Jimmy Crowley: All set for one last blast of classic Cork songs
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.
‘Cork is an Eden’ and ‘The Bells of Shandon’, ‘The Pride of Sweet Clogheen’ and ‘The Ballad of Katty Barry’, Crowley’s latest CD keeps them coming, his singing voice as quintessentially Cork as crubeens.
Ballads of sporting and playing, and of the city’s rebel history are interspersed with songs of the Lee and the sea which are close to the heart of Crowley, a keen sailor, who left his native Douglas and, after a sojourn in America, now lives in Cobh.
Along with his UCC degree in Irish and folklore, his published work on Cork urban ballads, and weekly ‘Songs of Cork’ column in The Echo, now approaching 1,000 instalments, Crowley’s recordings have played their part in elevating him to the status of learned ‘saoi’ when it comes to the songs of his native city.
Crowley, whose father was a northsider from Cattle Market St and whose grandmother had a market stall selling tripe and drisheen, was introduced to the delights of Cork ballads by his band-mate, the late Chris Twomey.
“The first Cork song I got was probably from Chris Twomey - who was my mentor and a founder member of Stokers Lodge - and that was ‘Connie Doyle’s Armoured Car’,” he recalls.
“He [Twomey] told me ‘this is urban balladry from Cork and it’s worth being aware of’ and it was a bolt from the blue.” Crowley quickly developed a passion for song-collecting, learning one of his signature ballads, ‘Salonika’, from Cumann na mBan veteran Helena Ronayne, the grandmother of another Stokers Lodge member, Mick Murphy.
Now, however, it is time to move on to pastures new and creative, says Crowley, 71.
“I’m associated with the urban milieu of Cork and collecting the ballads and it’s been a pleasure,” he says. “On the ethnographical side of it I’ve put a load of work, time, and money into this double album.
“There were songs that were half-forgotten for years that I managed to cobble back together again with the help of some friends, and that was a beautiful process and I really enjoyed it.
“I’ll always, forever, sing Cork songs but I said I’ll put my back into the Songs from the Beautiful City and then I’ll draw the line.
“This is my 13th album now and I’ve got more interested in song-writing,” he adds. “The pigeon-hole thing of 'Cork singer Jimmy Crowley' is a little bit confining and doesn’t always allow you to write a song about love, or about your Ma.”
Not that Crowley is any stranger to song-writing. He has been honing that craft since the 1960s, though his earliest recorded composition featured themes rather darker than either mammies or romance.
“My first song was called ‘Ante Mortem’ - before death, as opposed to a post mortem,” he says. “It was a very grim song that I wrote when I was sick with a fever as a 17-year-old.”
Though in hindsight he admits the lyrics may have been “too introspective” to achieve commercial success, youthful optimism ensured the demo single was sent off to London at the height of the swinging sixties.
“Niall Toner recorded it in a small studio in Cork and they produced it on a single record with a song on the B side by my great friend Dee McCarthy,” says Crowley.
“We sent it off to Apple and the Beatles – they were looking for stuff – and got a letter back with George Harrison’s name on it, saying ‘it’s lovely stuff, keep at it lads’.”
Though the musicians “didn’t exactly get a 10-year contract or anything”, the “kinda psychedelic” lyrics served as Crowley the composer’s initiation, with elements of his early song-writing now coming full circle in his newest work.
“I’ve been very inspired recently with songwriting and I’ve quite a lot of stuff prepared,” he says. “I got a bit of confidence in the songwriting and think it’s my job to express these feelings and emotions and memories in a lyrical way, more than a narrative way in the future.
“I’ve gone back a bit to fantasy, to things that mightn’t make corporeal sense at all, but the dream world and spirit world is what song-writing is all about.”
Indeed, he believes a “spiritual connection” was responsible for bringing him together with the new source of inspiration in his musical and personal life, his partner Eve Telford.
Long separated from Evelyn, his wife of 26 years, Crowley says: “I met Eve through a spiritual connection with my mother.” Despite being “not holy and not religious”, a sense of disillusionment prompted him to resume attendance at Sunday Mass, in Ballymore, near Cobh.
“One day I said a very fervent prayer. I always prayed,” he says. “I said a prayer to me Ma, I said thank God for my brother, and I said a prayer for Evelyn, and I said ‘Ma, how’re you doing? This is Jimmy here, down in Cobh’. I said ‘I’m dying from loneliness. Surely, somewhere in the world there must be somebody who could enjoy my company and maybe love me eventually. There must be somebody out there’. And two weeks later she [Eve] turned up.”
Landing in Aberdeen airport to sing at a folk festival, he was introduced to Eve and immediately “something kind of clicked”.
“She was a real expert on ballads and we talked a lot about the songs, the [Francis] Child Ballads; she was into Celtic languages and she says she fell in love with me that day.”
Now living with Eve, “a fine song-writer and she’s writing at home and writing poems all the time,” he says “it’s a huge influence to be living in a house with a second artist at work”.
Drawing inspiration from personal experience of love, loss, longing, and a range of “very diverse, unusual subjects”, he is in the final stages of work on his next album, whose name speaks volumes about his newly-broadened scope, and is entitled simply, Life.
See: jimmycrowley.com
Released shortly before the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic, several attempts at official launches for the double CD ‘Songs from the Beautiful City’ suffered the same fate as most live music events of recent months.
Continuing uncertainty around Covid restrictions means that, like many artists, Jimmy Crowley has a bookings diary with “lines drawn everywhere” through cancelled gigs.
He is far from idle, however. In addition to working on his new solo album, ‘Life’, Crowley has several collaborative projects planned with his partner Eve Telford, including singing initiatives in schools, with senior citizens, and delving into Irish Traveller versions of the Child Ballads.
- This Friday, December 10, the couple, along with special guest, Great Island singer-songwriter Tom O’Sullivan, are due to play Cobh’s Sirius Arts Centre with tickets, priced €15, available via Eventbrite.
