MARCH 1979
Gaelic song Folk Books Letters
The Unfortunate Shepherdess Where does she go from here? Features
Reviews
feriew MARCH 1979
VOL.8 No.(5 EDITOR: FRED WOODS
IN THIS ISSUE A long farewell Letters to the Editor Gaelic song Club dates Where does she go from here? Through hail, wind and snow Really Klever Publishers Record reviews Book reviews
4 7 8 15 16 20 24 27 37
Cover photograph: The High Level Ranters.
Folk Review is published on the 1st of each month from Austin House, Hospital Street, Nantwich, Cheshire. Telephone 0270 65542. Printed by Bemrose Press/Cheshire Typesetters Ltd., Chester. All contents (g) Folk-Review 1979 SUBSCRIPTIONS Subscription rate for the United Kingdom, Eire and BFPO areas is £4.00 per annum. Foreign rates (surface mail) are: Australia $8.50; Belgium F320; Denmark K52.00; France F45.00; Holland FL20.00; Italy L8000; Japan Y2100; New Zealand $9.50; Norway F50.00; Sweden K42.00; USA and Canada $9.50; West Germany D20.00. Airmail rates on application. Folk Review, Austin House, Hospital Street, Nantwich, Cheshire Please start/renew my postal subscription, to FOLK REVIEW starting with the issue dated I enclose cheque/PO for £4.00 or overseas equivalent. NAME ADDRESS
Please make cheques payable to FOLK REVIEW LTD.
JOHN PADDY BROWNE has followed MARY O'HARA'S career for twenty years. Now he asks
WHERE DOES SHE GO FROM HERE?" In November 1975 I was lucky enough to secure the first interview with Mary O'Hara following her now well-documented return from monastic life an exile which at the time, may have deprived her many admirers of the sight and sound of their heroine, but which, in brutally commercial terms, was a godsend to the publicity team which later launched her on her second road to fame. It must be said at the outset that Miss O'Hara is about the most uncommerciallyminded person on the face of the globe. The name of her cottage door is O'HaraSelig, reminding us that she is the widow of a young and promising Rhodes scholar and poet, Richard Selig who, as well as being an Oxford student, was at one time the sole manager and agent of her first international stardom. To the small circle of close friends to whom she returns when the lights have gone out at the Festival Hall, or the Albert Hall, or Carnegie Hall or the Palladium, she still talks about Richard as though we can expect him to walk through the door at any moment. It's a private and personal reaction, and has nothing to do with publicity and the quick buck, or with sentimentality, and is certainly not a morbid thing, for Mary O'Hara is also one of the most genuinely happy people I've ever encountered. When my first interview with her was published in the November '75 issue of hoik Review she had not at that point made her return to public life. Her first concert, a recital in a Salisbury church, was" still a week away, and her first 'legitimate' concert appearance, which 16
I produced for the Fo'c'sle folk club in Southampton, had not even been thought about. Putting her concert together, I was faced with the problem of making a selection of songs from her very large repertoire. She was rehearsing a core of songs for future public use: some of these were contemporary songs, and a few were drawn from her store of traditional lyrical songs. I was familiar with almost every breath and note on her early records, and wanted her to do a programme which would tax her abilities to the full and at the same time show an audience the remarkable range of her talents. She agreed with the self-indulgent programme I set her (which was more than some of my Fo'c'sle colleagues did!), and sang songs ranging from Rabindranath Tagore's 'Face to face' to the terrifyingly difficult lament 'Sliabh na mBan'. It must be the only programme in which she hasn't sung Carter's 'Lord of the dance', though she did ask to include one of his songs, and it turned out to be 'Judas and Mary'. She also sang 'The twa corbies' and the song which rocketed her to newfound fame, 'Cucuin a Chuaichin', the 'cuckoo' song. I had the concert recorded, and on the evidence of that recording, the concert was one of the most perfectly-performed pieces of singing and playing anyone could wish for. Those who said that the concert wasn't their cup of tea were exercising their pejorative, for such viewpoints had nothing to do with Miss O'Hara's act or her ability to tackle a programme in which
Mary O'Hara 17
the relentless demands on her voice and sense of style were flawlessly met. She continued to give similar, and longer, recitals throughout the country for the next year until her chance meeting on a New York-bound plane with Jo Lustig introduced her to a man well-known in the folk world as a hard-crusted entrepreneur who got things done partly because he recognised the right thing at the right moment. He recognised in Mary O'Hara a potential stormer, and it took someone with his nerve to book the Festival Hall for her, and to engineer a perfectly-timed appearance on a national chat-show which would fill that hall as a result of that television appearance. Her appearance at the Festival Hall was the show-business sensation of the year, attracting black-market touts offering £2 tickets for £20 at a sell-out show which defied all the laws of probability. After all, bigger and better-known stars thought twice before appearing in solo concerts at the Festival Hall, and who was this little-known lady of (forgive me) forty years, an ex-nun, a singer of traditional and sometimes unaccompanied songs, a personality so far removed from the ego-trippers of the commercial entertainment world that it hardly bore thinking about . . . who was this lady to blast her way into the South Bank's massive agora — a hall, as it turned out, which wasn't big enough for the event. The public and press reception of the Festival Hall concert was universally panegyric. The national dailies, weeklies and monthlies vied for the most doxological adjectives with which to extol the coming of the new song goddess, and a new star was born. Radio Two, not given to flooding its airwaves with Irish folksongs, couldn't find enough O'Hara tracks to fill the empty spaces in their programmes, and made do with playing her 'live' album, recorded at the Festival Hall concert, as many times a day as decency would permit. There then followed another sell-out concert at the Albert Hall, and another at Carnegie Hall, all preceded with the usual and effective Lustig press campaigns which
18
ensured that, if there were any cloth-ears left in the world who hadn't actually heard Miss O'Hara, then they were certainly going to hear about her, and hearing about her, they would be tempted to fork up a few quid to go and see her. I've spoken to an astonishing number of people at O'Hara concerts who came along to 'see what all the fuss was about' and stayed to enjoy the whole show. Only one man I chatted to at the Bournemouth Winter Gardens thought it was 'better than watching Mick McManus wrestling'. Her appearance on This is your life, a better-looking programme in her case than she possibly thought it was, was another brilliant piece of political television, coming right in the middle of a new nation-wide tour, and more importantly on the eve of her own week at the London Palladium. That a singer, now admittedly appealing to a wider public audience through the medium of a selection of over-played middle-of-the-road songs, but still essentially and unashamedly a singer of traditional Irish songs in the Irish language, should fill such a venue for a week is another remarkable occurrence in a career crammed full of remarkable firsts. Her albums were selling like cottage crusties in a bread-strike, winning her a silver disc for 500,000 copies of the Festival Hall disc sold in six months, and reviewed in this magazine on its release. A new 'hit' song was found for her in the oleaginous 'Music speaks louder than words', and made a change from 'Forty five years', which I must have heard about forty-five thousand times, and which just goes to show what sort of radio I listen to. The new album, released from Chrysalis, again spun off into the big-seller bracket, aided by the hot-cakes disposal I saw after her provincial appearances. In the meantime she has appeared in television shows of all types and classifications, though she herself evades classification. There are no handy pigeonholes to tell TV producers what Miss O'Hara is good at, so she appears in everything from Royal Variety Shows to 'In Concert' programmes and religious radio broadcasts. In all of these she un-
compromisingly sings a number of traditional songs: even in this year's Royal Variety, she devoted fifty per cent of her two-song time to a Gaelic lyric, no mean feast to set before the Queen Mother. So where does she go from here? On the face of it she appears to have done everything, and it seems she can only keep on doing it again and again. A forthcoming tour of Australia will be like a dustier version of her tour in Britain, and her tour of America, and her tour of Canada, her days filled with press and television interviews with chatmen who have run out of questions to ask, although she answers each query as cheerily and freshly as if it were for the first time. Well, assuming bleakly that she has another ten years to go as an able performer, she can continue to do what she is doing now for the time being. What she is doing now requires a voice of steely edge and quality, and a control of breath and phrasing. If and when she goes into decline, she will have the large corpus of traditional song which requires a lesser ability, and sounds none the worse for being in the second rank. (Ballads like The unquiet grave' are nowhere nearly as difficult to sing as 'Roisin Dubh', and are equally effective in their way). She can also continue to sing popular songs like 'Scarlet ribbons' for as long as she or her manager have a mind to. But she could also sing works specially written for her, and some of our revival songwriters could do worse than familiarise themselves with her style and put pen to paper with her in mind. A song in Mary O'Hara's mouth would do the song no harm at all. A Mary O'Hara Discography Songs of Erin (Decca-Beltona LBE 13 released 1957). Sixteen tracks which show the young singer - she was 22 then — already in full flower. Love songs of Ireland (Decca-Beltona LBE 20 released 1958). Another sixteen somewhat more demanding traditional songs in even more satisfying performances.
Songs of Ireland (Tradition-Everest TLP 1024 released in USA 1958). Eighteen tracks, all traditional, beautifully sung and played. Songs of Ireland (Decca-Emerald MLD 22 released 1967). Same issue as above, but with two good tracks mysteriously deleted. The folk song tradition (Tradition-Everest TSP 2 released 1960). One O'Hara track among a galaxy of other folk notables, including MacColl and John Jacob Miles. Mary O'Hara's Ireland (Decca AmeraldGem GES 1095 released 1973). Superlative first of excellent trilogy recorded before monastic days. Eighteen tracks. Mary O'Hara's Scotland (Decca EmeraldGem GES 1116 released 1974). Ambitious and now alwyas flawless interpretations of high Scots songs and ballads. But the best arrangements are really good. Monday Tuesday (Decca Emerald-Gem 1167 released 1977). Eighteen songs by,, for, or about children, in Gaelic and English. A glorious selection. The last of the 'first career' trilogy. At the Royal Festival Hall (Chrysalis CMR 1159 released 1977). The triumphant come-back album with its mixture of traditional and contemporary songs. Focus on Mary O'Hara (Decca doublealbum FOS 49/50 released 1978). Welcome reissue of 25 vintage tracks from the early Beltonas listed above. Some of her very best singing is here. Music speaks louder than words (Chrysalis CMR 1194 released 1978). Mixture, a little more bizarre, of traditional Gaelic and contemporary songs. At times she sounds a little tired, which isn't surprising — or is it bored? But her 'cuckoo' song, and the 'Roisin Dubh' are first class. An album of sacred and neo-religious songs, what Miss O'Hara calls her 'God Songs', is expected soon. Watch this magazine. 19