MARGARET BARRY from Page 41

fare so Margaret could go home to visit her daughter Nora and the grandchildren she’d never met (but was always sending parcels of gifts from her various travels). When it was presented to Margaret, she threw the hat on to the bar and said “Keep the drinks coming until the money’s gone.”

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She eventually did return to Ireland with a fund of unlikely anecdotes: of visiting an Indian reservation with Johnny Cash (and learning First Nation chants); of attending Elvis Presley’s wedding (“Elvis Priestley”, as she called him); of luxuriating on Frank Sina- tra’s yacht and telling him off for having bad manners; of scolding President Ford for the weakness of American Guinness; of Robert Mitchum declaring undying love (her grand- children grew up believing Mitchum was their grandfather); of drinking in Harlem bars with Jersey Joe Walcott and befriend- ing Muhammad Ali; of beating an abusive audience member with her banjo.

She led me a merry dance as I followed her trail, meeting a myriad of eccentrics en route. Like Maura “I was in The Commit- ments, y’know” O’Malley – a dancing fiddle player with whom she formed a bizarre and unsatisfactory partnership following Michael Gorman’s death. Interviewing 95- year-old Maura draped over a sofa in her rundown guest house in Co Meath as she talked disapprovingly of Margaret’s “indis- cipline” and snoring, laced with tales of her own brilliant movie career in The Commit- ments and Waking Ned Devine will live long in the memory. Margaret reputedly fled from the upstairs window of a New York apartment because she couldn’t stand to share a stage with her any more.

And what’s to be said about Pierrepoint ‘Peter’ Johnson, wayward heir to a family fortune, who abandoned it all to devote his energies to promoting folk music in Boston? Brilliantly eccentric, Peter regaled me with tales of his incarceration in various mental institutions, greeting Margaret while trussed up as a turkey while promoting a local restaurant, followed by a drunken wedding ceremony with her in an ill-conceived and vain attempt to get her a visa to allow her to stay in the country?

She ended her days living with her fam- ily in Laurencetown, Northern Ireland, smoking, gambling, drinking, talking, telling fortunes, crocheting and still, on odd occasions, singing and playing.

People still talk of her in awe and admi- ration. She still pops up on records. Her great- grandson is in a band. Those who know of her can’t stop talking about her. And every time I hear someone with a fey, prettified voice breathing daintily into a microphone I want to grab them by the scruff of the necks, drag them back 60 years or so, dump them to a street corner in Newry or Dundalk or Cork, make them listen to Margaret Barry and think about what they’d done.

She Moved Through The Fair: The Leg- end Of Margaret Barry by Colin Irwin and Mary McPartlan, featuring musicians and actors, will be performed at Celtic Connec- tions, at The Tron Theatre, Glasgow, on Sun- day January 22.

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wenty years her senior, Gorman died in 1970. A wake was held in his honour in a North London pub and the mourners went round with a hat to raise the

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4. ELZA SOARES The Woman At The End Of The World (Mais Um Discos)

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TRANSGLOBAL WORLD MUSIC CHART TOP 15

1. BONGA Recados De Fora

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4. ÇI ˘

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9. ROBERTO FONSECA ABUC

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9. CHRISTY MOORE The Collection

10. PAUL SIMON

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