Jimmy Crowley: 'I’ve left Cork behind with this album for the first time'
Jimmy Crowley, at the launch of his new album with Eve Telford, at Cork City Library. Picture: Jim Coughlan.
“Swashbuckling narrative of fierce robbers, scheming stepmothers, cross-dressing lassies, and gallant pages”. Add seduction by goblins, gothic horror, and an assortment of talking birds and you’ve got yourself a collection of Child ballads.
Not for the faint-hearted, the gruesome lyrics of some among the 305 narrative songs collected by American scholar Francis James Child and published in the late 19th century as English and Scottish Popular Ballads could curdle the blood.
Though it’s far from poisoned lovers and dashing knights Jimmy Crowley was reared, the king of the Cork urban ballad has now traded ‘The Bells of Shandon’ and ‘Groves of Blackpool’ for the likes of ‘Lady Margaret’ and ‘Lord Beckham’.
His new album of duets with partner Eve Telford, Hello! Child Ballads learned from Irish Travellers, includes the likes of poison ballad ‘Buried in Kilkenny’ and ‘Johnny Barden’, otherwise known as ‘Willie O’Winsbury’, from which the titular refrain ‘Hello!’ is derived.
The album is “completely Corkless”, claims Crowley. “I’ve left Cork behind with this album. For the first time I’m not singing about the Grand Parade, Katty Barry, and Christy Ring and it’s quite refreshing because it ties you down,” says Crowley, whose ‘Songs of Cork’ column in The Echo reached a milestone 1,000th song last year.
While Crowley’s familiarity with the singing of Travellers dates back to guest performances by Blackpool’s McCormack family at his 1970s Cork folk club, the Child ballads have held a longstanding fascination for Australian-born Telford.
Though Child collected narrative ballads only in England and Scotland, their longevity in Ireland owes much to the singing of Travellers, whose storytelling and singing tradition helped ensure the survival of the songs on both sides of the Irish Sea.
Recorded by more recent collectors including the late Tom Munnelly and Hugh Shields, and performed through the ‘Man, Woman and Child’ project, Irish sources of Child ballads became a focus for Clare-based collector Jim Carroll. It was he who encouraged Telford to revive ‘The Famous Flower of Serving Men’, employing an air from the singing of Tipperary Traveller Mary Delaney.
“I feel very connected to the singers who sang them,” says Telford, whose voice on the recordings made at the couple’s Cobh home evokes Delaney and Cork’s Margaret Barry, Crowley accompanying on bouzouki and mandocello.
“It’s not just about the songs; it’s about the singers as well,” she says.
“There were so many of these long narrative ballads kept among the Travellers. Many of these songs came from Scotland and England originally and people all over Ireland would have sung them. But as the years went on, as radio and television came in, people would have stopped singing them and it was Travellers around the campfire and in the caravans that sang them.” Living in Japan, Tasmania, England, and Wales before moving to Cork after meeting Crowley at a Scottish folk festival, Telford says she was raised without technology and was 23 when she first watched television but grew up listening to a wide variety of songs.
“My parents played all sorts of music to me, then I started exploring English, Irish, Scottish folk music. It’s been a most wonderful and individual journey because I didn’t grow up in a folk music background – it found me,” she says.
Telford, who says she always saw herself as “an outsider figure” describes the Child ballads, “these beautiful songs with fascinating and ancient narratives” as “a means of escapism from the day-to-day”.
“I feel very connected with that, even if it’s a romanticised past, and I think those stories, a bit like fairy-tales, are essential to the fabric of our life, even today.
“There’s so much scope in these songs for drawing an audience in and telling a story.” Among them are ‘False Lover John’, learned from Kitty Cassidy and from Kevin Mitchell, who recently passed away, while Telford picks ‘Young Hunting’, from the singing of Roscommon’s Martin McDonagh, as one of her favourites.
“She throws her lover in the well because he says ‘there’s a lady 10 times fairer than you waiting outside Lord Barnard’s gate’, so she doesn’t let him say anything else after that.” Though Crowley is more circumspect about “ballads about young fellas getting thrown into wells”, noting that among the Child ballads are songs that wouldn’t be considered politically correct, such as ‘False Lankum’, he points out that there are also some with happy endings.
“The late Tommy Munnelly in the mid-’70s said there was TV and radio coming in, country and western singing, and he’d be amazed if those songs like ‘Lankum’ survived, and he was right,” says Crowley.
He and Telford hope to put the ballads back into the public domain with Hello!, and a nationwide tour.
- See: jimmycrowley.com
