November 1975
A pot-pourri of criminal folklore English dulcimer Mary O'Hara Herbs in folklore Letters Features Reviews
30p
VOL 5 No. 1
NOVEMBER 1975 EDITOR: FRED WOODS
IN THIS ISSUE
Mary O'Hara: the girl who came back A pot-pourri of criminal folklore - 1 Cambridge and the Press The traditional English Dulcimer Wormwood shrubs Old Punch be praised - III Club dates Field trip - VIII Letters to the Editor British Federation of Folk Clubs Record reviews Book reviews Taking the mike
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Cover: Mary O'Hara (photo: Jack Miller) Folk Review is published on the 1st of each month from Austin House, Hospital Street, Nantwich, Cheshire. Telephone 0270 65542. Printed by S.G. Mason (Chester) Ltd. All contents©Folk Review 1975. SUBSCRIPTIONS
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Mary O'Hara the girl who came back interviewed by ... JOHN PADDY BROWNE Mary O'Hara was at the zenith of an international career when, in 1956 she married the young American poet Richard Selig. It was a singularly happy marriage, but a tragically brief one, for Richard died the following year. Taking her leave of fame and fortune, Mary entered a Benedictine monastery where, as Sister Miriam, she has lived for the past thirteen years in complete obscurity. A great many people, myself among them, never forgot her, relying primarily on the handful of exquisite records she made before her exile, as memory booster'. In these recordings Mary O'Hara displays a unique sense of what folk-song is all about — more I dare say than almost anyone in the current folk movement. She possesses one of the most haunting voices I've yet heard, and with it she sings the songs of Ireland and Scotland with matchless artistry, never pandering to low taste, but always raising the simplest song to her own high standards. And now, at last, she is emerging from monastic retirement to pick up the threads of her abandoned career, and my wife and I suddenly find ourselves befriended by this girl whose voice we have both loved for years. I first met her a few days before her first concert appearance since retirement — at the Salisbury Festival of Arts. Her concert dispelled any doubts that such a long absence would have harmed her voice: she returned to the stage in a triumphant tour de force performance, singing twenty songs (and two encores) with flawless style and with irresist-
able charm. Her songs ranged from the High Songs of Irish Romance, those seldom-heard classics which easily rank with the lieder of Schubert, Wolf and Brahms, to the contemporary 'Judas and Mary'. JPB You were bom 12 May, 1935 in the fair town ofSligo? Mary Yes JPB Did you ever meet that other famous Sligo personality, Delia Murphy? Mary No! JPB You see, I think she does for her songs, in a different way, what you do for yours. Mary Yes! JPB You've both got qualities which, in some ways, touch. Mary Mmm .. . JPB .. . Though using different techniques. Mary Mmm .. JPB Your mother was a pianist. Were there any musical influences from your parents? Mary I would say they were nil. They made no attempt to implant musical views. JPB Did they even foresee a musical career? Mary No. Nor did I. It all sort of happened to me. When I was small, they used to send me in for Feis competitions — as a singer — when I was about seven or eight. And I used to dread this, but
even at that tender age I realised that it was good for me to do these things that were, in themselves, good, but which I didn't want to do. Without realising it, I was building up my character. But the trouble was that I couldn't help doing my best, and then I would win the wretched thing, which meant the same agony again the following year. And so it went on and on. Then they sent me off to learn piano, just as my sister did, (Joan is a distinguished Abbey Theatre actress - JPB), and then when I was about fifteen, there was a pageant in my school .. .1 was with the Dominicans at the time .. .in Dublin, having left Sligo and gone to boarding school when I was twelve. It was a pageant on
Thomas Moore, and he used the harp as a symbol of Ireland in his poems. And the nuns who had written and were producing this pageant thought it would be a good idea to get someone in who could introduce the singers to the harp — and have them just learn to strum. And I was one of the poor victims! A year later I did my first broadcast, when I was sixteen, and when I left school, I thought: well that's that . . .nothing more . . .Free! But my mother said that two other people who had been learning the harp with me were going back to continue with their lessons, and she threw it out as a challenge, and I claim it's the only thing in
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which she influenced me . . .this singing thing. So I went back too, very reluctantly, and bit by bit engagements started to come in, and they kept on coming. And so I found myself an unwilling professional singer. /( strikes me that some of your work borders on the classical. You sing classic Irish songs (as opposed to songs by classical composers) but you sing them in a style which elevates them sometimes above their natural worth. Do you have any leanings towards classicism? Or is it simply the way you feel the songs should be sung? Well, I would define a 'traditional' song as a cross between a 'folk song' and an 'art song'. When we talk about 'art songs' we are into the classical realm, but some traditional songs . . .what you call the 'big songs' are technically very difficult to sing. If you're going to do them justice, you've got to have at your command a technique and a skill that is not needed for the simpler folk-songs. I love listening to art-songs, and I have recently started to include Elizabethan songs in my repertoire, so from that I suppose you could say I have leanings towards the classical type of folk song. Do you get any pleasure from listening to so-called 'authentic performances' of folk-songs . . .those songs recorded and sung by ordinary people as it were? To be honest, I don't. I'm very selective in what I can listen to, and countenance very little. Baez, when she sings 'folk' is a first-rate artist, but so many others, while they may be pleasant to listen to, are not artists, and that's where I feel there is a big division. / was actually thinking of a lower strata of performer than Baez rather in terms of'Joe Bloggs' .. .the plain man who sings plain songs. Do you know, for example, that there are several record companies specialising almost exclusively in recordings of shepherds and ploughmen and so on, singing their old songs, sometimes in remarkable style . . .albeit on a different plane from yours? Yes . . .but it has little appeal. Many of these songs are magnificent, and yet justice is not being done to them.
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I know exactly what you mean by these terms 'artists' and 'professionals'. But it's just me .. .it's just how I listen to them. I'm sure they have a worth, but it simply doesn't appeal to me. The worth, to some people, is that these old timers are the people who have carried these songs down through the years, often in the face of persecution from the Establishment, even though at odd periods in history, the Establishment has come out in favour of minstrels and classical-styled performers. Many people argue that it has been the old timers who have kept the songs alive and going . . . That word 'alive' .. .that's important. So much of this I find is completely dead. They're obviously sincere, are steeped in the tradition, but there's just no vitality. On the other hand I abhor the overdressed folk-song which usually has a condescension thing about it. That's the great thing about Baez: she served the songs so beautifully. I'm saddened by the turn her later work has taken. Her gift is a superlative one, and to me it's worthier of a better medium than what she's now doing. About this material you perform yourself. We mentioned earlier the High Songs of Ireland . . .the sort which few people ever tackle, possibly because they don't have your range of voice. Now where have these come from? The greater number of Gaelic songs, Big and Little, I have had from Sean Og O Tuamdha, a man from west Cork who teaches Science, and who has a vast store of traditional Irish Gaelic songs. He is very well-known in Ireland, and is boundlessly generous, teaching these songs to whoever wants to learn them. And I used to attend his sessions which were held that time at the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin. It was open house on Saturday afternoons. Those who wanted to would come; it was usually the same people. He just stood there and taught traditional songs, the melodies and the words . . . And some idea of how they should be performed? Yes. One would learn how he sang
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them, but it's inevitable that one goes away and unconsciously makes the song one's own . . .notvastly different, but there would, perhaps, be a difference of interpretation. It's always nice to go back to Sean Og and say 'am I going too far wrong?' How did you come to have an interest in Scots songs .. .lyrics and ballads? I went to the Hebrides in 1955, to South Uist, at the invitation of Calum MacLean. We had met in Dublin that spring. He was a well-known folklorist, a Hebridean islander himself, and was in Dublin doing some work at the Folklore Commission, which is the counterpart of the School of Scottish Studies, to which he was attached. It was while with Calum and his brother (who was a doctor of Uist) that I learned most of the Scots Gaelic songs I now have. Some I got from song books, but I was also coached by David Murison of the School of Scottish Studies who is editor of the Scottish National Dictionary — coached in the exact pronunciation of the Lowland Scots songs. He knows how a certain word was pronounced at a certain period in a certain area. One couldn't be better informed. We had many very long sessions, learning every syllable . . .but it was worth doing it properly. Are you interested in singing songs of other lands, in other languages? I already do sing a medieval French song, 'Tant con je vivrai', but I' d like to do more. Medieval Italian, and German . . .songs which could be sung to harp accompaniment. But I'd need an Italian David Murison, and a German David Murison! You wouldn't actually learn the language, but just the song? Ideally I'd love to learn the languages, but life is short. Returning to the ballads. In one of my reviews of your Scottish record, I suggested that your voice lacked the intrinsic cruelty needed to sharpen the tone of the song. The ballads, by their very nature are cruel, and your voice by its nature is not. I got immense pleasure from singing those ballads, 'The twa corbies,' 'Lord Randal' and 'The bonny Earl of Murray' . . .all those fierce songs. The
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cruelty in the ballads is an objective cruelty. Yes, but on the one hand we have this stark, Turneresque landscape reflected in the ballads, and here's you with a voice which evokes -not a barren, cruel landscape - but a multi-coloured Latin Ireland. The two don't seem to always go together. I see what you mean. In other words, I haven't sung them successfully! Is that it? Far from it. The achievement is remarkable: you have astonishingly good dialect, great sense of drama . . . The song just takes over, and you become one with it. Shortly after you made this marvellous set of records, you went into a monastery. That was in April 1962. It was a contemplative order of Benedictines, Stanbrook Abbey in Worcester. I saw the service of God in the monastic life as an extension of my love for my husband, who had died some time before. I didn't confuse the loves, or try to replace one with the other. And I left simply on health grounds. My views on God and my religion haven't changed. But at my own choice I hadn't sung for ten years in the monastery. Someone sent me the tune of Sydney Carter's 'Lord of the dance' (I had alread) discovered the words and thought it was a marvellous song), and I adapted it for the harp. And that's what started me singing again. Since then I have been building up a programme of what I call 'God songs', and by that I don't mean judgmental, bible-thumping things, and indeed one of them, which is a poem of my husband's, doesn't mention God at all. And so the repertoire has broadened out now.
AVAILABLE RECORDS BY MARY O'HARA: Songs of Erin Beltona LBE13 Love songs of Ireland Beltona LBE20 Songs of Ireland Emerald MLD22 Mary O'Hara's Ireland Emerald GES1095 Mary O'Hara's Scotland Emerald GES1116 Another, a record of children's songs, is imminent.