I’d ever sing with music but I loved it,” he says. “I love all the songs but the one I like best is The Wedding and I’d never have sung it if it hadn’t been for Ron Kavana getting the music in. He heard me lilting the song but I wasn’t happy with it so he said OK, let’s put music to it then. I wasn’t
sure but oh man, it was a buzz. I was hop- ping round the floor.”
P
Other outstanding tracks include Battle Of Aherlow, learned from his uncle Tommy Ryan and the wonderfully bawdy No Balls At All. Music, he says, has no boundaries. “I take people as they come. I’ve been singing and writing since I was 13 and I like old music. I also like reggae and blues. I grew up with a lot of Jamaican people and always got on with them. Black people and Irish people both had a hard time in England in the ’70s. ‘No blacks, no Irish, no dogs’…and sometimes no Jews. Must have been hard for those people in them days.”
rejudice, of course, still abounds, though he says the worst racism stems from the gypsy community, underlining the profound
differences between the gypsy and travelling communities. “Most gypsy people are dark-skinned with brown eyes and black hair. Travelling people are mostly fair-skinned. I’ve studied a lot of history and we are definitely the indigen - ous people of Ireland. Our language is pre-Celtic and we were there before the Celts arrived. The ancestors of gypsies came from Rajasthan in North India.”
He reserves his deepest scorn, howev-
er, for Comhaltas, official guardians of Irish traditional music. “The way they treat travelling people is terrible. People ask me to sing in competitions but I wouldn’t give them the time of day. They look down on travelling people like they’re aristocracy. It’s laughable. I don’t care what they say, the majority of the songs they claim as their own came from us. If anything we’re the superior ones.”
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