“…in 1966 Eddie and Finbar Furey won the international folk award in Tralee against eighty other groups. For this they got £170 in prize money which they say lasted about three days. ‘It went to charity’ says Eddie. The ‘Guinness charity’ says Finbar”
Finbar and Eddie Furey LP
Finbar and Eddie Furey, Transatlantic Records, 1968.
“You’ll meet a tall, dark handsome man….” she told my mother. Mrs. Furey that was, who used to tell fortunes up in Ballyfermot. “Jesus, she got that one wrong!”
I had a great time recently researching the Liam Weldon article, and got a laugh out of the images and memories it brought to mind especially for my mother. German TV cameras in the front garden, Christy Moore on the wall, a whole family at work musically. The Fureys were much the same, on Spidel Road.
Six in the family, the four boys and the parents. A musicial house to say the least. Another cornerstone of what I consider the great forgotten Trad-scene of Ireland, the Downeys acts. For all the romanticism surrounding traditional music in Ireland at the time (1968), you hear very little about Ballyfermot and what was going on there. The Furey Family, The Keenan Family , Paddy Sweeney (who did some time in the Dublin City Ramblers), The Weldon Family, and all the drop-ins you’d get on occasion for The Phoenix Folk Club, with the likes of Andy Irvine, Jim Page, Donal Lunny, Barry Moore (Better known now as Luke Bloom), Mary Black, Ronnie Drew, Mick Hanly and others. Christy Moore did a fundraiser for the folk club too, and things were really going on to say the least. You were no one without an instrument up there, with mam trying out the fiddle briefly and the father opting for the bodhran.
Anyway, the album.
An amazing array of instruments. Whistles, pipes, bodhrans, guitars, whatever you’re having yourself. Finbar and Eddie were sweeping awards from a young age, with several junior championship awards for pipes under both belts, and the Ulster Senior Trio championship taken along with the father, Ted.
The Spanish Cloak
Come by the Hills
Sliabh Na Mban
Dainty Davy
Tattered Jack Welch
The Flowers in the Valley
Pigeon on the Gate
Graham’s Flat
Leezy Lindsay
Piper in the Meadow Straying
The Curragh of Kildare
Eamonn an Chnuic (Ned of the Hills)
This Town Is Not Your Own
Rocking the Baby
Come By The Hills:
“Eddie’s first song was written by Scottish TV producer Gordon Smith. The words are set to the traditional Irish air Buchal an Eire”
The Curragh of Kildare:
“Sometimes called the The Winter It Is Passed and was said by Dean Christie (Who included it in his collection of traditional ballad airs in 1876) to have been written about a highwayman called Johnson, who was hanged in 1750 for robberies committed on the Curagh, the pen heathland that stretches to the East of Kildare”
Enjoy these two. While currently away in Belgium, nothing makes me long for a Downeys pint like this LP! More on the way friends, more on the way.
Click on the book for more.
Click on the book for more.
Donal
Ciarán
Sam
Come Here To Me! 
Yes that is certainly a classic album and still in my 12″ vinyl collection. Many’s a sunny Sunday morning when UCD student I listened to Eddie, Paul and co. in the back room of O’Donoghue’s in Merrion Row. Those were the days! And yes you are right ‘Ballyer’ was at that time the home of some important trad music families keeping alive and passing the richness of the past down through the generations ó ghlún go glún (lit. from knee to knee).
Often heard the ‘Curragh of Kildare’ being attributed to Rabbie Burns… another pub myth maybe.
Remember hearing Dave Stewart once on the radio (him of Eurythmics fame) telling about his musical apprenticeship spent with the above lads after running away from home in the 1960s. He learned the hard way playing some fairly rough & ready places with them in Scotland.