The Remarkable story of Margaret Barry Updated

Описание: Slight edit of previously posted programme. If you have already watched, no need to repeat (unless you really loved it!).
The Remarkable Story of
Maggie Barry (1917-1989)
Bob Dylan called her his favourite folk singer. Finbar Furey loved her distinctive voice. Christy Moore says she still inspires him. Van Morrison talks about “a great soul singer” when her name is mentioned. And a new generation of Ireland’s leading folk performers literally sing her praise for the inspiration she has bequeathed them. And they include the Mary Wallopers, Lisa O’Neill. Brian Kennedy, to name but a few.
At a time when Irish traditional music might have been heading for extinction, strangled and suffocated by Irish government policies like The Public Dance Halls Act of 1935, exiled musicians kept the flame burning, resulting in a vibrant Irish scene in New York and post war London. The uncompromising voice and raucous banjo of Margaret Barry were at its formidable heart.
Mary Margaret Cleary was born on 23rd January, 1917 in Cork, left home around 1933, aged just 16, initially leaving on a bicycle, and eventually living in a traditional horse-drawn caravan. She travelled throughout Ireland, favouring the border counties on the eastern seaboard. She adopted the persona of an Irish traveller and changed her name to Maggie Barry (taking the surname of her son-in-law)

She married Charles Power, and they had one daughter, Nora, who was born in Mullingar in 1935. Nora later married Paddy Barry, and the young couple settled initially for a while in Creagganbane, Crossmaglen, in South Armagh, and eventually in Lawrencetown, Co Down. Maggie stayed with her daughter and son-in-law intermittently. For reasons unknown even to her family, Maggie Power, née Cleary, took the surname of her son-in-law, and became known to the world thereafter as Maggie Barry. Alan Lomax, the influential ethnomusicologist and Peter Kennedy, the English folklorist recorded her for the BBC in Dundalk and London. A few years later she joined forces with Michael Gorman, (1895 -1970) an outstanding fiddle player from south Sligo.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Gorman and countless other young men from the impoverished west of Ireland, sought a living and livelihood in the rebuilding of post-war England. They attended to the boredom and loneliness of their enforced exile by seeking solace with other traditional musicians, initially in the pubs that catered for the burgeoning Irish immigrants in north London, around Camden and Kentish Towns. These lonely exiles relieved the tedium of the long weekends by
gathering in pubs, and, initially apprehensively, producing their instruments and creating what was to become the uniquely Irish phenomenon of pub sessions. In a handful of bars, clustered mainly Robert ‘Bob’ Thompson, Maggie’s paternal grandfather. in North London, musicians like Gorman, Willie Clancy, John Vesey, Tony McMahon, Bobby Casey and Martin, entered the •flamboyant and irreverent, self-styled Traveller and Queen of the Gypsies, Maggie Barry. Together, Gorman and Barry were the musical hosts of at least four weekly sessions in the Bedford Arms, Camden Town from the mid- 1950s, earning a steady and sufficient income. Initially landlords were reluctant to pay musicians, but Barry forced the pace by doing the rounds of the pub with a collection bag after their performances, eventually embarrassing publicans into paying musicians.

For the next few years, they dominated the Irish Traditional music scene in London, with many young recently arrived musicians looking to listen to and play alongside the legendary Gorman. The Sligo fiddle player’s reputation and repertoire was the initial main attraction, but Barry’s skilful, and to west of Ireland exiles, new and exotic 5-string banjo accompaniment, and her increasingly popular ballads, became an attraction that equalled and complimented Gorman’s status and attraction.

A young Dubliner named Luke Kelly, recently arrived off the boat from his native city, was taking note. While the folk revival of the 1950’s was getting underway in both Britain and Ireland, Barry was emerging into something of a cult icon, encouraged by her self-proclaimed Gypsy image. Reg Hall played piano at some of those early sessions. His recognition by TG4, an award of the Gradam Cheoil Musicians Awards in 2009 was for the lifelong contribution to Irish Traditional music, and his recordings of musicians of London sessions in the 1950’s.

Part 2 of The Remarkable Story of Margaret Barry to follow. Subscribe on
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