Culture That Made Me: Brian Warfield of the Wolfe Tones
Brian Warfield and the Wolfe Tones.
Born in 1946, Brian Warfield grew up in Bluebell, Dublin 12. In 1963, he co-founded the Wolfe Tones. He has performed banjo, harp and bodhrán for the band, as well as singing.
As their songwriter, Warfield has penned ballads like ‘Irish Eyes’, ‘Let the People Sing’ and ‘Celtic Symphony’.
The Wolfe Tones, who have been given the freedom of cities like Los Angeles and New York, will perform at Dublin’s Olympia Theatre, 16-17 April. See: www.3Olympia.ie
We have songs that we had learned from my grandmother. She was a great lover of songs and a rebel to boot. One of the songs we got from her was ‘The Peeler and the Goat’, which we put on one of our albums: “The Bansha peelers went one night/ On duty and patrolling O/ And they met a goat upon the road/And took him for being a-strolling O…” She had loads of songs. We heard them around the fire in winter days. Back then there was no television and barely a radio.
I was a member of the Young Folk Song Society in Dublin. Peggy Jordan ran it. Pete Seeger came to Dublin. He asked her to get a group of young singers to go on stage with him to sing the choruses. We gladly obliged. His mastery as an entertainer struck me. I'll never forget it. He had a great rapport with the audience. He had them in the palm of his hand. He was a character – the way he could turn an audience for each song. He could have them quiet as pins and then he could have them the next minute clapping and raving around the place. His mastery, too, on the banjo. After that, I said to myself, “I'm gonna get a banjo. I want to be a Pete Seeger.” He impressed me so much.
Pete Seeger wrote great songs: ‘If I Had A Hammer’, ‘Turn! Turn! Turn!’, and he had great songs with the Weavers: ‘Goodnight Irene’. And just like the Wolfe Tones, Pete Seeger was blacklisted on the radio. The way he stood up to McCarthyism. He was a hero. There couldn’t have been a more humane person than Pete Seeger. He cared about people. After the show, he came backstage to each one of us and shook our hands and thanked us. We should have been thanking him for the entertainment he gave us.
Myself and Noel Nagle emigrated to England in 1963. We were only kids. We went to my aunt’s house. We started going to the folk clubs around London. We were playing bits and pieces around the place. We spent a year there. Years later, my wife’s cousin said to me, “Do you remember that guy around Chelmsford who wrote all his own songs? Do you know who he is? He was Paul Simon.” He ran the folk club there. He gave us a residency. He was good. I liked his stuff, but I wouldn't have seen him as a super star. Later when I heard ‘The Sound of Silence’ I took an interest in that.
I'm a collector of antique books. I have thousands of books. They're all concerning Ireland, Irish history, Irish travel, every book of Irish music that you could name, going back to the eighteenth century. I love the Young Irelanders period. John Mitchell’s books are probably some of my favourites. He is a hero of mine, but not many other people like him because he took the “wrong” side in the American Civil War. He took the side of the South. He lived with the people around Richmond, Virginia. He was loyal to the territory he lived in, not because of slavery. His Jail Journal – from the time he was captured, to going to Australia, first to Bermuda – is a fabulous book. He escaped from prison in Australia. It is gripping from start to finish.
Séamus Ennis was a great character, a great musician. He loved the aul drink, though, I have to say. After one or two pints, he had to put vodka into the into the pints of Guinness – it was getting too weak. He collected folklore all over the country. We ran the Old Shieling session in Dublin. We used to give him gigs there. He played the pipes, and he’d tell a story, a yarn. I always remember him for ‘Brian O’Linn’. It went: “Brian O’Linn and his wife and wife’s mother/All went out for a pee together/One peed the needles and another one pins/’It’s very sharp pissing,’ says Brian O’Linn…” He loved that kind of verse. He got a great kick out of it.
Willie Clancy was much admired. I was more a creator, a songwriter than a great musician, but I played the whistle as best I could and as the way it was taught to me. People like Willie Clancy, we just stood in awe when watching him play.
I always loved Bob Dylan. I very much admired his writing. When I was around 16 or 17, I learned one of his mammoth songs, ‘Desolation Row’, off by heart. It took me a long while to learn it. I said, “How did he write this?” It’s unbelievable – the wording and the cleverness. The important thing about song-writing – and I learned this from the masters – is that the melody must be sympathetic to the lyrics. You have to get the written word and marry it to a melody. They must suit each other. With a Bob Dylan song, you feel the emotion. You hear the lyric and the emotion of the music carries that lyric and really enters your body and soul.
I was very drawn to the McPeake Family from Belfast. They had harps and uilleann pipes in their setup. I loved their sound. That's where I heard Jug of Punch and Monaghan Fair first, a couple of great songs. They had a wonderful repertoire of northern folk songs and we captured a few of them.
I played the harp for a time. I used to love reading about the old harpers. There's a couple of lovely books on Turlough O’Carolyn and Rory Dall O’Cahan. They tell great stories about how they lived and how they went around the various places. There’s stories about them going to Scotland and stories of them going around Ireland, and the great controversy between O’Carolyn and one of his peers. He accuses O’Carolyn of sucking up to the new landed families, the English, around the country.
