Maggie Barry, the Gypsie Queen
Oliver O’Connell came to the Railway Bar, Newry in early December, 2024, to perform his newly composed song, Maggie Barry, the Gypsie Queen, for her grandson and great-grandson, Paddy and Eóin Barry respectively. O’Connell’s repertoire and reputation generally celebrates his beloved Co Clare, its musicians, landscape and people. But here he revisits his fascination with Irish Traveller musicians and singers (the theme of our joint effort in our book, Irish Travellers and Irish Traditional Music (2011). The song is an inspired celebration of one of Ireland’s most iconic balladeers.
Maggie Barry (1917-1989)
Bob Dylan called her his favourite folk singer. Christy Moore says she still inspires him. Van Morrison talks about “a great soul singer” when her name is mentioned. (Colin Irvine, The Guardian, Jan 18, 2017).
At a time when Irish traditional music might have been heading for extinction, exiled musicians kept the flame burning, resulting in a vibrant Irish scene in 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. She 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).
Teaming up with the great Sligo fiddle player Michael Gorman, she became a star on the burgeoning Irish folk club scene of the time, and went on to headline concerts at the Royal Albert Hall and New York’s Carnegie Hall. She was a major driving force of the folk revival, emerging from post-World War 2 Britain, spreading back home to Ireland and eventually engulfing the world. She was discovered in Dundalk in 1952, by Alan Lomax, the renown American folklorist, collector and archivist, and is buried in Lawrencetown, Co. Down. This is very much a border county story, with tentacles spreading around the world.
“She smokes, she drank, she cussed, she span yarns, she marched on stage carrying pints of Guinness, she didn’t care who she offended, and she spent money as fast as she earned it”. (Colin Irvine, The Guardian, 18th Jan, 2017).
Maggie Barry earned a reputation as a strong and versatile singer with a great panache for entertainment. She accompanied herself on a 5-string banjo, performing popular folksongs of the time. She learned songs from various sources, and one of her most famous and enduring favourites, My Lagan Love, was learned by lingering outside a record shop in Dundalk, Co Louth, long enough to listen to the song until she had it memorised. (Hall, R. 1958. Her Mantle so Green, Topic Records).
For almost 20 years, from 1933 to 1953, she travelled the length and breadth of Ireland, playing at fairs, markets and football matches performing popular folk ballads and earning a good living. She quickly gained a reputation as a very popular entertainer. 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 Reaganian, 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.
London
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 ending solace in seeking out 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 North London, musicians like Gorman, Willie Clancy, John Vesey, Tony McMahon, Bobby Casey and Martin Byrnes coalesced, mainly around traditional dance tunes including, reels, jogs, hornpipes etc. The flamboyant and irreverent, self-styled Traveller and Queen of the Gypsies, Maggie Barry forced her ballads and her powerful persona into that male-dominated arena.
Tommy Fegan
31/12/2004