Folk Of Ages

Jim O’Donnell is a man who, although he didn’t see it himself for years, was an influence on most of the musicians who came into contact with him. Although hardly a household name, he inspires plaudits from some of the most respected folk and traditional musicians in the country - Niall Toner, with whom he played for a time in the ‘60s; Jimmy Crowley and Jimmy MacCarthy who both played at the folk club he ran in Cork, and Donagh Long. So why, at the fine old age of 67 now, has he finally come to make a record?

“I retired two years ago, but I suppose my story goes back to when I was in my twenties,” he says. “I was torn between making furniture and making music. I was in a group in Cork – Paddy’s Goatskin and String Band – with Niall Toner, and Annie Briggs, the English singer joined later. We didn’t play very much, maybe only twenty gigs in total, but we had a great sound. It was like an extension of that Sweeney’s Men sound, but the fiddle gave it a different dimension. When we split up it left me rudderless. There wasn’t anything else in Cork at that time musically that I wanted to get into and I had a young family to bring up. I left Cork City, I left the civil service and I set up a furniture business which I ran for years, it got big, employing around fifty people at the time I retired.
“It was only in the last ten years or so though, that I realised I was an influence on other singers. Jimmy MacCarthy who sang at the Group Theatre, and Jimmy Crowley would always say to me, ‘When are you going to make a record?’ And Donagh Long lives a stone’s throw away from me now. His studio is the Spain Tower Studios, and I can literally see it from my house. We have a thing in West Cork that you never pass anyone. If you meet someone on the road you would always wind down the window and talk, and every time we would meet on the road Donagh would say ‘Why don’t you come down and take a look at the studio, see what you think?’ It’s a beautiful studio, and well, one thing led to another...”
Was it difficult to decide what kind of shape to put on the record, having taken so long?
“Well, in many ways the record is reflective of the songs that I would sing for myself. Donagh provides most of the accompaniment, but there’s a bit of a schizophrenic aspect to it as well, because about half the songs on it are unaccompanied. They’re mostly old songs I’ve sung for years. About 12 years ago I went to America - my daughter was living in California and I went to visit her. Before I went I had said that there were two things I wanted to do there: get a new guitar and get a new song. Marla Fibish [mandolin player with San Francisco trad outfit Three Mile Stone] had this song ‘Bohemian Dreams’. It’s adapted from a Robert Service poem. When I heard the opening lines: ‘Because my overcoat’s in pawn/I choose to take my glass/Within a little bistro on/The rue du Montparnasse’, there was something magical in it that caught me.”
How did he narrow down the song selection?
“My father was Scottish, which I’ve alway maintains gives me a licence to sing Scottish songs. My parents split up when I was young but he would come back every year. He didn’t really sing Scottish traditional songs, but one year he sang this song ‘Lizzie Lindsey’. He probably didn’t think it was a great song, but I did. My brother was a singer too and a member of the local FCA Pipe Band. I still go to the World Championships in Glasgow Green every year. My style – if I had one to speak of, would be that of a pub singer. I started going to road bowling with my brother and it would always end up in the pub afterwards. A lot of the singers would sing cowboy songs but occasionally someone would sing something like ‘The Rocks of Bann’. I remember then when the folk revival came, it made me proud to be Irish. The record is a fairly good representation of the music I’ve made through my life. Now though, I’m finding singing a very emotional experience. I feel the songs much more, so much so that I can barely sing the song sometimes.

In a Garden Walking... is out now.