The Birds Song

The RSPB recently released a record of birdsong which managed to go to the top of the charts - a fantastic achievement.  And they've now started a Birdsong Radio - wonderful.    It is surely the biggest delight of my day to hear the birds singing in the morning and to watch them feeding in the garden.  Check it out here

On our recent trip to England and Scotland we had a morning off in the Lake District and found TheBirds Bistro :). A brilliant place to buy special foods for the birds and squirrels.  We came home loaded down.   Check it out if  you're in the area. 

And at the same time, my Tom has written a fun song called The Birds Song - a parody on immigration - have a listen - and a watch of our birds :). 

He's working on a children's book at the moment illustrated by a friend, Colum McEvoy.  I'll post some of the images in a future blog post - it will be launched at our festival here next month.   

"We may have different feathers and sing a different song

But when we sing together, the differences are gone. "

Songbirds - Bridie Gallagher

In part 3 of Songbirds the First Ladies of Irish Song, the focus is on Bridie Gallagher, the Girl from Donegal, who was the darling of the dance halls and travelled the world to play for the Irish wherever they were based.  

Bridie died in January 2012.

It was such a pleasure for me to meet Bridie in her home back in 2005

I hope you're enjoying the series so far - just a couple more to go and then they're here for as long as they're needed.  
Do drop me a line and let me know what you think...

This blog is Day 30 of my 30 day blog challenge

Songbirds - Mary O'Hara

Part Two of Songbirds the First Ladies of Irish Song features the beautiful singer and harper Mary O'Hara who was first featured on British TV in the mid 1950s and was a huge star in America and a close friend of the Clancy Brothers.
Her story is fascinating.

Thank you for all the comments about the first programme.   Margaret Barry was such a wonderful character.   In this series we tried to focus on women who sang the same songs but from a different perspective.   Margaret and Mary are poles apart.   For many people Mary O'Hara was their first introduction to Irish music and before she came to fame, the harp had virtually died out in Ireland.  

With Mary in 2005 at the World Harp Convention.

You can read more about Songbirds, the series, here.

Let me know what you think about her.

This blog is Day 23 of my 30 day blog challenge

Songbirds: Margaret Barry

Street singer Margaret Barry on stage in America

In 2005 we were very grateful that RTE (Irish National Television) took our 6 part TV series Songbirds the First Ladies of Irish Song and broadcast it. (A synopsis is available here.)

I narrated and co-produced, Tom edited and co-produced and a friend, Jimmy Hayden directed.   It was our first time attempting a TV documentary and it was an amazing experience.  Last year a small satellite station also showed the series in the UK - only viewers with Sky TV could see it though.

So I wanted to share it with everyone now - the first episode is available free through You Tube and is also on my website.


This is the first episode featuring Margaret Barry.   She was a street singer who became a big part of the British Folk Revival in the 1960s, is honoured in the Smithsonian FolkLife Museum and played concerts with Bob Dylan and Joan Baez.   Not the prettiest of singers, but she was an incredibly well loved character who was a wonderfully interesting subject to research and to document.





The next 5 episodes will come online in the coming weeks and I'll give you a notice of it here on my blog as they come up.

Margaret Barry at home in Laurencetown mid 70s

I hope you get a chance to watch - it'd be great to hear your comments.

This blog is Day 16 of Sarah Allen's 30 day blog challenge

Songbirds back on TV

I"m really excited to tell you that our TV series, Songbirds - the First Ladies of Irish Song which we made for Irish TV about 7 years ago, is going to be shown across Ireland and the UK next month.

Delia Murphy

A small satellite station , Showcase TV, are going to show the series starting on the 19th June at 9pm.   If you're based here, the station is 191 - Showcase TV, which is under the banner of Irish TV.   There are 6 programmes in total and they'll be shown for 6 weeks, Thursday nights at 9pm.

A while back I wrote a post about the series which I narrated and was involved in making.  You can read more about it here ...

I had recorded a lot of songs that were popular when my mum was young and that I learned when I was a child.   After the CD was done we realised that most of the songs had first been recorded by one woman, Delia Murphy, between the mid 1930s and the mid 1950s - and she in turn influenced countless other female (and male) singers.   To cut a very long story short, we got to make a TV programme about her life for RTE based around my songs, and the one programme suddenly became 6.   At the time I was very unsure about using my recordings rather than theirs, but from the point of view of paying out huge royalties that we couldn't afford, it made sense.  So there are guest performers working with me and recording a song that pertained to each of the women in question who all had different styles of singing, but who all in essence sang the same repertoire.
I'll tell you more about each lady as the programme comes up for screening, but for now, here's a role call of them all.

1. Delia Murphy - the first person recorded singing in her own accent
2. Bridie Gallagher - the mother of Irish Country music
3. Margaret Barry - a street singer and traveller who became a huge part of the British Folk Revival
4. Mary O'Hara - harpist and classical style singer
5. Ruby Murray - the pop singer who still holds the record for having 5 songs in the UK pop charts on the same week.
6. And the 6th programme is an overview of all their lives - sometimes this is shown first.

Mary O'Hara

Ruby Murray

Bridie Gallagher

Margaret Barry

Wow!   I'm both nervous and excited - it'll be interesting to see the response.

S is for Songbirds - the First Ladies of Irish Song

 My S song is in Irish - listen here to Seoladh na nGamhna  (which means "herding the calves" and basically talks of a young one out bringing the calves home, meets a young man and the calves go home alone!!!)

Songbirds was a TV programme that I presented for Irish TV in 2006.   

It profiled the lives of 5 influential women singers from the 30s, 40s and 50s who sang the common folk songs of the day - 

Delia Murphy, Mary O'Hara, Margaret Barry, Bridie Gallagher and Ruby Murray.

Introduction to the series


The women profiled were Delia Murphy who was the first person recorded singing in Ireland in her own accent which makes her the mother of the Irish folk music industry.  Read my blog about Delia here


Mary O'Hara was a harpist who sang similar songs but in a very classical style.   She came from Sligo, was very beautiful and was featured in many TV shows in England in the early 50s.   Mary recorded many albums with the Clancy Brothers and had a fascinating life - started recording at the age of 18, married at 19, was widowed at 21 and entered a convent very shortly afterwards where she stayed for 14 years.   When she came out again she had another hugely successful career.


Margaret Barry was a wonderfully eccentric street singer, who came from a Spanish gypsy family, who was at the start of the folk revival in the British Isles, performed with Bob Dylan and Joan Baez to name but a few and is revered as a custodian of the traditional song catalogue.

Bridie Gallagher was the mother of modern Irish country and western music.   Again she sang much the same repertoire as the previous three ladies but added a country dance beat to most of the songs.  She came from the North of Donegal and became known as the girl from Donegal.   In the 1960s she did 19 tours to America for 9 weeks at a time and brought news from home to the legions of emigrants who had left Ireland for work.    

And last but not least was Ruby Murray - a pop singer from Belfast who until very recently held the record for having the most songs in the British charts at the same time - in 1955 she had 5 songs in the Top 20 - and not even the Beatles did that.   Her crown was only lost when Michael Jackson died and all his albums went back into the charts.  Ruby was gorgeous and I had the pleasure of working with her back in the 1980s when I was stage manager in one of the local theatres.  Her biggest hit was Softly Softly - Frank Sinatra asked to work with her, but sadly after 10 months at the top she spent the rest of her life working clubs and small theatres.   She died in the early 90s.

You can read more in depth information about all these women here.

The Queen of Connemara

The Queen of Connemara - Delia Murphy

If I Were A Blackbird was one of Delia's best known songs - hear a little bit of it here

Delia Murphy (1902 - 1971) was born and raised in Co. Mayo, and made her first recordings in 1938 - The Spinning Wheel and 3 Lovely Lasses from Bannion coming from the earliest batch. She became Ireland's first and arguably greatest musical ambassador and her contribution to the folk revival of the 50s and 60s was immeasurable. Her simple ballad style and endearing presentation on stage made her an almost overnight success on radio. Married to diplomat Tom Kiernan, Delia travelled the world, finally settling in Canada, only returning to live in Ireland in 1969.

With Tom, they were posted to the Vatican during the War years where she was involved in many escapades involving the escape of allied soldiers - later Tom became the first Irish Ambassador to Australia and Delia brought back many songs that later moved into the Irish Tradition. 

Among here many recordings was a song called the Queen of Connemara about a boat ... and this was where her nickname came from.

Delia's website is maintained by her grandson, the uilleann piper Ronan Browne at  www.deliamurphy.com

Delia Murphy was without doubt the single most influential singer to have recorded traditional songs in Ireland and she influenced a generation of singers that followed her. 

I made a series of documentaries for RTE television and with the help of guests from the various strands of Irish music we reconstructed the biographies of Delia and the other first Irish ladies of song who were recording in and around the 1950s.  The series was called Songbirds and I will write about it in a later post.    Our newer recordings of these well known songs (many of which I've shared here through these A to Z posts) is available through my website at www.filcampbell.com along with more information and a DVD of the series if you'd like to read more about her and the Songbirds series. 

Here's my version of If I Were A Blackbird

The Spinning Wheel

For quite a while I've been wanting to write blogs about well known women's Irish songs and here's No. 1 in what will hopefully become a series.

The Spinning Wheel (John Frances Waller)

Listen to : Fil Campbell – The Spinning Wheel
From the TV series - Songbirds - the First Ladies of Irish Song

Mellow the moonlight to shine is beginning
Close by the window young Eileen is spinning
Bent o’er the fire her blind grandmother sitting
Is crooning and moaning and drowsily knitting

When I first learned this as a little girl I pictured this beautiful young girl gazing longingly out of the window, dressed of course in a perfect long skirt, with long hair and an angelic face!!   The old lady was knowingly sitting in the corner  ....   

I can still see the sash window, the moon shining, the wood outside where the young lovers ended up walking ...  Isn't it funny the pictures that stay in  your head with a song:))

Delia Murphy

The Spinning Wheel is one of the most famous Irish folksongs  and was one of the first songs I learned as a child.

The Spinning Wheel was written in the late 1800s by John Frances Waller (1909-1894) and it's said that the melody is actually French, although it quickly became known as an Irish song.   Really, it was a parlour song that was part of the Anglo Irish tradition, nothing at all to do with traditional Irish music, but more to do with an idealised quaint way of life.  It quickly became a favourite for young girls to sing and instantly brings back memories of a gentler way of life.

Well known singers of the song
It was one of the songs recorded by Delia Murphy in her first recording session in 1936, one of the songs that made her a star and she in turn was the person who made the song popular.

Later, it became the first international hit for Mary O'Hara, although she didn't even want to record it.   Delia sang it at her husband's inauguration as the first Irish Ambassador to Australia and she said that if it's sung correctly you should feel the spinning wheel turning.  In our TV series - Songbirds, the First Ladies of Irish Song - it was the only song that we found that had been recorded by all the featured ladies - Ruby Murray, Margaret Barry, Bridie Gallagher, Delia Murphy and Mary O'Hara - and they all sang it in very different styles.

Mellow the moonlight to shine is beginning
Close by the window young Eileen is spinning
Bent o’er the fire her blind grandmother sitting
Is crooning and moaning and drowsily knitting

Eileen a chara I hear someone tapping
Tis the ivy dear mother against the glass flapping
Eily I surely hear someone sighing
Tis the sound mother dear of the autumn winds dying

Merrily cheerily noiselessly whirring
Swings the wheel spins the reel while the foot’s stirring
Sprightly and brightly and airily ringing
Thrills the sweet voice of the young maiden singing

There’s a form at the casement the form of her true love
And he whispers with face bent “I’m waiting for you love
Get up on the stool through the lattice step lightly
And we’ll rove in the grove with the moon shining brightly”

The maid shakes her head on her lip lays her fingers
Steals up from the seat, longs to go and yet lingers
A frightened glance turned on her drowsy grandmother
Puts one foot on the stool spins the wheel with the other

Lazily, easily swings now the wheel round
Slowly and lowly is heard now the reel sound
Noiseless and light through the lattice above her
The maid creeps then leaps to the arms of her lover

Slower and slower and slower the wheel spins
Lower and lower and lower the reel rings
E’er the reel and the wheel stop their ringing and moving
Through the grove the young lovers by moonlight are roving

******
The songwriter: 
John Francis Waller (1810 - 1894) was born in Limerick, educated at Trinity College, Dublin and was called to the Irish Bar in 1833. He became a contributor to and ultimately editor of the Dublin University Magazine, usually writing under the pseudonym of "Jonathan Freke Slingsby"

He published several volumes of poems and also wrote popular songs, including Cushla Ma Chree, The Spinning Wheel and Song of the Glass. He was responsible for the explanatory notes and a life of the author in a new edition of "Gulliver's Travels" written by Dean Jonathan Swift. 

Connected
If you're interested in spinning as an art I found this fascinating blog from a lady in Scotland.

Have you any memories of the song?  

If I Were A Blackbird - the start of a journey

I was standing in the middle of the floor at a singaround  during the  Holmfirth Folk Festival  back in the mid 90s - Tom and I had just met a bunch of lovely Yorkshire singers and I was blown away by the concept of the singaround which was something that I'd never encountered before.  I sang "If I Were A Blackbird" and afterwards Maggie Boyle told me that it was a Delia Murphy song.  I'd only vaguely heard of Delia before that, but I'm fascinated by the story of songs so I started researching her and storing away the bits of useless information that I found.

Fast forward a few years to the Tron Folk Club in Edinburgh and I met Alex Burns - sadly Alex is no longer with us - but that chance encounter changed my life in ways that I couldn't see at the time.  I sang "The Connemara Shore" and asked the audience if any of them had ever come across it before.  Alex thought he had it in his collection of gramophone records and several months later a cassette recording of a selection of his gramophone collection landed on my doormat.  And there, was my proper introduction to Delia and her songs.   

All of a sudden my lonely "If I Were A Blackbird" - or is it If I Was A Blackbird"? had a home and I could remember all the dozens of songs that my mother sang that inevitably were way too uncool for a teenager so I'd filed them in the "not worth considering if you want to be Linda Ronstadt" category...!!

The song became the first one I recorded when I decided to do an album of songs from my childhood in 2004 - it was also the first one that Delia recorded in her very first recording session in 1936.  She was the wife of the Irish minister in London and in diplomatic circles she was mixing with the arts and cultural leaders as well as politicians and diplomats.  John McCormack was a friend of hers as was Margaret Burke Sheridan and when the denizens of the recording industry starting looking outwards from London to find suitable projects to record someone suggested Delia - she was the life and soul of the embassy parties, playing piano and leading singsongs with her vast repertoire of Mayo songs.  So she went in for her very first session in 1936 and recorded 6 songs and became the first Irish person, male or female, to be recorded singing in her own accent, a fact that makes her recordings the beginnings of Irish folk music as we know it from these islands and an early native addition to the work being recorded in America by the McNulty Family and Flanagan Brothers among others.  

In our house we sang If I Was A Blackbird - probably our colloquialisation of the correct grammar - nowadays I find it difficult to be proper and sing "were" .. but here are the words as I sing them.  I also sing the chorus after each verse.   I've read somewhere that the song dates back to the 1700s and there are various theories as to who the Blackbird is or was - some say it was Bonny Prince Charlie as he was sometimes referred to in this way.  However most often it is considered a Dublin street song and started appearing in books from the 1920s onward.  There are interesting discussions about it at Mudcat

If I Were A Blackbird (traditional)

recorded by me on the Songbirds CD  (Glenshee Music GSR001) - available from CD Baby or my shop at www.filcampbell.com

If I was a blackbird, I’d whistle and sing

And I’d follow the ship that my true love sailed in

And on the top rigging I’d there build my nest

And I’d pillow my head on his lily white breast

I am a young maiden and my story is sad

For once I was courted by a brave sailor lad

He courted me truly by night and by day

But now he has left me and gone far away

He promised to take me to Donnybrook Fair

To buy me red ribbon to tie up my hair

And when he returns I will greet him with joy

And I’ll take to my bosom my dear sailor boy

His parents they chide and will not agree

That I and my sailor boy married should be

But when he returns from the ocean so wide

He’ll take me and make me his own loving bride

If I was a blackbird, I’d whistle and sing

And I’d follow the ship that my true love sailed in

And on the top rigging I’d there build my nest

And I’d pillow my head on his lily white breast