Traditional music star John Doyle tells David Hennessy about his new album, how his uncle’s currach story inspired one of the songs and busking on the streets of London for enough money to get the boat home.
John Doyle is one of the most influential musicians in Irish traditional music. He first came to international prominence as a founding member of Irish American super-group Solas in the 1990s, and went on to serve as band leader for the Joan Baez band.
He currently plays as a trio with John McCusker and Michael McGoldrick, two more names of repute on the trad scene and with the Irish super-group, Usher’s Island that also includes big names like Andy Irvine, Paddy Glackin and Donal Lunny.
The guitarist is about to return with his latest solo offering, The Path of Stones that borrows its title from a WB Yeats poem and is the follow up to 2011’s Shadow and Light. Cathy Jordan of Dervish is a guest on the album.
John Doyle told The Irish World where the album’s title came from: “It was one of Yeats’ early poems, He Mourns For The Change That Has Come Upon Him And His Beloved, And Longs For The End Of The World. It was a little long for a title,” he laughs.
“So I ended up taking a little part of that poem and turning it into a song, reorganising it a fair bit. It actually bears very little resemblance to the poem now. I enjoy singing that,it’s nice and it seemed like the right title for the album at the time.”
John was nominated for a Grammy in 2010 for his collaboration with fiddler Liz Carroll on Double Play.
His collaboration with Karan Casey, Exiles Return, won him critical acclaim and solidified his reputation as a world class interpreter of traditional songs.
The stories of Irish emigrants have often cropped up in John’s songwriting. He wrote about his great grandfather who was on the torpedoed S.S. Arabic in 1915, famine victims on the coffin ships to Quebec as well as Confederate and Union Irish fighting against one another at Fredericksburg.
“Everyone has theses stories in their family and they rarely come out. You use them in these songs. the format that we have in traditional song is a great way to express it and to tell stories like that, never mind stories from my family but also stories from historical events that need to be re-encapsulated, that sometimes go missing. I am a history buff. I have a stream of little interesting titbits that I get from reading the last few years and then I formulate songs based on that. It’s mainly about Irish people and Irish emigrants because I am one and it has a tendency to go that direction because of the link of an Irish guy or an Irish woman heading over and changing their life completely and trying to imagine what they’ve seen or what they’ve done in their lives.”
Can we expect similar tales from this forthcoming collection? “There’s one or two like that. I suppose it’s a little bit more reflective, a little bit different from the last albums.
“There’s one song about Irish people going over to Sutter Creeek in the gold rush and a fair few based around Sligo direction. I was born in Dublin but my family were from Sligo and we used to go there on holidays all the time.
“Teelin Harbour is actually about my uncle. My uncle lived in Teelin and he was a currach man. He used to bring us out fishing on Sliabh Liag. I always remember him telling a story, he would say his worst time as a currach man was going out to sea and then when he would come back, at certain times the wind would be whipping from the cliff out towards the sea and themore that he pulled to shore, the further out he would go out to sea.
“You could imagine the strain he would have of trying to get in to shore. He says his most frightening thing was when it would start to darken and he would start seeing the lights of home but he was still getting further away. I always remembered that so that’s what that song is about.
“The Rambler from Clare is a song from the 1798 rebellion about a roving rake who eventually joins the United Irishman during the 1798 rebellion,The Year of the French. In the song, the rambler from Clare eventually escapes to America. I honestly cannot remember where I heard this song first. I changed the melody a little from the original. Some say this is a Northern song and the ‘Clare’ they speak of are townlands in Co. Tyrone, but I tend to believe it’s a Co. Clare song.”
Having lived outside of Ireland for many years, how has John been struck by some of the changes the country has gone through? “It’s changed, absolutely. I left in the early 90s so there’s been the peace agreement up the north. That’s one huge thing. The recession, 9/11 even affected there. All of these different things have changed narratives so there’s massive changes.
“Going back and seeing housing structures and developments in this little village where I was- There used to be 160 people all told, now I think there’s nearly 800 or 900 people there. That’s a big change, the estates coming in and then the abandoned estates in different places that were done by developers who just thought they would make a quick buck. Then they’re gone and they’re now rotting so it’s more like a gulag. It’s terrible but there’s also great things.”
John lives in Tennessee in the United States and has seen the homelessnes spiral out of control there just as it has in Ireland and the UK.
“I’m no stranger to it over here. There’s always been homeless and it feels like a generalised thing these days. It’s sad to see that in Nashville, where I am now, it’s actually more and more in the last few years. It seems like the richer the place becomes, the more homeless there are. That’s an interesting thing to see. I don’t know why that is.
“I know the housing thing is a serious thing in Dublin even for college students.
“If you go to LA and San Francisco, you’ll see what they call tent cities now. That’s where there are people living, going to work everyday that live in tents and they can’t afford anything else. I think it’s disastrous. This country is meant to be the biggest and the brightest in the world.”
John has played in London countless times over the years.
“Over the years I’ve grown more and more fond of it and I love going there now. It has that same buzz that New York does for me. It’s just full of life and full of things to do.
“We go to the Irish Cultural Centre a lot there in Hammersmith and they’ve always taken good care of us when we’ve played there.
“All the sessions that have been there over the years, since the 40s and 50s and before that too. I know it was big in the 50s and 60s when all the workers came over from Ireland to work on the roads and things, hard time they had too.
“It seems to be a lot different these days. There seems to be a brightening up of the relationship between English and Irish in London.
“The first time I landed in London was after a tour in Brittany. My brother was living in Seven Sisters and I was busking near Denmark Street.
“That was my first entry into London life even though I didn’t live there but I kind of hung there for a few weeks. I remember that. I busked because I didn’t have enough money to get back over to Ireland. I made enough money over a few days to get the ferry over,” he laughs.
“The reason why I didn’t have any money was because I had gotten off tour in France and I had a wedge of cash in my pocket. I went to Denmark Street and I bought a guitar, the first good guitar that I ever had and I was broke after that.”
The Path of Stones by John Doyle is out now.
