Cuppa Tea with Len Graham

Episode 32 – Cuppa Tea with Len Graham: Antrim singer Len Graham on old songs and friends who sang them
This Irish Music Stories episode aired August 13, 2019
https://shannonheatonmusic.com/episode-32-cuppa-tea-with-len-graham

Transcript edited by Robert Suchor

Speakers, in order of appearance
>> Shannon Heaton: flute player, singer, composer, teacher, and host of Irish Music Stories 
>> Len Graham: County Antrim born traditional singer specializing in songs from Ulster
>> Nigel Heaton: young announcer for Irish Music Stories, and co-producer of this story

_____

>> Shannon: I’m Shannon Heaton. And this is Irish Music Stories, the show about traditional music, and the bigger stories behind it …

[ Music: “The Wheels of the World,” from Do Me Justice

Artist: Len Graham ]

… like why Antrim-born singer Len Graham bothered to learn old songs from his neighbors — even after the Beatles and the Rolling Stones took over the Irish airwaves: 

>> Len: The beauty of some of those melodies grabbed me from an early age. Whatever it was in them.

>> Shannon: Len’s early diet of songs at home whet his appetite for traditional singing. But not everybody has a singing mom and granny:

>> Len: It’s a matter of the spark being — whatever ignites that spark. I just happened to be lucky that there were two women that were compulsive singers. 

Regardless of what age people are, I think music is one of those things that if you get into it, it really takes over. That’s just been my life. And every one of those songs usually has a story and a face and history and information, you know?

[ Music: “Meaning of Life,” from Production Music Made for Irish Music Stories

Artist/Composer: Matt Heaton]

>> Shannon: When Len and I spoke at the Swannanoa Gathering in Asheville, North Carolina, he told me stories about growing up around songs. And he told me the stories behind some of those songs.

He does this all the time — onstage, at lunch. But not everybody gets to hear the apertoire story… or the rooster story.

Before I tuck into these special Len Graham tales, my son Nigel and I want to thank our sponsors:

>> Nigel: Thank you to Hatao, Chris Murphy, Justin Anderson, Lynn Hayes, BrotherHug, David Vaughan, Brian Benscoter, Joe Garrett, and Gerry Corr. 

>> Shannon: Thank you for donating this month, and helping me build the show. To support future editions, please head to IrishMusicStories.org. And thank you.

So here we go, traditional songs with Len Graham … and the bigger stories behind them:

>> Len: I started off singing, my mother said I was singing from the word go. Like, she was singing, my grandmother was singing, my father was singing, although he was in Glasgow at this stage. He didn’t come back ‘til I was probably about 5 or 6. He was working over there, you know. So I had two women who were constantly singing, and I would be singing along with them.

I’d be hearing all sorts of big songs, wee songs

[ Music: “Fair Rosa,” and “Early in the Morning AKA When I Was Young,” sung live in the Lounge for Irish Music Stories

Artist: Len Graham]

[ Music: “Chimes,” from Production Music Made for Irish Music Stories

Artist/Composer: Matt Heaton]

>> Shannon: And it wasn’t just mom and gran who filled Len with songs:

 >> Len: There was a very popular program on in the 50s brought about by an American called Alan Lomax. So that was broadcast on the wireless every Sunday. 

>> Shannon: American folklorist Alan Lomax took a trip to Dublin in 1951. And just one night of songs and conversation in the Ennis family kitchen led to “As I Roved Out,” a weekly radio program that ran for five years. Every Sunday, Len and his family tuned in to recordings of singers that Seamus Ennis made around most of Ireland, and also Sean O’Boyle’s recordings from the 9 counties of Ulster; Hamish Henderson’s songs from Scotland; and Peter Kennedy’s recordings made around the islands, England, and Wales.

>> Len: We loved this program as there was a local woman that sang the signature song every Sunday, Sarah Makem, Tommy Makem’s mother, sang that lovely “As I roved out…”

[ Music: “As I Roved Out” excerpt, sung live in the Lounge for Irish Music Stories

Artist: Len Graham ]

[ Music: “As I Roved Out,” from The Heart Is True

Artist: Sarah Makem]

>> Shannon: When the show ended, it was replaced by a program called Family Favorites. 

>> Len: I must say, it wasn’t a family favorite at our home.

>> Shannon: And then Irish radio started playing more and more rock and roll.

>> Len: I missed out on all of that Revolution that went on, with the Beatles and Rolling Stones. My ear had been attracted to the older stuff. 

At that time back in the ‘60s there were still ceili houses. We still could drop in with all sorts of people for sessions of music and song, you know?  That only died out like probably in the ‘70s, that generation started dying off, that whole tradition, television and things sort of did away with that old tradition of dropping in, particularly during the winter nights, you know? 

>> Shannon: When his uncle gave him a box of newspaper clippings, Len was able to learn more complete versions of songs that he’d heard during those winter nights of dropping in:

>> Len: A man called Sam Henry published a song every week in the local newspaper from 1923 to 1939. So my uncle, my mother’s older brother, gave me – I was still in my teens, young teens, actually – he gave me a shoebox of cuttings that he had made.  Not the whole collection, but a good number of them.  And that collection was eventually published in 1990, but I was able to source that earlier from, well at least from the early ‘60s. So that was also a useful resource. And as much as I loved the singers, many of the singers I’d be calling with were elderly, so they mightn’t remember a whole song, but they might have a verse or two verses, I could go to Sam Henry, and with a bit of luck it might be in there, and be able to fill out the versions. 

>> Shannon: So Sam Henry had published these ballads and songs in his weekly column, and well before you could go to Sam Henry’s book to find these songs, well, you’d have to dig through a box of newspaper clippings.  Now here’s me picking up my copy of Sam Henry’s Songs of the People.

[Sound of pages being ruffled]

It’s bound as a book.  There are over 800 songs in here.  And on the cover, in the lower left-hand corner, there’s a picture of a guy with a horn:

>> Len: Oh, that man’s John McGrath, was a neighbor of ours. Sam got one song off of him, a land league song from the 19th century, called the “Money Grand Pig Hunt.”  And I said “You didn’t give any more songs to Sam Henry?”

And John said “Oh Jesus, when we found out what his real job was …”

“What was his real job?” says I.

“He was an excise man! Working for the government. And at that time my da was making poitín in the barn, and we didn’t want to bring him around the place. No, one song was enough.”

>> Shannon: There was also singing at the gatherings of the Antrim and Derry Fiddlers Association, which is still meeting, as it has for about 67 years. 

[ Music: “Celtic Grooves,” from Production Music Made for Irish Music Stories 

Artist/Composer: Matt Heaton]

>> Len: Occasionally between the fiddling they would call up a singer, and I would hear songs being sung. I remember the first time that I heard an old fiddler up in the Antrim and Derry – I was only about 12 at the time – singing Western Winds. I thought, gee I have to get that song. But I wasn’t able to get it, because he lived miles away from us. Master Hugh Carson – he was one of the fiddlers – I did finally track it down. He had died in the meantime, but luckily one of his neighbors had learned it from him, and I got it off him. It’s a Robert Burns song, but I didn’t know at the time. Burns, when he was 16, his father sent him to learn maths – mathematics – up in Kirkoswald in Ayrshire, and he fell in love.  One of his early love affairs was with a young girl called Peggy Thompson. And he wrote one of the most beautiful love songs you could ever imagine.

[ Music: “Now Westlin Winds” (AKA Western Winds), sung live in the Lounge for Irish Music Stories

Artist: Len Graham]

>> Shannon: Lovely.

>> Len: There you go.

[ Music: “Little Bird Lullaby,” from Production Music Made for Irish Music Stories

Artist/Composer: Matt Heaton]

>> Shannon: “The gory pinion!” [a line from the song]

>> Len: Yeah, he was a poet alright.

>> Shannon: Pinion is what connects the feathers?  And pinion is also a shackle.

>> Len: Yeah.

>> Shannon: OK, this song; “Now Westlin Winds”, or the Irish version “Western Winds”, it was written by Robert Burns in 1775. If Len had known that, he could have tracked it down in a library. But that’s not usually how folk songs travel. People hear songs. They fall in love with them. They pursue them.

Like when I first heard the song I had to learn it, and I went to a bunch of different sources.  You know, there are different versions out there.  And the line that really knocked me over was:

Thus every kind their pleasure find
The savage and the tender
Some social join some leagues combine
Some solitary wander.

[ Music: “John’s Theme,” from Production Music Made for Irish Music Stories

Artist/Composer: Matt Heaton ]

I mean, it wouldn’t have meant as much if I had just read it. But hearing the different versions and piecing it all together for me, that’s what gives the song so much more power.  Yeah. 

So who knows, maybe if Len had simply been given the Burns words, and hadn’t had to chase them down … well, maybe the song would have had less sway for him. Regardless, Len didn’t just learn songs at the Antrim and Derry Fiddlers Association. 

He began singing songs and passing them on.

>> Len: Eventually they started calling me up to sing, to give the fiddlers a break. And it was at one of these, in ’63, that I was called up to sing, and sang one of my grandmother’s songs.

[ Music: “The Moorlough Shore,” sung live in the Lounge for Irish Music Stories

Artist: Len Graham ]

>> Len: That Moorlough I sing is up in north Antrim, up in the Glens of Antrim, between Fair Head and Torr Head. It’s a lovely, beautiful little bay.  And at that gathering of Antrim and Derry fiddlers – that was in Dunminning, I’d say, Ballymena – one of the fiddlers came over to me and asked me for that song. And I got the address, and a few days later I came around. And that was my introduction to Joe Holmes. So that friendship began then and ended when Joe died in 1978, so we had 15 great years going around and having fun, all over the place.

[ Music: “The Girl that Broke My Heart,” from Celtic Mouth Music

Artists: Joe Holmes & Len Graham ]

 >> Shannon: Len travelled with his friend and Mentor Joe Holmes all over Ireland. And he introduced Joe to musicians he’d met as a teen, backpacking around to various Fleadhs and gatherings. 

>> Len: I remember taking him down to meet Denis Murphy, way down in Kerry, the Sliabh Luachra district. You would have thought that going from the Glens of Antrim down to here, a distance of over 300 miles, not far by your standards, but by Irish standards. And hearing Joe fiddling along with Denis Murphy, tunes they had in common with different names. In many cases Joe had the right title. Denis would say I’m gonna play you Paidraig O’Keefe’s “Farewell to Whiskey”. Oh I have that one. What do you call it, Joe? Oh, that’s Niel Gow’s “Farewell to Whiskey”. Joe was right, it is Neil Gow’s. Because his manuscripts are all available you know. 

[ Music: “Farewell to Whiskey,” from The Star Above the Garter

Artists: Denis Murphy & Julia Clifford ]

So there were quite a number of tunes then, there’s all these different names, but they’re the same tunes.  It just shows you how much coming and going there was, you know?

>> Shannon: Fiddler Joe Holmes knew lots of tunes — in the Irish tradition, tunes are the ones, usually, without words. But Joe also knew songs, like “The Rambling Irishman”:

>> Len:  Joe’s “The Rambling Irishman”, he could only remember a verse and a chorus when he first sang it to me in the early ‘60s. When he was 12, his brother Harry came back from the First World War with a fiddle for him. From France. And Joe went down to a neighbor to get lessons. He went down to a neighbor, Willie Clark, to get fiddle tunes. This would be … he was born in 1906, so this would be the early 1920s. He went down to Willie Clark, an elderly neighbor, and he was a fiddler and a singer, and he picked up some, but he could only remember one verse and a refrain of “The Rambling Irishman.” 

So it turned out then that Willie had died in the ‘30s, but his daughter had emigrated to Belfast. And Joe got her address and I ended up in the ‘60s there, and got another three verses, gave the song to Cathal McConnell, and he recorded it on the first Boys of the Lough album. Dick Gaughan recorded it. Dolores Keane recorded it on the first De Danaan album.

[ Music: “Rambling Irishman,” from The Best of DeDannan

Artist: DeDannan ]

>> Shannon: This song that Joe Holmes got from his old neighbor … and taught to Len … who learned the extra verses from the neighbor’s daughter, well, this song had travelled well beyond County Antrim: 

>> Len: And lo and behold it turns up in the Ozarks. You’ll be able to look it up if you look under the name Bertha Lauderdale. 

[ Music: “New York Bay,” from Max Hunter Collection #455 (c/o Missouri State University, Duane G. Meyer Library)

Artist: Bertha Lauderdale]

>> Shannon: Bertha Lauderdale in Arkansas learned it from her dad, and she called it “New York Bay” when she sang the song for Max Hunter in 1961.

>> Len: Max Hunter was an electrical salesman and got one of the first reel-to-reel tape recorders in the late ‘50s. And was going around selling probably vacuum cleaners and things. And when he was there, have you got any songs? And he’d record them with this new-fangled tape recorder. It’s great to listen to some of those singers, some great versions.

>> Shannon: These songs of the people — they travel. And there have been amazing travel agents—like Max Hunter with the reel-to-reel recorder in his vacuum cleaner case…. and Sam Henry and his weekly newspaper column… and Seamus Ennis and the “As I Roved Out” collective… 

But the real porters of these songs are the people who sing them. And share them. People like Bertha Lauderdale, Sarah Makem, Elizabeth Cronin, Len Graham, Joe Holmes… and Eddie Butcher.

>> Len:  Eddie Butcher was another great character who had a huge repertoire. Having said that, I took Joe to this big gathering that happened every Friday night in Dublin, in the Traditions Club, in Slattery’s, upstairs, it ran from the ‘60s right through to the mid-‘70s probably. And it was like a who’s who. If you went through the list of people who performed there it was unbelievable, you wouldn’t believe it. They all seemed to be going through there. But I was down one time with Joe and Eddie. I’m downstairs getting a couple of drinks for the two lads, bringing them on a tray upstairs. And I overheard two Dubs at the bar, “God those men down from the North, great men, Len Graham and Joe Holmes and that man Eddie Butcher — great name!” And one of them says “Eddie Butcher, that man has a huge apertoire of songs!”

>> Shannon: Hahaha! Does that make his voice loud?

When Len wasn’t performing his growing repertoire of songs with Joe, he was singing on his own:

>> Len: I was asked to come over for the bicentennial year…

>> Shannon: 1976, your first time in America? 

>> Len: Yeah, for the Irish American Cultural Institute — it was very intensive. It took me a few months to get over it. I was young and foolish at the time. I’m old and stupid now. But then I was young and foolish, you know? You know the game. Funny, some of the people … I was the only peasant, I think. Like you had the honorable Desmond Guinness doing Georgian architecture. Rory de Valera doing archeology, he was a lecturer in archeology, son of the president Éamon de Valera. All sorts of very important people on that tour. 

>> Shannon: And yourself!

>> Len: Well, I was a peasant. [Laughter]

>> Shannon: So you came over with all of them.

>> Len: It was brilliant. Just mind blowing for somebody who hadn’t been out of Ireland very much.  I’d been over to Scotland and England a wee bit, but nothing … and seeing so much of it, up and down every day in a bloody plane, it just was mind blowing, and meeting all these people, you know

>> Shannon: Shortly after that big U.S. tour, the Smithsonian Institute invited Len to return to America, this time with Joe: 

[ Music: “Hometown Lullaby,” from Production Music Made for Irish Music Stories

Artist: Matt Heaton (guitar) ]

>> Len: Joe was supposed to come out for the Smithsonian thing along with me, but he wasn’t feeling great. That was ‘76, and he died in ‘78. So I think he had had a few wee flutters with the heart and didn’t want to chance the journey, but we were asked out to that. And I’d been out with the Irish American thing for 3 weeks, which nearly killed me, so I knew what was involved, you know?

>> Shannon: This is from Len and Joe’s last album together, After Dawning, which came out in 1978.

[ Music: “The Parting Glass,” from After Dawning

Artists: Joe Holmes & Len Graham]

>> Shannon: I started listening to Len Graham in 1983, his solo albums Do Me Justice and Ye Lovers All. 

[ Music: “Ye Lovers All,” from Ye Lovers All

Artist: Len Graham]

When Len wasn’t doing his own thing, he travelled around with the band Skylark; made an album with Fermanagh singer and flute player Cathal McConnell; and teamed up with John Campbell from Armagh. John was a singer and gifted storyteller.  John and Len performed and also did a lot of school programs, bringing kids together in the North of Ireland:

>> Len:  We were working in a very divided area in Portadown. And we were working for several months, and then brought them together for a big concert in the town hall in Portadown. Parents and everybody were there, and great all hugging one another. John Campbell, one of the best storytellers that ever came out of Ireland was working with me. 

[ Music: “Bb Intro Groove,” from Production Music Made for Irish Music Stories

Artist/Composer: Matt Heaton]

>> Shannon: Len and John collaborated for 20 years. And Len also kept other projects going as well. He and his wife Pádraigín Ní Uallacháin made a very special recording of kid’s songs with Garry Ó Briain. This CD, When We Were Young, has gotten a lot of play in our home:

[ Music: “Fox and the Hare,” from When I Was Young

Artists: Len Graham and Pádraigín Ní Uallacháin]

Whether singing about the fox and the hare with Pádraigín, or sharing funny stories and songs with John Campbell, Len was in demand at Irish and international festivals, including the Smithsonian Folklife Festival:

>> Len: John was supposed to come over with me and he got bad word that he had leukemia. It was a very extreme form of it. And John wasn’t able to do it, and I came over to do it solo. And Brian came along with me, and that was the start of it. It must have been the year after John died. Yeah, that would be the Spring, I think, of 2007. And then we started coming back and forth.

>> Shannon: So you and Brian have been traveling around together singing for 12 years. 

>> Len: Ah that would be! There you are – when you’re enjoying yourself, time flies.

>> Shannon: Like Len Graham, singer, musician, and dancer Brian Ó hAirt won the Senior All-Ireland Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann in traditional singing. Len won it in 1971. Brian won it in 2002. And since their first collaboration in 2006, Len and Brian have travelled all over to share their collection of songs, dance tunes, and old-style sean-nós dancing.

[ Music: “Where the Moorcocks Crow,” from The Road Taken

Artists: Len Graham & Brian Ó Hairt ]

>> Shannon: These are folk songs. For everybody. For folks.

But that word “folk”, can sometimes imply simple… or small town… or casual. And really most of these big, well-travelled songs are rich. They pack a punch.

>> Len: There’s very few of them that still don’t have a message in them of some description, you know? There’s very few of them that you couldn’t sort of identify with, even though they might be of some antiquity they still have a message to modern audiences. There’s everything in there. Love, unrequited love, emigration, it’s all in there. You’ll find most of the stories in there. Whereas if you read history books they’re going to give you a very slanted … history is going to be biased from some angle, you know?  Whereas the songs are … you can get songs on a subject, different takes on it, but at least you’ll get different takes on it from people that were there.

>> Shannon: Like the great Frank line: “Those in power write the history, those who suffer write the songs.”

>> Len: That’s the one. 

>> Shannon: Here’s songwriter Robbie O’Connell with his song that references that famous line by Dublin singer Frank Harte:

[ Music: “The Keeper of the Songs,” from live at WGBH

Artist/Composer: Robbie O’Connell ]

>> Len:  There’s all sorts of information in there, if you look for it, you know? There’s a line in a song. You start to research and you find there’s a whole PhD in there, just from one little clue in the song. Say, for instance, “The Boys of Bullabawn”, which is the village I live in now. There’s a line in it that “Squire Jackson, he’s unequalled for honor and for reason. He never turned traitor, nor betrayed the rights of Man.” I think it must be the only song in Ireland where the landlord gets praise. And what’s this Rights of Man all about? And you look into it. When I first heard that 50 years ago, I’m asking that question … I know what it’s all about now.  Then you find out Thomas Paine was the most influential political philosopher of the 18th century. He influenced George Washington. Thomas Jefferson, Wolfe Tone, Napoleon Bonaparte, Henry Joy McCracken were all reading The Rights of Man. Even Burns was reading The Rights of Man:

While Europe’s eyes are fix’d on mighty things,

The fate of Empires and the fall of Kings;

While quacks of state must each produce a plan,

Even children are lisping the Rights of Man;

Mid all this mighty fuss just let me mention,

The rights of women merit some attention.

Mr. Robert Burns

>> Shannon: Presenting old songs collected by, say, Francis Child, for modern audiences, and not just for folk song nerds like me, welcoming new listeners and keeping it alive — this is part of the challenge and the art of it for Len:

>> Len: You know, experts that want to hear Child # whatever and 48 verses, unabridged, that’s fair enough. But for goodness sake, what is it my father used to say? If your Aunt Emma goes out there with a bucket to feed the hens. She comes out … chuck, chuck, chuck, she throws a handful here … chuck, chuck, chuck, she throws a handful here … chuck, chuck, chuck, she throws a handful there. She doesn’t throw the bloody bucket over their heads.  [Laughter] So that was the advice he gave me from an early age. He gave me a lot of good advice, actually.

I was working on a song … Richard Hayward, “The Blackbird”, it’s a Jacobite song. But it’s disguised, because you’d be charged with sedition if it was known that you were a Jacobite. So the Blackbird is actually referring to the Stewarts, James Stewart. 

[ Music: “The Blackbird,” from The Star Above the Garter

Artists: Denis Murphy ]

The song as Hayward learned it, I was writing it out and learning it. My father heard me, “You’ve only got half the song.” 

“What do you mean?”

 “You better go down to your Uncle Walter and get him to play you the melody. Hayward’s only singing half the melody.”  So I went to Walter and Walter played the melody. It’s played as a hornpipe, a jig, a reel, and a song air. So he played it slowed down as a song air. 

And I came back at it, and I said “Jesus, there’s an awful range in that Da.”

 “Is there?” he says. “Work on it for a while and see how you get on.” And I was having a bit of difficulty. “You better go down and see your Aunt Emma.” 

“Why?”

“She has poultry hasn’t she?”

“Aye.”

“Go down and watch the rooster.”

So I goes down, and sat there watching the rooster. And the rooster’s going for the high note it drops its head, and came up for the high note. And I came back and he asked “Well, what did you observe?” And I said what. “Well there you are, try that. Drop your head when you’re going for the high note.” So that’s how I got the high note. 

[Laughter]

[ Music: “The Royal Blackbird,” sung live in the Lounge for Irish Music Stories

Artist: Len Graham]

I’m a wee bit throaty after 2 weeks of singing. But that’s more or less the first verse, but I think there’s 6 verses all together. So there you go.

 >> Shannon: Thanks for chatting … and singing!

>> Len: Not at all! Sorry the singing’s a wee bit rough. There’s a bit of a frog in there somewhere.

[ Music: “The Parting Glass” [outro lilting], from After Dawning

Artists: Joe Holmes & Len Graham ]

My thanks to Len Graham for sharing a slice of his repertoire of songs — and the bigger stories behind that formidable collection. Irish Music Stories was written and produced by me, Shannon Heaton. Thank you to Matt Heaton for the production music, to Nigel for acknowledging our sponsors, to Joshua Lambert and Scott Fischer at Missouri State University for helping me navigate fair-use for the Max Hunter Collection.

And thanks again to hatao, Chris Murphy, Justin Anderson, Lynn Hayes, BrotherHug, David Vaughan, Brian Benscoter, Joe Garrett, and Gerry Corr for underwriting this episode. If you can kick in, there’s a donate button at IrishMusicStories.org. Every little bit helps. Thanks again for listening, everybody.

[ Music: “The Blackbird,” from Cover the Buckle

Artists: Seán Clohessy, Sean Mccomiskey, And Kieran Jordan ]

OUTTAKE

>> Shannon: So with your huge repertoire …

>> Len: Hahaha Apertoire! 

[ Music: “Rooster Crow,” recorded by Benjamin Nelan

used under Creative Commons license]