Crowleys Music Centre: 'It’s really about honouring my father and my grandfather'
Sheena Crowley runs the latest incarnation of Crowley’s Music Centre on Friar Street in Cork. Picture: Chani Anderson
Sheena Crowley is quite simply a Cork institution. Her family music shop Crowleys Music Centre has been a cultural touchstone in Cork for a century. Although it’s moved location a few times, the heart and soul of the shop have remained unchanged for decades.
Today, that heart and soul is Sheena herself, together with a team of musicians and music enthusiasts who work with her in the shop. Now based at 1 Friar Street on the south side of the city, Crowleys Music Centre is a still hub for Cork’s music community.
“This is a circular economy,” says Crowley, originally from Ballinlough. “Customers come in here and they buy stuff but we then want to be involved with them and help them. So we sell their CDs, we book them for workshops, or we book them for gigs, we create events that we can get them involved in. It’s constantly going around. And I suppose that makes it more than just a shop, it’s a part of that music community.”
Customers at music shops like Crowleys often come in to get their first instrument, and the shop will see them coming back over the months and years as they develop and grow. In many ways, the shop becomes invested in its customers’ music life, says Sheena.
“You see them from 12 years of age, and maybe again at 16, and you see how they’re developing.” A recent songwriting competition organised by Sheena, attracted 222 entries. “I thought it would be like just a trickle of entries,” she laughs. “There’s so much talent here and I love to promote it how I can.”
There’s a familial element at play too. “In some way, I feel like I’m their grandmother or something, minding them. I must get it from my dad, who always looked out for his customers. That was the ethos I grew up with.”
Of course, Crowleys is very much a family business. Tadhgh, Sheena’s grandad opened the shop, which was originally based in Merchant’s Quay, in 1923 before registering the business officially in 1926.
Sheena’s father Mick took over the business in 1951 when his father died. He was just 14. Sheena says her dad wasn’t a dedicated school-goer at the time. “He was quitting school a lot to go ‘on the lang’,” she laughs. So, together with his sister they took over the running of the shop.
Mick, like Sheena after him, grew up in the shop among musicians. He was about 16 or 17 when a 10-year-old Rory Gallagher started visiting the shop on his lunch breaks from school. The pair clicked straight away, drawn together by their interest in guitars and amps, says Sheena.
She’s lost track of how many times she’s told the now-infamous story of Rory buying the 1961 Fender Stratocaster in Crowleys. It’s a defining moment in the shop’s history, arguably cementing its place in Cork music lore.
Pilgrims from all over Ireland and the world still make their way to Cork to follow in Rory Gallagher’s footsteps; the shop is one stop on an unofficial Rory Gallagher tour, which also takes in the City Library, St Oliver’s Cemetery and the building on Bridge Street where his grandmother’s pub once stood.
Even Joe Bonamassa, a lifelong fan of Gallagher who played a three-night residency at Live at the Marquee in 2025 to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Cork musician’s death, made the pilgrimage to Crowleys.
Sheena recalls how she was at home “cleaning the floors” when she got the call that Bonamassa was in the shop looking at guitars. She rushed to the shop and the blues guitarist was there with an entourage. “He just sat down in the corner and started playing guitars,” she recalls.
When he was leaving the shop a couple of hours later, Sheena says she offered him a discount on the guitar he was buying, but he refused. “He said, I want to pay full price. I'm here to support you; that’s the mission.”
As he left the shop Bonamassa took a photo and shared it on his Instagram profile. The next three days business was booming at the Crowleys, Sheena recalls. “We’ve never had so many customers; there were queues of people waiting to go in and there was no stopping all day long.”
In that few days, Sheena says the shop made more than it would typically make in a whole month.
But Crowleys Music Centre is more than just its link to Rory Gallagher. It is, of course, a music shop, selling everything from guitars, mandolins and banjos to uilleann pipes, fiddles and bodhráns, as well as specialist instruments like sitars, tablas, zhongruans and harmoniums. It’s also a treasure trove of hardware and parts, and vintage instruments of all kinds.
The building in Friar Street benefits from a dual aspect view with large windows bringing the sun into the space. Like any music shop, instruments are everywhere. Sheena laughs that a lot of her day is taken up moving stock to make room for either more stock or the re-organising they’re doing at the moment.
A small room to the rear of the main shop will soon become a studio space. “We're going to build a studio around the wall there. People can come in and use that for teaching or for workshops or doing recording if they want. We'll have our equipment on the wall that they can use, like processors and computer programs and stuff like that.
We know a lot of customers with some serious talent, and they say to us ‘I'd love to lay down a track, but I can't afford to go to a studio’. So, they’ll be able to just plug in there and do their thing.”
The studio space will replace a workshop where some of Sheena’s team worked on repairs. Crowleys has opened a new dedicated workshop in Ballycureen in Frankfield. Repairs will move to the new location, which will also house a new instrument making venture.
“When I re-opened the shop in 2023 my intention was to stock as many handmade Irish instruments as possible. But the individual luthiers can’t produce enough for retail, so we are taking it on ourselves.”
As well as being a champion of Cork musicians and primarily running the shop because she loves it, Sheena is also a canny businessperson. She says she’s noticed a clear gap in the market for instruments for musicians who are coming up through Ceoltas, and that’s what she’s initially targeting.
“There are no instruments at a certain price point and none of my suppliers have anything that will be good enough for the Irish market. A lot of the stuff isn’t made with the Irish market in mind, and the Irish market is huge, especially in the trad section.
“We have a range of Crowleys banjos ready to be set up now, and they'll be launched in the next three or four weeks. And we'll make some bodhráns, guitars and pedals and other instruments too.”
Like the shop itself, instrument making is part of the Crowley family legacy. “My grandfather used to make uilleann pipes and other instruments. My father made banjos and flutes, and then we were making mandolins and guitars too. So it’s not new to us, but I want to do it with economy of scale more in mind.”
From growing up in the shop, doing stock taking and “horrible jobs”, Sheena now sees herself as carrying that legacy into its second century.
“For me it’s really about honouring my father and my grandfather. I absolutely love it, and I am connected to the musicians, like almost like they’re my extended family kind of thing. I get to know them, and I care where they’re ending up and what they’re doing.”
- On Sunday, October 4, 'Live at Crowleys' is being launched at 6pm on the store's YouTube channel. Episode one of the monthly event will feature five acts of different styles playing in the shop. See www.youtube.com/@crowleysmusic
Dave Flannery, repairs and instrument making Dave Flannery, from Blarney, previously worked in Crowleys at its MacCurtain Street location. “I worked there for a couple of years on the shop floor, selling and helping customers. Then I started doing small repair jobs in the back of that shop.”
When Sheena moved across the city to Friar Street, Flannery, who is the brother of Cork musician Mick Flannery, joined her again in 2024. “It’s the nicest job I’ve ever had,” he says. “In the repair aspect, I see loads and loads and loads of cool instruments that I'd never encounter if I wasn't doing this job. Old Martins, old Gibsons, mandolins, and you know all these tools and instruments that come in for a little bit of love.”
Flannery is part of the team working in the new workshop in Ballycureen making instruments. He’s pre-dominantly a self-taught luthier but being a musician himself as well as a being skilled at repairs, he learned quickly.
“I just taught myself. I looked up designs and bought the woods and followed designs, trying out things with different timbers. I did a bit of training with a guy who makes mandolins and bouzoukis called Macdara Ó Faoláin. He showed me a bit of history about making bouzoukis and mandolins, and I transferred those skills over. Of course, I do a lot of repairs, and I know a lot about how instruments are made from repairing them.”
With the initial focus of the Crowley instrument range to be banjos, Flannery has had to get to grips with making these complicated instruments. “Banjo rims are complicated to make. If you're making it out of hardwood, you’re essentially trying to create a circular thing out of timber that doesn't want to be circular. There’s a lot of precision engineering too in the manner in which you put everything together.”
The process can take weeks, according to Flannery who says, but there’s a real pride in making something that someone will go on to play beautiful music on. “There’s something so exciting about it. Just starting off with plain lumber and turning it into something to make music on.”
