Tom Dunne: A history of Ireland in one object — Rory Gallagher’s guitar
Rory Gallagher and his Stratocaster in 1970 (Photo by Fin Costello/Redferns).
Blackpool, Cork, 1899: Tadgh Crowley is born. He becomes a keen bagpipe player and in the 1920s, after Cork has convulsed though the War of Independence and Civil war, opens a business repairing bag pipes and drums. It will later morph into a music shop.
Crowley’s, as it will become known, is later described in song by John Spillane as a “shop of dreams, a cave of wonders, a palace of musical delight.” In 1926 Tadgh will repair a set of uilleann pipes for Henry Ford. Those pipes are now in a museum in Dearbourn, Michigan. In his lifetime his passion will see him transcribe all the 1001 tunes from the famous Chief O’Neill’s book to bagpipe settings.
In the late 1940s Rural Electrification takes a young ESB employee Daniel Gallagher, a Derry man, and his Cork wife Monica north to Ballyshannon. A son, Rory is born in March 1948.
They are close to Base One Europe in Derry, one of the US’s biggest navy bases. Like all US Naval bases at that time, it doesn’t just bring ships, it brings American blues music, Muddy Waters – Rory’s favourite - and Howlin’ Wolf.
Rory, his mum and his new brother Donal move back to Cork in the 1950s. The showband era is dawning as early rock and roll inspires the big bands to move about on stage. Jim Conlon, a star of the Royal Showband orders a red 1961 Stratocaster from Crowleys, likely the first one in Ireland.
He specifically wants a red one to match band’s suits. When a sunburst finish arrives accidentally, he reluctantly plays it until the red one comes in months later. Then the now second-hand sunburst is returned to Crowleys and goes in the window.
Tadgh Crowley had passed in 1955, leaving the shop to his son Michael, then only 14. By the time he spots two young lads eyeing the guitar lovingly, he himself would have been only 22. The Strat is the same guitar Buddy Holly plays. Buddy is a hero of a young Rory and his accompanying brother Donal.
When the lads work up the courage to come in, Michael agrees reluctantly to a hire-purchase arrangement. £100 in 1963 is a lot of money. Rory makes the repayments by playing, aged 15, with a showband, the Fontana, as they tour the UK.
The rest of this story is better known. Rory and that guitar will become joined at the hip, over countless gigs, dozens of albums and a live tour of Ireland in 1974 that will become the stuff of legend.
Rory and that guitar will lead Ireland out of the showband era and into a world of U2, The Rats and Thin Lizzy. Few if any of those who will later rewrite Irish music will not have experienced a moment where they looked at Rory and that guitar and wanted to do likewise.
Witnesses say it already looked fairly weather beaten when he played it at the Isle of Wight festival in 1969. That was the festival where a film crew, employed to just film one song, were told, when Rory started to play, to “just keep filming.” It looked, even then, as if it had been sanded. But its travails were only beginning. Over the course of its life Rory’s profuse sweat would cause the pick-ups to burn out, paint to flake and the neck to become so wet he took it off several times to dry it out.
At one point it was even stolen and spent two nights in a garden off the South Circular Road in Dublin before an appeal on the Garda Patrol TV programme saw it re-united with a greatly-relieved Gallagher.
He also rewired it so that one control was volume, one control was tone, and the middle one was “null and void.” This “made the Strat more like a Tele, so I could use the tone to create wah wah effect,” he said.
You can buy a 1961 “Rory Gallagher Fender Relic Guitar” on Thomann for €6,000. It will also boast three custom single coil pick-ups, a maple neck, a rosewood fretboard and a sunburst finish.
But, buyer beware, it is not soaked in the DNA of arguably the greatest blues guitarist of his generation. It was not used to ignite a generation, to play Belfast when no one else would, to speak in the voice of Cork’s favourite son.
That guitar is the Elgin Marbles of our music... except, right now, we still have it.
