Culture That Made Me: Frances Black on Jimmy MacCarthy, Judy Garland and Niall Tóibín
Frances Black performs with Mary Coughlan and Sharon Shannon at Cork Opera House for Cork Folk Festival, on Oct 1.
Frances Black, 63, grew up on Charlemont Street, Dublin. She’s the youngest member of the Black Family band, which includes her sister Mary Black, and three brothers. She released the album Frances Black and Kieran Goss in 1992, and later several best-selling solo albums. In 2016, she was elected to Seanad Éireann as an independent Senator.
She will perform with Mary Coughlan and Sharon Shannon at Cork Opera House next Sunday, Oct 1, as part of Cork Folk Festival. She will perform a solo gig at Saint George’s Arts and Heritage Centre, Mitchelstown, Cork, on Saturday, November 4.
James Taylor’s Mud Slide Slim is an album I still listen to when I’m feeling nostalgic or a bit low; it cheers me up. It’s the first album I ever received. I got it as a present for my sixteenth birthday off my brother’s best friend who I think was half fancying me at the time. I fell madly in love with James Taylor. Back then, 'You've Got a Friend' was a huge hit. I learned every single song on the album. I loved James Taylor's voice, his guitar playing. He has this unbelievable ability to connect with people's souls. I was a wannabe hippie. I used to look at the picture of James Taylor on the album cover, and thought, wow, he's pure perfection.
I loved Carole King’s Tapestry. You can imagine a young angst-ridden teenager wanting to fall in love, hearing the songs on that album like 'A Natural Woman', 'Will You Love Me Tomorrow?' I was young at the time. I hadn't had a boyfriend. As a 16-year-old, listening to the album made me go into this wonderful feeling of love, and yearning to be in love, to find some lovely, gorgeous young man I could love. That’s what Carole King probably brought to me at that time.
I saw Jimmy’s Hall, the adaptation of the Ken Loach movie, in the Abbey Theatre in 2018. I went twice – I had to go back again. It’s about Ireland in the 1930s, based on a true story. Jimmy Gralton came back from the US. He was leaning very much towards Communism. He set up this community hall in Leitrim. He had this little gramophone and he played records on it. The kids in the local area used to dance to it. They loved it. The Catholic Church – who ruled the roost – got a set against him. The hall got burnt down. What wasn’t in the film was the music. Lisa Lambe sang a song A Stor Mo Chroí in the play, I’ll never forget it. I was crying. The whole play is pure, authentic Irishness.
When I used to go to a Christy Dignam concert – who has sadly passed away – with Aslan, he had this wonderful ability to interpret a song, that made you really listen to it and get lost in it. If you've ever been to a Christy concert, it was almost a spiritual experience. You left like you were on the crest of a wave, floating along.
I binge-watched Breaking Bad. Then my partner and myself got into Better Call Saul, and it’s even better. There’s less violence in it than Breaking Bad, which I had to look at through my fingers. It’s obviously about Saul Goodman. What a phenomenal character he was. He was a lawyer, he had morals, but he was a bit on the dodgy side. He played the system. I loved it. I was devastated when it was over.
Skara Brae is a favourite album. I would have listened to it in my late teenage years or early twenties. It’s by three siblings, Mícheál Ó Domhnaill, and Maighread and Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill, and a fourth member, Dáithí Sproule. It’s one of the best albums that ever came out of Ireland. It’s pure soul.
Judy Garland is my hero. During Covid, I got obsessed with her. I studied her. I wanted to learn everything about her and her story. She’s a fantastic interpreter of songs. The way she delivers a song, it’s almost like she’s talking but she’s singing – she’s telling a story, but it’s actually through song, it's the way she interprets it, her timing. 'Over the Rainbow' stops me in my tracks every time I hear her singing it. It doesn’t matter what age she was singing it, whether she was 15, or whether it was just before she passed. Hairs on the back of your neck stuff.
If you listen to any Jimmy MacCarthy song, he has a fantastic ability to push the boundaries. His songs are like poems – the imagery he paints with his words, the way the words interact with each other. When you look at, say, Bright Blue Rose: “I skimmed across black water, without once submerging/Onto the banks of an urban morning…” Where did that beautiful imagery come from? 'No Frontiers', all of the wonderful songs he’s written. He can’t be surpassed.
I saw a production of John B. Keane’s The Field in The Abbey about 35 years ago. Niall Tóibín was playing The Bull McCabe. He was the best Bull McCabe. I saw the film shortly afterwards and it wasn’t a patch on the play. The play is brilliantly written. It captures rural Ireland – how the land is so important to Irish people. It’s part of their soul. Maybe because we were colonised it's so precious. The play goes to the very core of how important the land is to Irish people, so much so that someone is willing to kill somebody because of it.
George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a big book for me. I read it when I was a teenager, and I got very enmeshed in the plight of the animals. I didn't understand it fully at the time, but I re-read it again, when I was in my thirties, and it had a whole different meaning. It’s a fantastic book.
The Countrywoman is a book by Paul Smith, written in the 1960s. My sister Mary gave it to me. She said, “When you read this, you’ll be bawling your eyes out.” The story line still stays with me. It’s about a young woman from the country who marries a man from Dublin, probably around the 1920s, a time of huge poverty.
They actually moved into the tenement houses where we lived as kids, which is Charlemont St. She gave her life to her children. Her husband couldn't get work. Obviously that impacted him. He took to drink, and she had to try and cope. The thing that kept her going were her son and daughter, the lights of her life. It’s a beautiful story.
