f


of Cork City, barely sixteen, with nowt but a seventeen-shilling banjo on her back to take her chances singing on the cold, cold streets of a poverty-stricken, trouble-torn land. Whenever I bumped into Reg after that, he’d apologise that the Rakes had been unable to play at my wedding due to a prior booking and I’d say “Never mind that, Reg, tell me some more about Margaret Barry.”


And it was very much to do with a won- derful concert at Galway Town Hall by Mary McPartlan about four years ago when we retired to the bar afterwards, discovered a mutual adoration of all things Maggie and said someone should put together a stage show celebrating her life and music. It was to be a few years before we resolved that the someone might be us.


Maybe it was even attempting to inter- view the infamously grumpy Van Morrison for A Different Magazine. Van despises the press. We all know that. And on being intro- duced to me he grunted a bit, examined the floor, wrapped his muffler ever more tightly around his face and practically turned his back. Until I said: “Van, did you ever meet Margaret Barry?” Suddenly, the muffler was off, his eyes were alive and he was practical- ly hugging me. We got along famously after that. It transpired he’d never met her but he loved her dearly. “I’ve got her records… a great singer… a soul singer.”


So I set off on a magical mystery tour, retracing Margaret’s steps. From her begin- nings in a tenement block in unprepossess- ing Peters St (not Peter St as it is usually erroneously referred to) right in the heart of Cork, Ireland’s charismatic second city, in the rebel county. Through Ireland; Northern Ireland; London; Scotland; New York; Boston. Talking to anyone and everyone who might remember her. And there were plenty of those. She wasn’t easily forgotten.


Separating myth from reality wasn’t


easy, especially as the myths were often per- petrated by Margaret herself. She was known as ‘queen of the gypsies’ and ‘the singing tinker lady’ and there is certainly a Spanish gypsy background on her grand- mother’s side, but it was many years before circumstances forced her to live in a caravan at Crossmaglen just across the Northern Irish border. And while the story of her drinking the notorious carouser Brendan Behan under the table one night at the Brazen Head in Dublin is part of her legend – with the bonus of actually being true – and she’d invariably go on stage ostentatiously parad- ing a bag full of Guinness generously sup- plied by the brewery, her preferred drink of choice was a cup of tea “strong enough to trot a mouse”. From Reg Hall and Bob Dav- enport to Len Graham, Sean Tyrrell and Tommy Sands, none of the musicians who played with her ever remember seeing her drunk. And for all her storytelling and bravado, she revealed little about herself. Reg Hall contends that her bravado was a foil for inherent shyness. She’d address her audience but she never once looked at them while she sang.


She was steeped in music. Her grandfa-


ther, Robert Thompson, was one of Ireland’s greatest pipers – with a string of all-Ireland titles to prove it – although he’d fallen on hard times and no longer had a set of pipes after the pawn shop where he’d left them had burned down. He was working as a funeral plume maker in Cork when the


quest for independence grew more intense and Irish musicians playing Irish music were in demand again.


Her mother – Bob Thompson’s daugh- ter – died of TB when Margaret was twelve and the free-spirited Margaret’s nose was put of joint when her father remarried a girl only a couple of years older than Margaret herself. Feeling abandoned and alienated when, having previously played banjo in a band at silent movies, he joined a travelling circus, and having taught herself to play on her dad’s banjo when he wasn’t looking, she took off to the streets on her own.


nd then one bright morning in 1951, in Dundalk of all places, just a couple of miles south of the northern border, every- thing changed. Robin Roberts heard her voice a couple of streets away and rushed towards it. And there she was “a skinny little lady wearing a worn green coat with no teeth,” as Robin told me nearly 60 years later. “The song she was singing, Rose Of Mooncoin, I think… a ter- rible song. Just terrible. But what a voice. I stood there staring at her. And then sud- denly she launched into Bold Fenian Men. She had to sing around her teeth and her mouth was moving all over the place. And an old man came along and threw a coin into her hat and said ‘That’s for the auld ones…’ I said ‘Wait there, don’t move!’ And I ran off to find Alan.”


A Alan, of course, was Alan Lomax, cele-


brated Texan folk song collector on a mis- sion to retrieve traditional music from wher- ever he could find it. Which, at that moment, happened to be in Ireland. Robin Roberts was his assistant and a little while later Lomax was recording Margaret singing in his hotel room. Among her repertoire was Goodnight Irene, the Lead Belly song which had become an international hit for The Weavers. “Where did you learn that, Margaret?” said Lomax. “I larned it off Radio Luxembourg,” said Margaret.


He also recorded her singing She Moved Through The Fair, which Margaret had learned off a record by Irish tenor John McCormack, which she’d listened to stand- ing in the doorway of the Premier record shop in Belfast. That track ended up on a collection of Lomax recordings from his Irish researches, alongside the likes of Seamus Ennis, Elizabeth Cronin and the Ballinakill Ceilidh Band.


Back in London, a young TV producer called David Attenborough asked Lomax to present and book guests for a TV series called The Songhunter to reflect the grow- ing interest in folk song. Word went out to Margaret, who duly arrived on a ferry to stupefy Attenborough and horrify middle- class audiences singing in the full throttle manner she employed to attract attention


The hazards facing a girl in her mid- teens trying to raise enough cash to put a roof over her head each night playing an instrument rarely seen in Ireland at the time don’t bear thinking about, but the unique characteristics we now celebrate – the shuddering power and range of the voice, the clanking banjo, the brazen per- sonality, the ability to stop people in their tracks and connect with people in the roughest environs were honed and shaped as she found a way of communicating in the most hostile conditions.


In full flight at Soho’s 44 Club, mid-1950s. Redd Sullivan looking… bewildered!


at fairs and football matches, while thrash- ing away on an out-of-tune banjo. “It was not,” concluded Attenborough, “the high- light of that week’s television” as the nation bombarded the network with complaints, demanding to know why a toothless Irish tinker had invaded their front rooms.


But the folk song revivalists adored her. Alan Lomax told her she was authentic. Margaret said she was pleased to hear that but had no idea what that meant. At his flat in Croydon, Ewan MacColl recorded her 1955 album Songs Of An Irish Tinker Lady – a title and sleeve design that displeased her greatly – and announced that her “elongat- ed vowels, terminal dipthongs and heroic delivery are occupational characteristics rather than personal idiosyncracies.”


Margaret just sang. No theory. Just


songs… Galway Shawl, Factory Girl, Her Mantle So Green, My Lagan Love… none were her own, but she made them her own.


The migrant Irish labourers working for McAlpines, Laings and Wimpeys rebuilding London after the War flocked to the pub after work and found succour and a taste of home in the porter and the musicians who gathered and effectively gave Irish tradi- tional music the kiss of life when it was in hopeless decline back home. From Willie Clancy to Jimmy Power and Bobby Casey, London in the 1950s and 1960s was full of superb musicians who can be heard on Reg Hall’s recent momentous Voice Of The Peo- ple collection, Irish Music In London. And, teaming up with the great Sligo fiddle play- er Michael Gorman after being introduced by Douglas Kennedy one day at Cecil Sharp House, Margaret Barry became a key stimu- lant for that rarefied time. Her legend soon extended into the wider folk club move- ment blossoming around the rest of the country as she and Gorman became stars of the new scene.


Stories abound of her exploits. Riding up to Buckingham Palace on a horse and cart to announce “the queen of the gypsies wishes to meet the queen of England”; boasts about her drinking exploits – Roy Harris told a tale of booking her at Notting- ham Traditional Music Club and her arriving in the company of a white-faced taxi driver who said she’d driven him to distraction with her constant chatter, her singing and her drinking.


America called and she and Gorman played Newport Folk Festival in 1965, the year that Dylan went electric. Margaret’s only comment on the matter was that she remembered Dylan as being “very smelly”.


Continued on Page 75


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