Edward Maturin, novelist and poet, is born in Dublin on June 18, 1812. He is naturalised as an American and works as a professor of Greek. His fiction and poetry generally deal with historical themes, while his work as a Gothic novelist often has an Irish background.
The Maturin family is descended from a Huguenot clergyman who fled to Ireland after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Edward’s father, Reverend Charles Robert Maturin, is curate of St. Peter’s Church, Dublin, and well known as a preacher, as well as a poet and Gothic novelist. Born the second son, Edward enters Trinity College Dublin at the age of fifteen and graduates at twenty. Immediately afterward he emigrates to the United States in 1832 with letters of introduction from the poet Thomas Moore and other Irish writers. Having studied law under Charles O’Conor, he is called to the bar but later becomes professor of Greek at South Carolina College and applies for American naturalisation in 1837. He marries Harriet Lord Gailiard in 1842 and has three children by her. In 1848, he returns to New York, where for upward of thirty years he fills professorships in Greek, Latin and belles-lettres. His mastery of Greek is such that he is selected in 1850 by the American Bible Union as one of their revisers and works on the gospel of St. Mark.
All of Maturin’s work is written in the United States and for the most part concentrates on historical themes or Irish fantasy. His first book contains the interconnected stories of Sejanus and Other Roman Tales (1839) and is dedicated to Washington Irving. They concern incidents during the reigns of the Roman emperors from Tiberius to Nero. Self-consciously literary, the dialogue is written in an imitation of Shakespearean English. This is followed by the two-volume romance, Montezuma, the Last of the Aztecs (1845) and then two works on Spanish themes. The long series of “Spanish Ballads” that originally appears in The United States Magazine and Democratic Review during 1845 are eventually collected with his other poems in Lyrics of Spain and Erin (1850). They are followed by the romance Benjamin, the Jew of Grenada (1847), a story of the fall of the Moslem empire in Spain.
After his move to New York, Maturin’s prose work becomes more Gothic. It includes The Irish Chieftain, or The Isles of Life and Death (1848) which is later to be dismissed as “a wild story without foundation in history … melodramatic, sentimental, extravagant,” and the two-volume Eva, or the Isles of Life and Death (1848). His later Bianca, a tale of Erin and Italy (1852) is set in more modern times but is equally condemned as “an outlandish story, full of murders, characters – mostly illegitimate – with terrible secrets, a duel between brothers, banshees, mysterious lady-prophetesses, fee-faw-fum.” A final offering is his four-act play Viola (1858).
Maturin dies in New York City on May 25, 1881.
(Pictured: “Montezuma: The Last of the Aztecs” by Edward Maturin, Paine & Burgess, New York, 1845)
Patterson is born on October 5, 1938, in Clonmel, County Tipperary. As a boy Patterson performs with his local parish choir and is involved in maintaining the annual tradition of singing with the “Wrenboys.” He sings in the local St. Mary’s Choral Society and at a production of The Pirates of Penzance performed with both his parents. His interests extend beyond music and as a boy he represents Marlfield GAAhurling club, plays tennis at Hillview and golf at the Mountain Road course. He quits school at an early stage to work in the printing business of his mother’s family. He moves to Dublin in 1961 to enroll at the National Academy of Theatre and Allied Arts where he studies acting while at the same time receiving vocal training from Hans Waldemar Rosen. In 1964, he enters the Feis Ceoil, a nationwide music competition, in which he wins several sections including oratorio, lieder and the German Gold Cup.
Patterson gives classical recitals around Ireland and wins scholarships to study in London, Paris and in the Netherlands. While in Paris, he signs a contract with Philips Records and releases his first record, My Dear Native Land. He works with conductors and some of the most prestigious orchestras in Europe including the London Symphony Orchestra and Orchestre de Paris. He also gains a reputation as a singer of Handel, Mozart, and Bach oratorios and German, Italian and French song. He has a long-running programme on RTÉ titled For Your Pleasure.
In the early 1980s Patterson moves to the United States, making his home in rural Westchester County, New York. A resurgence of interest in Irish culture encourages him to turn towards a more traditional Irish repertoire. He adds hymns, ballads, and traditional as well as more popular tunes to his catalogue. In March 1988, he is featured host in a Saint Patrick’s Day celebration of music and dance at New York City’s famous Radio City Music Hall. He also gives an outdoor performance before an audience of 60,000 on the steps of the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. with the National Symphony Orchestra.
Patterson is equally at home in more intimate settings. His singing in the role of the Evangelist in Bach’s St. John Passion is given fine reviews. Further recordings follow, of Beethoven arrangements, Irish songs, Berlioz songs, Purcell songs and others, all on the Philips label.
Patterson performs sold-out concerts from London’s Royal Albert Hall to New York’s Carnegie Hall, and with his family he presents two concerts at the White House, for presidents Ronald Reagan in 1982 and Bill Clinton in 1995. He records over thirty albums in six languages, wins silver, gold and platinum discs and is the first Irish singer to host his own show in Radio City Music Hall in New York.
Rising to greater prominence with the new popularity of Celtic music in the 1990s, Patterson sees many of his past recordings reissued for American audiences, and in 1998 he stars in the PBS special Ireland in Song. His last album outsells Pavarotti.
In 1999, Patterson learns he has a brain tumor. He has several operations in the following year and his condition appears to stabilise. He is diagnosed with a recurrence of his illness on May 7, 2000. He briefly recuperates and resumes performing. His last performance is on June 4, 2000, at Regis College in the Boston suburb of Weston, Massachusetts. Shortly thereafter he is admitted to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York where he lapses into a coma and dies on June 10, 2000, at the age of 61.
O’Connor is born on June 7, 1874, at Worcester, Massachusetts, the eldest of three sons and two daughters of Andrew O’Connor, a stonecutter from Lanarkshire, Scotland, who becomes a professional sculptor, and Marie Anne O’Connor (née McFadden), of County Antrim. Educated in Worcester public schools, at the age of 14 he becomes apprenticed to his father, helping him to design monuments for cemeteries. He is employed in the early 1890s on sculptural work for the World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago World’s Fair), being active in the studio of William Ordway Partridge, and assisting Daniel Chester French on his colossal Statue of the Republic, a landmark of the 1893 Columbian exposition.
Moving to London (1894–98), O’Connor works on bas-reliefs in the studio of the painter John Singer Sargent, who uses him as a model for his mural Frieze of Prophets for the Boston Public Library. His first independent work, Sea Dreams, a relief of a head, is exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1896. Returning to the United States (1898–1903), he becomes a studio assistant of French, through whom he receives his first public commission, for the Vanderbilt Memorial Doors for St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church, Manhattan, New York, a project completed in 1902 to wide critical acclaim. He also executes the tympanum and lateral friezes.
Around 1900, O’Connor marries an artist’s model named Nora, by whom he has a daughter. In 1902, he hires as studio model Jessie Phoebe Brown from New Jersey and of County Down parentage. The following year he elopes with her to Paris, where they marry and have four sons, the youngest of whom, Patrick O’Connor, becomes an artist and gallery curator. Jessie continues for many years as his primary model, sitting for the heads of both female and male figures, O’Connor coarsening the features for the latter.
During his years in Paris (1903–14), O’Connor is influenced by the work of Auguste Rodin, whom he befriends. Among his pupils in Paris is the American sculptor and heiress Gloria Vanderbilt Whitney. He continues to fulfil numerous commissions for funerary and public monuments in the United States, an example of the former being the Recuillement in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, near Tarrytown, New York. From 1906 he exhibits annually at the Salon in Paris, where he is the first foreigner to win a second-class medal, for his bronze statue of Gen. Henry Lawton. Included in his only exhibition at the Royal Hibernian Academy (1907) is a bronze relief of the prophet Nehemiah adapted from a panel of the Vanderbilt doors. The relief is subsequently included in his one-man show at the Galerie Hébrard, Paris in 1909.
In 1909, O’Connor wins a competition open to sculptors of Irish descent to execute a monument to Commodore John Barry, the County Wexford-born “father of the American navy,” for Washington, D.C. His design includes a frieze depicting events in Irish history, flanked by a group of three nude Irish emigrants entitled Exile from Ireland, and another group representing the Genius of Ireland, which includes a female figure of the “Motherland.” Probably owing to opposition from the Barry family to the depiction of their ancestor as a rough-and-ready sailor, the commission is not completed. His marble statue of Gen. Lew Wallace (author of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ), a plaster of which is exhibited at the Salon in Paris in 1909, is placed by the state of Indiana in the National Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol, Washington, D.C. Another marble, Peace by Justice, is commissioned as a gift from the United States to the Peace Palace in The Hague in 1913.
Returning to Paris in the mid-1920s, O’Connor becomes the first foreigner to win a gold medal at the Salon des Artistes in 1928, for the marble sculpture Tristan and Iseult, now held in the Brooklyn Museum, New York. The French government makes him a Chevalier of the National Order of the Legion of Honour in 1929. In 1926 he had exhibited a plaster group, Monument aux morts de la Grande Guerre, at the Salon in Paris. The sculpture is requested in 1932 by the people of Dún Laoghaire, County Dublin, as a memorial to Christ the King, O’Connor obligingly altering the interpretation of his iconography. Imposed on a “Tree of life” are three figures of Christ, representing in turn “Desolation,” “Consolation” and “Triumph.” Cast in bronze, throughout World War II the statue remains hidden in Paris to avoid its being melted down for the valuable metal. Transported to Dún Laoghaire in 1949, due to clerical opposition to its unconventional iconography, it is not at first erected, but for years lay on its side in a garden in Rochestown Avenue until its eventual unveiling in 1978 as Triple Cross in Haigh Terrace, where it stands in Moran Park. His other chief work in Ireland is a bronze statue of Daniel O’Connell in the Bank of Ireland, College Green, Dublin. Inspired by Rodin’s famous Monument to Balzac, the work is executed at his studio in a converted stable at Leixlip Castle, County Kildare in 1931–32.
During the 1930s, O’Connor lives and works in London and Ireland, where he has residences at Glencullen House, County Wicklow, and 77 Merrion Square, Dublin. He dies at the latter address on June 9, 1941, and is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery. His own bronze relief, Le feu sacré, marks the grave. A portrait painting, executed by his son Patrick in 1940, is in Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, which also holds twenty-six sculptures presented by O’Connor late in his life, and posthumously by his family. The collection includes a marble self-portrait bust of 1940, a bronze of the Lafayette cast by the gallery in 1984 from a reduced plaster model presented by the artist, and a bronze group entitled The Victim, on view in Merrion Square Park, from an uncommissioned and uncompleted war memorial conceived by O’Connor under the general title Le Débarquement. The National Gallery of Ireland has the Desolation maquette for the Triple Cross. A centenary exhibition of his work is held at Trinity College Dublin in 1974. His widow dies in Dublin in 1974.
(From: “O’Connor, Andrew” by Lawrence William White and Carmel Doyle, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)
Bedford then mainly works in theatre in the United States, on both coasts, but mainly in New York City both on and off Broadway. He is in the premiere of Tennessee Williams‘s last play Small Craft Warnings at the New Theatre in New York in 1972. Other stage appearances include Brian Friel’s The Mundy Scheme in New York in 1969 and as John Adams in the nationwide tour of the musical 1776. He appears in over 200 stage productions throughout his career.
Bedford dies at the age of 67 on November 20, 1999, in Manhattan, New York City, of cancer six weeks after entering the hospital.
Brenan is born in Cork, County Cork, on November 17, 1828. He begins to write verse at an early age and is one of the genuine poets of the Young Ireland movement. His earlier poems are published under the initials “J. B., Cork,” or “J. B—n,” and some of his American verses under the pseudonym “Gondalez.” He is also an able prose writer.
Brenan is an active member of the Cork Historical Society, and is one of the editors of the Cork Magazine, which appears in November 1847, and continues to be published until the end of 1848, when the journal ceases publication. Some of its contributors, who include Frazer, Martin MacDermott, Fitz James O’Brien, Mulchinock and Mary Savage, later either end up in jail or in exile.
In January 1848, John Mitchel visits Cork and, according to Michael Cavanagh, who publishes a sketch of Brenan’s life in Young Ireland, Dublin, in June and July 1885, Brenan for the first time “beheld the man he most admired on earth, and with whose future destiny, whether for weal or woe, he felt his own was bound up. Never had the archenemy of England a more faithful or earnest follower.”
Brenan contributes to the Mitchel’s United Irishman and sells his rifle to obtain train fare so he can take up his residence in Dublin, the headquarters of the revolutionary movement. He later publishes articles in John Martin‘s The Irish Felon urging the Confederate Clubs members, many of whom have arms, to be in readiness for action. “The sooner you realise the fact,” he writes in a letter addressed to the Members of the Provincial Confederate Clubs, “that the Confederation was got up for the purpose of doing something, the better for us all. Just think what it undertook to do. It undertook to defeat the strongest Government and to liberate the most degraded country that ever existed. It undertook to give – to a province—to strike the chains off millions of slaves and, if necessary, to wash out the iron moulds in blood.”
In another letter to “the Young Men of Ireland” on July 22, 1848, he writes, “On you I principally rely. You realise that you are very ‘rash,’ rather inclined to be ‘violent,’ and have exceedingly little prudence to spare. Brothers, let your watchword be ‘Now or never—now and forever’ rashly.”
Brenan is associated with John Savage and John O’Mahony while Savage is operating on the slopes of the Comeragh Mountains. He is arrested and kept in prison for seven months alternately in Newgate Prison, Carrickfergus and Kilmainham Gaols. During his confinement he writes some fine poems, according to T. F. O’Sullivan, one, entitled Yearnings, evidently addressed to Mary Savage, sister of John.
After his release without trial in March 1849, Brenan becomes editor of the Irishman which had been started in Dublin by Bernard Fulham, and for six months attempts to rekindle the insurrectionary flame in the country. He is implicated in the attack on the Cappoquin police barracks on September 16, 1848, and in October escapes to the United States.
In America Brenan becomes associated with a number of journals, including Horace Greeley‘s New-York Tribune, Devin Reilly’s People, The Enquirer of Newark, New Jersey, and the New Orleans Delta in which he writes a series of papers under the pen-name Ben Fox. On August 27, 1851, he marries Mary Savage, in her parents’ house, on Thirteenth Street, New York.
Brenan writes some articles and poems for John Mitchel’s Irish Citizen in 1854. He is an enthusiastic supporter of the Southern cause and founds the New Orleans Times.
Brenan dies on May 27, 1857, at the early age of twenty-nine and is buried in the old French cemetery of New Orleans. During the last year of his life, he is almost totally blind. He is attended in his last illness by Dr. Dalton Williams. There are seven children of his and Mary’s marriage, only one of whom, Florence, survives their parents. She possesses her father’s literary ability but devotes her life to religion as a member of the Mercy Order.
Brenan’s best-known poem, “Come to Me, Dearest,” is addressed to Mary Savage before their marriage. The love story of Brenan and Mary is told in the sketch by Ellen Mary Patrick Downing, afterwards Sister Mary Alphonsus.
Doheny receives a rudimentary education from an itinerant scholar while labouring on his father’s holding, and in 1826 attends Maher’s classical academy near Emly for nine months. Educating himself in the late 1820s and early 1830s while teaching the children of local farmers, he determines on a career in law to help secure political redress for the disenfranchised poor. He is admitted to Gray’s Inn in November 1834, enters the King’s Inns, Dublin, in 1835 and is called to the Irish bar in 1838. Settling later that year in Cashel, County Tipperary, he first practises in the local courts and then on the southern circuit. Appointed legal assessor to the borough of Cashel under the Municipal Corporations (Ireland) Act 1840, he successfully prosecutes former borough officers for misappropriation of funds and fraudulent transfer of property, winning wider attention. He had supported the campaign for repeal in the early 1830s, and in 1841 joins Daniel O’Connell‘s Repeal Association, becoming active in forming temperance bands and setting up town meetings. By May 1841 he is on the association’s general committee. O’Connell finds him less tractable than most and is ruffled by his queries into the association’s financial management.
During 1842 Doheny begins to associate with the more militant members of the repeal movement such as Thomas Davis. There is a marked gap in age and class between Doheny and most of this group and some look down on his lack of refinement. Others, however, admire his zeal and sincerity, and an anonymous colleague describes him as “rough, generous, bold, a son of the soil, slovenly in dress, red-haired and red-featured, but a true personification of the hopes, passions, and traditions of the people.” Assisting in the launch of The Nation in October 1842, he is chagrined to find most of his articles rejected as unfit for publication, although fifteen are published between January 1843 and September 1844. He also publishes a competent History of the American Revolution (1846) for The Nation‘s “Library of Ireland” series. More impressive as a speaker than a writer, he contributes regularly to repeal meetings at Conciliation Hall, Burgh Quay, Dublin. He enthuses at the apparent martial potential of the immense, ordered crowds attending the “monster” repeal meetings of 1843, and is one of the main organisers of the Cashel meeting of May 31, 1843, at which he is loudly cheered. However, his later claim to have deliberately set up these meetings, with Davis and John Blake Dillon, on quasi-military lines in order to prepare the peasantry for a future war with Britain, is far-fetched. His opposition to O’Connell’s decision to submit to proclamation of the proposed meeting of October 8, 1843, at Clontarf again greatly irritates O’Connell.
An active member of the Repeal Association parliamentary committee from February 1844, in February and March 1845 Doheny chairs a sub-committee of five senior barristers investigating the legality of withdrawal from the House of Commons by the body of repeal MPs, coming “reluctantly” to the verdict that such an action is open to criminal prosecution. O’Connell’s gruff dismissal of his report testifies to their awkward relationship. He further vexes O’Connell by his advocacy of non-denominational university education during debates over the Maynooth College Act 1845. Irrevocable divisions between the Young Irelanders and O’Connell open up between April and July 1846 when Doheny leads calls for endorsement of the conduct of William Smith O’Brien – imprisoned for a month for refusal to serve on a parliamentary committee – and voices Young Ireland’s martial convictions in a speech at Liverpool. After the secession of the Young Irelanders from the Repeal Association in July 1846, he opposes attempts at reconciliation and is one of the founders of the Irish Confederation on January 13, 1847.
During the summer of 1847, Doheny begins setting up “Confederate Clubs” in east Tipperary and aids James Fintan Lalor in organising a failed tenant league meeting at Holycross, County Tipperary, on September 19. He is one of the few Young Irelanders attracted to Lalor’s revolutionary agrarian philosophy, but supports Smith O’Brien against John Mitchel in January 1848, deploring irresponsible demands for insurrection. However, after Mitchel’s conviction for treason felony in May, he supports armed action. Arrested for seditious speechmaking at Cashel on July 12, he is bailed on July 20. During the confused period of “rebellion” in late July, he attempts to organise the peasantry in Tipperary but is frustrated by O’Brien’s vacillation.
After the collapse of the armed adventure at Ballingarry on July 31, Doheny takes refuge near Slievenamon and, with James Stephens, eludes pursuit for nearly two months, until he finally escapes, disguised as a clergyman, on a cattle-ship from Cork to Bristol. Some days later he reaches Paris, where he stays for two months with Stephens and John O’Mahony before leaving for New York City. Practising law in New York, he dedicates himself to the development of an Irish Americanrepublican movement. Tensions between conservative and radical Young Ireland exiles, perhaps aggravated by social snobbery, surface by late 1849, when he is arrested for attempting to push Thomas D’Arcy McGee into an open cellar on a New York street, angered by accusations of boasting, drunkenness, and incompetence. Similar criticisms are made by John Blake Dillon and appear to have some foundation.
Doheny finds time to write The Felon’s Track (1849), a polemical account of the repeal agitation and the 1848 insurrection that is highly critical of O’Connell. Despite a rambling narrative, it becomes a popular work and is reprinted several times. He also gives several lectures on historical and literary subjects to Irish American societies and contributes a memoir on Geoffrey Keating to O’Mahony’s translation (1857) of Foras Feasa ar Éirinn.
Involved with the New York Irish militia from his arrival, he is elected lieutenant colonel of the 69th Infantry Regiment in November 1851, and in September 1852 becomes colonel of a new regiment, the Irish Republican Rifles. These formations are often wracked by dissension over strategy and leadership, and in February 1856 he and O’Mahony found the Emmet Monument Association, planning to mobilise an Irish American force to invade Ireland. Efforts to acquire Russian backing fails on the close of the Crimean War in March 1857.
In autumn 1857, Doheny and O’Mahony make overtures to James Stephens to reorganise the republican movement in Ireland, and in March 1858 they accept Stephens’s demands for undisputed authority there, though by the winter of 1858–59 Doheny shows increasing distrust of Stephens’s ambitions. Adopting the organisational structure set out by Stephens in establishing the IRB in 1858, he and O’Mahony found the American equivalent, the Fenian Brotherhood, in early 1859, although he plays a subordinate part. In July 1859, he founds and edits a short-lived newspaper in New York, The Phoenix, to promote Fenian ideals. Active in opposing the national petition for self-government of 1860–61, he argues that Britain will only yield to force. He assists in making preparations for the funeral of Terence Bellew MacManus in Ireland and acts as one of the pallbearers in New York. Travelling to Ireland in October 1861, he appears to argue for using the excitement engendered by the funeral to spark an insurrection in Dublin but is thwarted by Stephens.
Doheny dies suddenly on April 1, 1862, in New York and is buried in Calvary Cemetery in the city’s borough of Queens.
(From: “Doheny, Michael” by James Quinn and Desmond McCabe, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)
Paul Joseph Brady, Irish singer-songwriter and musician, is born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on May 19, 1947. Interested in a wide variety of music from an early age, his work straddles folk and pop.
Brady begins learning piano around age six and by the age of eleven he has begun to play guitar, spending hours of his school holidays learning every song that the Shadows had recorded. He is also influenced by Chuck Berry.
In 1963, Brady begins performing as a piano player in a hotel in Bundoran, County Donegal. In October 1964, he attends University College Dublin and performs with a number of R&B groups, covering songs by the likes of Ray Charles and James Brown. The first of these is the Inmates (late 1964–about April 1965), which evolves into the Kult (about April–December 1965), featuring Brady, Jackie McAuley (ex-Them, and future Belfast Gypsies and Trader Horne), Brendan Bonass, and Dave Pennefather. He can be seen in the documentary film Charlie Is My Darling waiting outside Dublin‘s Adelphi Cinema for the Rolling Stones‘ concert of September 3, 1965. He next joins Rootzgroup (late 1965–May 1966) and Rockhouse (about May–December 1966).
During Brady’s time at college in Dublin, the country sees a huge rise in interest in traditional Irish music. He joins the popular Irish band The Johnstons when Michael Johnston leaves in May 1967. They move to London in 1969 and subsequently to New York City in 1972 to expand their audience. Despite some success, he returns to Ireland in 1974 to join the Irish group Planxty, the band that subsequently launches the solo careers of Andy Irvine, Liam O’Flynn, Dónal Lunny, and Christy Moore.
When Planxty disbands in late 1975, Brady forms a duo with Irvine from 1976 to 1978, a partnership that produces the successful album, Andy Irvine/Paul Brady. The next few years see him establish his popularity and reputation as one of Ireland’s best interpreters of traditional songs. His versions of ballads like “Arthur McBride” and “The Lakes of Pontchartrain” are considered definitive and are still popular at concerts today. In 1975 in New York, he records three albums for Shanachie Records as guitar accompanist to resident Irish fiddlers Andy McGann, Paddy Reynolds and John Vesey. He also records a 1976 album, The High Part of the Road, for the same label with Irish fiddler Tommy Peoples.
In 1978, Brady releases his first solo album, Welcome Here Kind Stranger, which wins him critical acclaim and is voted the “Folk Album of the Year” by Melody Maker magazine. However, it proves to be his last album covering traditional material. He decides to delve into pop and rock music and releases his first album of this genre in 1981, Hard Station.
Brady releases a number of successful solo albums throughout the 1980s: True for You (1983), Back to the Centre (1985), and Primitive Dance (1987). By the end of the decade, he is recognised and accepted as a respected performer and songwriter. His songs are being covered by a number of other artists, including Santana and Dave Edmunds.
Dylan is sufficiently impressed by Brady’s work to name-check him in the booklet of his 1985 box set, Biograph. The actual quote is “(…) people get too famous too fast these days and it destroys them. Some guys got it down – Leonard Cohen, Paul Brady, Lou Reed, secret heroes, John Prine, David Allen Coe, Tom Waits. I listen more to that kind of stuff than whatever is popular at the moment. They’re not just witchdoctoring up the planet, they don’t set up barriers (…)”.
In 1991, Brady reaches number 5 in the Irish Singles Chart with Nobody Knows.
Since his Hard Station album (1981), Brady is on various major labels until he creates his own label, PeeBee Music, in the late 1990s. He releases three albums in the 1990s: Trick or Treat, Songs & Crazy Dreams (a remixed compilation of earlier songs) and Spirits Colliding, which are met with critical acclaim. Trick or Treat is on Fontana/Mercury Records and receives a lot of promotion. As a result, some critics consider it his debut album and note that the record benefits from the expertise of experienced studio musicians, as well as producer Gary Katz, who works with the rock group Steely Dan. Rolling Stone, after praising his earlier but less-known solo records, calls Trick or Treat Brady’s “most compelling collection.”
Brady goes on to record several other albums, fifteen in total since going solo in 1978, and collaborates with a number of other established musicians including Bonnie Raitt and Richard Thompson. In 2006, he collaborates with Cara Dillon on the track “The Streets of Derry” from her album After the Morning. He also works with Fiachra Trench.
Brady’s fifteenth studio album, Hooba Dooba, is released in March 2010.
In 2017, a friendship is struck with Theo Katzman (Vulfpeck) and Brady tours Ireland in 2019 as half of this duo with Joe Dart, also of vulfpeck, Louis Cato and Lee Pardini. He continues to tour, record and collaborate with other artists. In 2019, Jimmy Buffett begins performing a cover of Brady’s hit, “The World is What you Make It.” In September 2019, Brady joins Buffett on his tour stops in both Dublin and London.
Brady releases the album Unfinished Business on his own label, PeeBee Music, licensed to Proper Music UK, in 2017.
While Brady and Andy Irvine’s planned tour of their 1976 album Andy Irvine/Paul Brady is impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, they finish the tour in 2022. Musicians to join them on the tour include fiddle player Kevin Burke and multi-instrumentalist Dónal Lunny, both of whom had played on the original album.
In 2009, Brady receives an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from the University of Ulster, in recognition of his services to traditional Irish music and songwriting.
Frederick Edward McWilliamCBERA, Northern Irish surrealistsculptor, dies in London on May 13, 1992. He works chiefly in stone, wood and bronze. His style of work consists of sculptures of the human form contorted into strange positions, often described as modern and surreal.
McWilliam is born in Banbridge, County Down,on April 30, 1909, the son of Dr. William McWilliam, a local general practitioner. Growing up in Banbridge has a great influence on his work. He makes references to furniture makers such as Carson the Cooper and Proctors in his letters to his friend, Marjorie Burnett.
McWilliam attends Campbell College in Belfast and later attends Belfast College of Art from 1926. After 1928, he continues to study at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. He originally intends to become a painter, but influenced by Alfred Horace Gerrard, head of the sculpture department at the Slade, and by Henry Moore whom he meets there, he turns to sculpture. He receives the Robert Ross Leaving Scholarship which enables him and his wife, Beth (née Crowther), to travel to Paris where he visits the studio of Constantin Brâncuși.
During the first year of World War II, he joins the Royal Air Force and is stationed in England for four years where he is engaged in interpreting aerial reconnaissance photographs. He is then posted to India. While there he teaches art in the Hindu Art School in New Delhi.
After his return from India, McWilliam teaches for a year at the Chelsea School of Art. He is then invited by A. H. Gerrard to teach sculpture at the Slade. He continues in this post until 1968.
During the Northern IrelandTroubles McWilliam produces a series of bronzes in 1972 and 1973 known as Women of Belfast in response to the bombing at the Abercorn Tea-Rooms.
In 1964 McWilliam is awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters from Queen’s University Belfast. In 1966 he is appointed CBE and in 1971 he wins the Oireachtas Gold Medal. He is represented in many public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and Tate Britain in London. In 1984 the National Self-Portrait Gallery purchases a McWilliam self-portrait amongst acquisitions from fellow Northerners Brian Ballard, Brian Ferran and T. P. Flanagan.
The play is a tragicomedy about a small rural town in Ireland where many of the townspeople are extras in a Hollywood film. The story centres on Charlie Conlon and Jake Quinn, who, like much of the town, are employed as extras for the filming. The key point in the play is when a local teenager commits suicide, by drowning himself with stones in his pockets, after he is humiliated by one of the film stars. The script calls upon the cast of two to perform all 15 characters (men and women), often switching gender and voice swiftly and with minimal costume change. Comedy also derives from the efforts of the production crew to create the proper “Irish feel” – a romanticised ideal that often conflicts with the reality of daily life.
The play is first shown as a DubbleJoint Production premiering in West Belfast in August 1996. The set design, by Jack Kirwan, is simple – a backcloth depicting the cloudy sky above the Blasket Islands, a row of shoes (symbolising the myriad characters) and a trunk, a box, and two tiny stools. The lighting design is originally by James C. McFetridge and this design is used in both the London West End and the Broadway versions of the show.
The show moves to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1999. It then returns to Ireland and has a brief run in Dublin before moving to London‘s Tricycle Theatre. It then transfers to the New Ambassadors Theatre in London’s West End. The show, however, proves so successful, its run is extended and moves to the Duke of York’s Theatre up the road, where it remains for three years.
The original cast of Hill and Campion take the show to Broadway and, as its West End run continues to play to packed houses, actors line up to play Charlie and Jake, most notably Bronson Pinchot, Rupert Degas and Simon Delaney.
The play wins the Irish Times/ESB Irish Theatre Award for Best Production in 1999, wins two Laurence Olivier Awards in 2001 for Best New Comedy and Best Actor (Conleth Hill) and is also nominated for three Tony Awards in 2001.
The play is revived at London’s Tricycle Theatre in 2011, with Jamie Beamish as Charlie and Owen McDonnell as Jake, and at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow in 2012 performed by Robbie Jack and Keith Fleming.
For the 20th anniversary of the first production, The Dukes in Lancaster and The Theatre Chipping Norton co-produce a touring production which opens at The Dukes on February 25, 2016, and tours 35 venues between then and May 28, 2016. Charlie de Bromhead plays Jake and Conan Sweeny plays Charlie.
The original version of the play is created in collaboration with theatre director Pam Brighton, who later sues Marie Jones for co-authorship rights. Brighton loses the case in the high court, and subsequently becomes bankrupt.
Daniel Doyle, Irish folk singer, is born in Dublin on April 28, 1940. During the 1960s and 1970s, he is one of the top Irish singers, regularly featuring in the Irish charts and scoring three No.1 singles. He records twenty-five albums and is known for his chart-topping songs “Whiskey on a Sunday,” “Daisy a Day” and “The Rare Ould Times.”
After leaving school at the age of fourteen, Doyle starts doing odd jobs, including working as general factotum in Dublin’s Pike Theatre, where he begins to pick up, from the travelling players, songs from the Irish countryside.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Doyle is one of the top Irish singers, regularly featuring in the Irish charts and scoring three No.1 singles. His song “The Rare Auld Times” notably displaces ABBA‘s “Take a Chance on Me” after just one week at the top. The song is composed in the 1970s by Pete St. John for the Dublin City Ramblers and peaks on the Irish Music Charts for twelve weeks. In 1979, he is the first artist to record St. John’s song “The Fields of Athenry.” He is probably best known for his 1967 number one hit “Whiskey on a Sunday.” His other notable works are “A Daisy a Day” and “The Rare Auld Times.” The hit songs “Daisy A Day,” “Streets of London,” “Lizzie Lindsay” and “Whiskey on a Sunday” that are released in the 1960s make him popular.
In 1983, Doyle moves to the United States from Ireland.
seamus dubhghaill 