Jimmy Crowley: All set for one last blast of classic Cork songs 

When he's done with his Songs From The Beautiful City project, the 71-year-old hopes to move beyond his somewhat pigeonholed association with tunes from his native place 

Jimmy Crowley and Eve Telford. Picture: Monika Gorka

After 13 albums and a lifetime spent singing and collecting the songs of Cork, Jimmy Crowley has reached a crossroads. The likes of ‘Johnny Jump Up’ and ‘Salonika’ may have been his bread and butter since his 1977 album with Stokers Lodge, The Boys of Fair Hill, but with his most recent 27-track CD he asserts he has come to the end of the road in terms of recording further ‘Songs from the Beautiful City’.

“It’s probably going to be my last Cork album,” he says of the double CD, drawn from his 2014 compendium of material collected and researched over decades, Songs from the Beautiful City: The Cork Urban Ballads, published by his own Free State Press.