Hammy Hamilton: 'Sectarianism in the North was completely ignored by traditional musicians'
Hammy Hamilton is originally from Belfast, but has been resident in Co Cork for many years.
Hammy Hamilton is unlikely to forget the names of Geordie Hanna, Cathal McConnell, Len Graham, Joe Holmes, Diarmuid Ó Súilleabháin, or John Connell, from whom he had the “luck and inestimable blessing” to learn songs.
Indeed, when writing sleeve notes for his newly-released CD, the Belfast native credited those who imparted their songs and wisdom during his student days in the North and following his 1970s move to Cork.
There was one important omission from the album’s cover, however, as Hamilton discovered while preparing for its release.
“I did the CD design myself and I lay awake a couple of nights after it had gone to the printer thinking ‘did I mention Cathal McConnell, did I mention John Connell?’," he recalls.
“I was all ready to go with a sort of a launch last October and when I got the CDs back from the printer, I was looking at it and all of a sudden I went ‘Oh shit my name’s not on it’. The person I forgot to mention was me. That’s very typical of me. I’m absent-minded in a very odd way,” he laughs.
His name now added to the cover, Hamilton views this delay in the album’s release as just the latest hitch to beset the project since its 2018 inception.
What became a live recording with a string quartet began as a conversation at Hamilton’s Cúil Aodha home with Four Star Trio friends Con Fada Ó Drisceoil, Johnny McCarthy, and Pat ‘Herring’ Ahern. “We ended up singing a few songs and somebody suggested, ‘Hammy, you should record a few of your songs,” he recalls.
The idea of combining Hamilton’s vocals with a string arrangement developed, with cellist Yseult Cooper Stockdale to be joined by McCarthy and Liam O’Connor on fiddle.
“Because Johnny was one of the original fiddle players it was natural that [his son, pianist and composer] Cormac would come on board. When that was suggested I jumped at it, and I love the arrangements he did.”
Then, however, began a tale of woe, says Hamilton. “We had our first rehearsal with Liam and Johnny and Yseult. It was a few days before the first covid lockdown, which knocked that on the head for approaching two years.”
Talks of recording resumed, but halted abruptly when Hamilton was diagnosed with colorectal cancer. “Just before Christmas 2022 I was diagnosed, so that was almost another two years of not being able to do things. Then when I got well enough to do it again, the next thing was Johnny broke a tendon in his left hand, which for a fiddle player, knocked him out.”
Fully recovered from cancer, Hamilton set about resurrecting the project with a reshuffled line-up, Cooper Stockdale joined by fellow Ora Quartet members Siún Milne, Molly O’Shea, and Ali Comerford.
The performance, with Cormac McCarthy’s arrangements, came to fruition last year in an Arts Council-backed concert at Baile Mhúirne’s Ionad Cultúrtha, recorded live and mixed by Ahern.
The resultant album, “a new interface between classical and traditional” is a personal song retrospective for Hamilton.
Better known as a flute-maker, musician, and composer, “not a lot of people know this, but I was a singer long before I played the flute,” says Hamilton, whose songs featured on 2001 album with Ó Drisceoil and Séamus Creagh.
Born “in the heart of loyalist Belfast”, he says despite the Troubles, “the sectarianism in the North was completely ignored by traditional musicians and the artistic community”.
Hamilton, whose first public performance was singing adds: “At college at Queens I fell in with a group of people who were very keen on traditional singing and a lot of them would have been influenced by the folk-club scene.
"People like Len Graham and Joe Holmes, Cathal McConnell, who was a big influence on me as a flute player and was also a big influence as a singer, and Geordie Hanna - I was lucky enough to meet all those great singers ‘in the flesh’.”
With commercial recordings then less widespread, “the transmission process was much more personal” notes Hamilton, who examined the role of commercial recordings in traditional music for his PhD thesis.
“And when I came down to Cúil Aodha there was a very vibrant singing scene… a community of people who would sing, and nobody ever thought of making a recording. It was just what people did.”
and are among Hamilton’s Ten Old Songs, along with which his mother “used to sing snatches of”, he says.
“For me singing is such a personal thing and when I sing I think not just of the emotion of the song but where I learned it and the occasions I sang it before, so these are all songs that really mean something to me very deeply.”
- is out now
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