Colin Randall writes: for a variety of reasons, Salut! Live has been quiet of late. The Facebook group has been updated rather more conscientiously than the site but not enough. This, my first posting for a while, is a latest entry in our Artist of the Month series and honours a truly great Irish singer ….
If I start by saying Mary Black has one of the finest voices Ireland has produced in my longish lifetime, you will guess that I am not just a critic but probably also a fan. In her decades of performing and recording, she has shown an extraordinary gift for making any song, traditional or contemporary, her own, and I have witnessed her revealing that gift on several occasions.
I should declare another interest, let me say straight away that I am a fan of the woman, too, not just her music. I’ve interviewed her in London, Dublin and on the phone; we’ve met socially at or after gigs in London, Dublin and Belfast and I was even whisked away with Black and her band for a memorable sojourn in Bahrain.
What I feel for Mary Black is a mixture of admiration, respect and genuine affection. She and her husband, Joe O'Reilly, have given me great company and companionship. "I want everyone except the band out of here," she declared in the dressing room in a lavish Bahrain hotel. Seeing me prepare my exit, she yelled: "Stay, Colin, you're with us."
By MaxPride. Mary Black at the Olympia, Dublin in 2006
I think of Mary Black as a young woman, much the one I first encountered in the 1980s. but she turned 70 in May this year. She has enjoyed a fine career, selling out concert halls, collecting awards galore and seeing her records rise high in the charts, including three top 20 albums in the US. She is sensational solo but also a skilled and sensitive collaborator with other artists.
Not many female vocalists could hold their own with Joan Baez as well as Black does in this gorgeous live version of Bob Dylan's Ring Them Bells.
Black was born in Dublin. It was a musical family; her mother sang and her dad, a native of Rathlin island, off the Antrim coast, played the fiddle. She was aware form a young age that she was a strong, versatile singer, Her siblings Shay, Michael, Martin and Frances also sang and I still have – and play – a vinyl record by the Black Family.
There was a spell in a band called General Humbert and the start of a long musical relationship with the musician and producer Declan Sinnott that led to a successful, eponymous first solo album. I had heard a lot of her music by listening to Irish radio (RTE), just about audible when I lived in Bristol. It was there that I first saw her live, stunning as the lead singer in Frankie Gavin's outstanding traditional Irish band, De Dannan.
More solo work, and success, came when she left De Dannan and released two albums, By the Time It gets Dark and No Frontiers, the later spending more than a year in the Irish album charts top 30. Babes in the Wood also topped the Irish chart but did well, too, in the US. For someone not a household name outside Ireland, she amassed a huge British following, not just the Irish community, and I was at the Royal Albert Hall in 1992 for the climax of her sell-out UK tour.
Along the way, Black recorded with many other great artists. In one of the finest of these collaborations, she joined the McGarrigle sisters Kate and Anna, Emmy Lou Harris and Karen Matheson for a sublime version of Hard Times Come Again No More, a beautiful song by the renowned US composer Stephen Foster that became extremely popular during the American Civil War.
It feels impossible to choose just a few Mary Black performances to illustrate her massive talent. But I have always enjoyed her version of Richard Thompson's magnificent love song, Dimming of the Day. She sang it in concert in Belfast one night in the 1990s. I happened to be in Northern Ireland on reporting duties, and didn't make the gig but met the band later for post-concert drinks at their hotel.
It was usual for Mary to sing at these wind-down gatherings – an American tourist once wandered up to her and said with a voice like hers, she should be recording – and, at my suggestion, she sang Dimming of the Day all over again.
And I have saved another glorious example of her work for last: Mary Black's faultless version of one of my favourite ballads of father and daughter falling out, often with fatal results as here, over choice of lover.
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