Johnny's City style Country Folk

DUBLIN raised him but as a teenage star of the ballad boom years of the mid-1960s. Johnny McEvoy's songs were a pot pourri of influences, from his rural roots in Banagher, Co Offaly, summer holidays in Clonfert, Co Galway and tunes he learned in The Universal Folk Club in the capital's Parnell Square. There is a confluence of all these influences, and others, some from his days presenting Folk-Country programmes such as Sounds Like McEvoy on afternoon TV on the BBC, or from his years fronting a Country showband, on the new double album The Johnny McvEvoy Story. The Definitive Collection. There is a great cross-section of McEvoy material on this double CD but one could question if it is the definitive collection, as Johnny is still coming up with new compositions after all these years. Accordionist Sharon Shannon joins him for a very different sounding 2010 version of his first No.1 from 1966, Muirsheen Durkin, and it is the opening track on this new release. Both of the discs have a smattering of originals from the pen of Johnny as well as many of the ballads, Folk and even a few more contemporary songs that have been associated with Johnny during his career, which spans 44 years so far. As one would expect, other hits by Johnny such as The Boston Burglar, Nora, Those Brown Eyes, Gentle Annie and Where My Eileen is Waiting for Me are included here. The latter song saw him compete with the then Pop idols The Bay City Rollers in the Irish Pop charts of the mid-1970s. His very fine composition Michael, about Irish War of Independence hero Michael Collins, has been revived on this set and rightly so, at a time when there is renewed interest in Collins. While the song was a Top 20 hit, it was far less commercially successful than many of Johnny's compositions. Another hit song that he wrote, but which was never very successful for himself, Out to California, is included here. Johnny admits that it was Country singer Paddy O'Brien who made this song his own and it will be forever associated with him, rather than with the composer. But he is philosophical about that and indeed there are a few other McEvoy compositions on this release that could, and should,have been hits either for Johnny or for some other singers. These include The Ballad of John Williams, which is a brilliantly crafted story-song about a young couple going off on the Titanic and their friends left behind in Ireland being jealous of the new life in the New World that they thought their friends were sailing away to. Another song on this set also written by Johnny but which never reached its full potential, as far as commercial success is concerned, is Rich Man's Garden. Johnny once said he was influenced to write this from memories he had of a pretty child that he met while on holidays in Clonfert. The line 'She was six and I was seven, with not a penny to my name' sums it all up. He laughs when he says that he though he was in love with this girl from his childhood, he never knew her name. Phil Coulter wrote the hit The Town I Love So Well about his native Derry and if Johnny McEvoy was as fortunate as Phil was, with his song The Town I Lift Behind it could have been a hit of similar size. But this song has remained one of his more obscure compositions and one hopes that it might get more exposure, not that it is included as a track on this set. He was influenced to write the song by thoughts of one of his older brothers who has spent most of his adult life in St Louis in the USA but who has never forgotten Banagher, the town he left behind. Apart from Johnny's compositions, this release has him singing diverse songs from Cohen's Heart with no Companion to The Last Thing On My Mind from the pen of Tom Paxton to Pete St John's Dublin in the Rare Old Times. Johnny duets with his daughter Alice on When You Say Nothing At All and he still retains the theatrical style from his days of doing shows in The Gaiety in Dublin as he turns Carrickfergus  into an epic narrative on this album. One could question the merit of having The Hedgehog Song on this set but then perhaps it adds to the diversity of the material. It is also nice to see a new song about Hank Williams which Johnny wrote recently, included here on disc two and just before Johnny launches into the Williams composition Wedding bells are Ringing in the Chapel. Perhaps after this double CD the time could be ripe for the re-release of Country material from Johnny's vinyl recording days, including his LP of Hank Williams songs. This new album might well be called The Johnny McEvoy Story but with a lot of his earlier recordings still lost in the vinyl vaults, and Johnny still writing good new material, his story in songs seems set to continue for a long time yet. â€â€ TG.