More favourite albums: Van Morrison and the Chieftains – Irish Heartbeat

The album cover of Van Morrison and the Chieftains “Irish Heartbeat”.

A few years ago I had fun doing a list of 10 favourite albums. The list was a moveable feast and there were plenty of great albums I had to leave out. Number 10 on that list was the self-titled 1976 album of Andy Irvine and Paul Brady, and there are plenty of similarities with number 11. Irish Heartbeat, released in June 1988 was a collaboration of prolific artists in their field. It was the 18th album for Van Morrison and the 19th for Irish traditional band The Chieftains. Like Brady, George Ivan Morrison was an immensely talented singer-songwriter with a glorious voice who emerged from the Northern Irish troubles in the late 1960s to world acclaim. Morrison was less in touch with his Irish roots than Brady preferring to mine the depths of soul and R&B for his art. While Brady eventually moved to the mainstream, Morrison kept a desire to get back to Irish music, an itch he finally scratched in Irish Heartbeat.

The recent death of the Chieftains’ founding member Paddy Moloney brought me back to the album. The Chieftains were less well known than Morrison but Moloney, an uillean piper and tin whistler, was a musical colossus making the Chieftains as influential in their genre as Morrison was in his. Even before Irvine and Brady’s Planxty, the Chieftains almost single-handedly popularised Irish traditional music, championed by John Peel and Mick Jagger, and featuring on the soundtrack for Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 film Barry Lyndon. In 1984 they made a groundbreaking tour of China.

Morrison began in Belfast rock band Them and their anthem “Gloria” (1964) before he made a string of solo hits including Brown Eyed Girl (1967) which became his signature song. Acclaimed albums like the ethereal Astral Weeks (1968) and the more poppy and popular Moondance (1970) cemented his reputation as a unique talent. Though both albums had Celtic influences, Morrison’s American style helped album sales in that country. As his career developed he wanted to place his work in an Irish context. “Going away and coming back are themes of all Irish writers,” he said.

Morrison and the Chieftains shared a bill at the Edinburgh Festival in 1979 and Morrison hoped they would work together again. He had much in common with the Chieftains’ talented multi-instrumentalist Derek Bell: both Belfast-born Protestants with mystic leanings and both devoted to their musical craft. In his biography of the Chieftains, John Glatt said Bell was interested in eastern religions and mysticism. Under Bell’s influence the band recorded a waltz by English occultist Cyril Scott which piqued Morrison’s interest when exploring his own spirituality. Morrison knew Scott had written about how music could influence future history and he contacted Bell to find out more.

In 1987 Morrison invited Bell to a conference at Loughborough University called “The Secret Heart of Music”. The symposium was advertised as “an exploration into the power of music to change consciousness” but didn’t lead to much. Bell said Morrison was “in a hurry” and his notoriously short attention span had moved on to born-again Christianity. “Van wanted teachings at the time but he didn’t want to do any work,” Bell told Glatt. “He wanted them now and if you didn’t have them you could fuck off.”

Despite the spiritual rift, Bell and Morrison kept a musical link. When Bell died in 2002, aged 67, Morrison called him “a wonderful human being, a true friend and a fine musician”. In a 1988 concert recorded by the BBC, just before Irish Heartbeat was released, Morrison performs and chats with Bell and others, discussing his love of blues and skiffle music growing up in the 1950s. The only Irish influence he mentions is little known Delia Murphy, a singer and collector of Irish ballads whose husband Thomas Kiernan was Ireland’s first ambassador to Canberra (the 50th anniversary of her death was remembered in 2021). Morrison admitted Murphy was an obscure choice but turned to Bell saying, “Derek, you’d know her”. Bell did indeed know Murphy.

Bell made his reputation on another obscure Irish musical artist, 18th century blind harpist Turlough O’Carolan. Fellow harpist Bell performed O’Carolan’s work on radio in 1972, catching Moloney’s attention. Bell joined the Chieftains a few years later, but he never led the band. Bell told Morrison that a collaboration would depend on Moloney. Morrison rang Moloney who immediately flew to London where they agreed on the concept, though not yet the contents. Moloney told Glatt that Morrison was searching for his Irish roots. “It was this man of blues, rock n’ roll, jazz, and more important soul, coming home to his Irishness with the Chieftains and the music we had been playing for so many years,” Moloney said. “Musically we were going to meet each other half way”.

This was important. Irish Heartbeat was as much a gamble for the Chieftains as Morrison. Many Chieftains fans saw Morrison as a dilettante. The band had recorded an album with another Belfast man James Galway and Moloney had played on other people’s albums but this was their first full blown collaboration. They gathered in Wicklow to plan the album and Moloney began a love-hate relationship with the prickly Belfast man. They often fought on the tour that followed.

Nevertheless as Morrison said in the 1988 interview, the album was “fifty fifty in the end.” Bell said Morrison gave the Irish songs a fresh perspective, while their music provided the Celtic cover Morrison needed. The strong Northern Irish feel to the album began on the opening track Star of the County Down, an air based on the traditional Norfolk ballad Dives and Lazarus. Cathal McGarvey’s lyrics tell the story of the young man in Banbridge, Co Down who falls in love at first sight with Rosie McCann, the “star of the County Down” whom he has a vain hope to make “a smiling bride by my own fireside”.

Next is the title track, Irish Heartbeat, one of two Morrison songs on the album. Morrison wrote it for his 1983 album Inarticulate Speech of the Heart with the lyrics “Don’t ever stray / Stray so far from your own ones” betraying his longing for roots. The 1988 recording was a warmer, more folksy version than the original synthesised approach. Morrison left no doubt he was on a journey back to his homeland.

Song 3 Tá Mo Chleamhnas Déanta (My Match is Made) has alternate verses in Irish sung by Kevin Conneff and in English sung by Morrison. It is another unrequited love song with a Northern Irish angle: “I walked Cork, and Dublin, and Belfast towns / But no equal to my true love could I find.” There is heartbreak in the end. “I heard the blackbird and linnet say / That my love had crossed the ocean.”

Morrison’s attraction to Irish poetic tradition shows in the fourth track Raglan Road. Another poem of unrequited love, Patrick Kavanagh first published it in 1946 as “Dark Haired Miriam Ran Away”. When Kavanagh met Dubliner Luke Kelly in a pub, they put it to the traditional music of “The Dawning of the Day” (Fáinne Geal an Lae). Kelly’s version is definitive but Morrison and the Chieftains gave it international recognition. Reviewing the song’s history, the Financial Times said The Dubliners’ delivery was stately, with Kelly’s voice dominant over simple banjo, while Morrison’s dramatic arrangement interprets the poem’s emotions with a vocal tour de force.

It is followed by another haunting love song. She Moved Through the Fair (the air later used in Simple Minds’ Belfast Child). This traditional Irish folk song was first published in Hughes’ Irish Country Songs in 1909 though the author is not known. A man sees his lover move away through a field after telling him that since her family will approve, “it will not be long, love, till our wedding day”. She returns as a ghost at night, her death unexplained, but she repeats the words “it will not be long, love, till our wedding day” hoping they will be reunited in the afterlife.

It’s followed by another traditional air I’ll Tell Me Ma. This English song was adapted to Ireland where the chorus usually refers to Belfast city and is known colloquially as “The Belle of Belfast City”. The song finishes with a musical verse from the Orangeite anthem The Sash, a joke not lost on Morrison and Bell. In the book Van Morrison: No Surrender, Bell recalls how he offered a Chieftains album to a Northern Irish friend only to be told “oh, that’s Catholic music”.

The Northern Irish love song theme continues on Carrickfergus, with Bell prominent on harp. Though named for the Co Antrim town, it was first recorded as “The Kerry Boatman” by Dominic Behan on an 1965 album called The Irish Rover. Carrickfergus does not have a consistent narrative and likely evolved from two separate songs. Although the song seems to refer to Tipperary’s Ballingarry coal mines it is also similar to the “Over the Water”, a Scottish song set in Kilmeny on the island of Islay. Wherever it came from, Carrickfergus would have been a familiar landmark to Morrison: “My childhood days bring back sad reflections / Of happy times spent so long ago.”

It’s followed by the second best song on the album and the best version of Celtic Ray. Morrison originally recorded it for Beautiful Vision in 1982 and was one of the first songs recorded for Irish Heartbeat. Morrison said at the time it was “important for people to get into the music of their own culture.” The longing is apparent: “Listen Jimmy, I want to go home / I’ve been away from the Ray too long.” Morrison was finally able to answer his own question. He was ready.

The best song on the album is My Lagan Love (there is an excellent live version performed for RTE’s Late Late Show). The Lagan river flows through Belfast and the English lyrics are credited to Belfast man Joseph Campbell (1879–1944) who collected traditional Donegal airs. The song mentions “a love-sick lennan-shee”. In Scottish Gaelic a “leannán sídhe” is a fairy lover who takes a person’s love and departs leaving the human dying of sorrow for their lost love. Morrison goes out on a limb, turning it into an almost gospel lament. The Chieftains more than meet him half way, Morrison’s voice is matched note for note by Moloney’s haunting tin whistle.

The final track Marie’s Wedding is almost an anti-climax after the earlier highs. Yet it is no accident Irish Heartbeat finishes with a rousing Scots folk song and a happy ending. After failing to land the star of the Country Down, the lost match, the dark-haired Miriam running away, and Belfast’s Belle, Morrison finally gets a Celtic wedding flourish to add to the Vanthology. It’s not hard to imagine the often irritable and temperamental artist raising a rare smile, and probably a glass, to celebrate finding his roots.

The album was successful commercially and the collaboration benefitted both parties. Van the Man found his Celtic Ray while the immense talents of Moloney, Bell and the other Chieftains reached audiences well beyond their tradition. Rolling Stone said the album was as overcast as an Irish afternoon, meant it in a way that could serve as Moloney’s epitaph: “Never hokey and always affecting, Irish Heartbeat taps into the melancholy, deeply spiritual side of the Irish heritage, in which centuries-old music is more than a way of life; it is life.”

Meagher of the Sword: Thomas Francis Meagher in Ireland, Australia and America

The statue of Thomas Francis Meagher outside the capitol building, Helena, MT

Waterford man Thomas Francis Meagher is fondly remembered on three continents. Meagher is revered locally for first flying the Irish tricolour in Waterford, In Australia he was famous for escaping transportation after his involvement in the 1848 Young Ireland rebellion ​and in America he is an important figure in Civil War era politics and was a early governor of Montana. His statue is outside the state capitol in Helena and last week a Montana theatre group announced a musical on his life and legacy.

Meagher (pronounced MAH-r) was born on August 3, 1823 at what is now the Granville Hotel on the Waterford Quay. Meagher’s father, Thomas Meagher, owned the building and was a prominent merchant and later mayor and MP who traded between Waterford and Newfoundland where his Tipperary-born father, also Thomas Meagher, first made his money in the fishing industry before returning to Ireland. The Meaghers were wealthy Catholics and Thomas Francis was training to be a lawyer when he got involved in Irish independence politics. In 1848 he flew a tricolour (probably in the French colours to celebrate that country’s latest revolution) at the Wolfe Tone Club on the Waterford Mall for seven days before it was pulled down. He was transported to Tasmania the same year for his role in the botched Young Ireland rebellion. He escaped to the US and became a Brigadier General in the Irish Brigade in the American Civil War. He went on to become secretary to the territory of Montana, and acting governor, before disappearing in the Missouri River in 1867 in mysterious circumstances.

Meagher’s time in Tasmania was overshadowed by a more famous Irish rebel, John Mitchel, who eventually became a Westminster MP. At the other end of the earth from Ireland, Meagher and Mitchel were brought together to plot an escape to America. That story was fictionalised in Christopher Koch’s 1999 book Out of Ireland a thinly disguised roman de clef featuring Devereux, the fiery journalist who arrived via Bermuda (mostly based on Mitchel, though with aspects of Meagher) and Paul Barry, the lawyer and orator from Waterford (mostly Meagher). I was reminded of Koch when I read Tony Moore’s “Death or Liberty: Rebels and radicals transported to Australia 1788-1868” which pays homage with his chapter name “Out of Ireland” about the Young Ireland convicts. Moore opens the chapter with a quotation by Meagher (who he calls one of mid 19th century Ireland’s finest orators) from the dock at his 1848 Clonmel trial which begins “I am here to regret nothing I have done, to retract nothing I have said”. The unimpressed judge handed down a death sentence.

Fomenting revolution in the middle of the Irish Famine, Young Ireland paid homage to the ecumenical United Irishmen 50 years after the 1798 rebellion. Meagher was aged just 25 in 1848. He spent six years at Clongowes Wood College, Kildare, and another four years at Lancashire’s Stonyhurst College, both Jesuit schools for wealthy Catholics. In 1843 he returned to Dublin to study law. He developed his patriotism and debating skills in O’Connell’s Repeal Association and quickly became a formidable speaker and ideas man. In 1845 he became disillusioned with pace of Repeal under the influence of the publication The Nation. His 1846 speech against the O’Connellites defending a theoretical armed rebellion in Ireland earned him the nickname Meagher of the Sword.

By 1848 Ireland was wracked by years of famine. The British reacted with coercion driving the Young Irelanders closer to rebellion. Mitchel was charged under the new Treason Felony Act, brought in to deal with Irish wordsmith trouble-makers. Meagher was arrested at home in Waterford by British troops. The official charge was a seditious speech to the people of Rathkeale, Co Limerick. After Meagher was arrested, his police carriage was surrounded on the bridge over the Suir. With supporters threatening to liberate him, Meagher gave a speech asking them to stand down. Writing in The Great Shame, Thomas Kenneally said Meagher was worried three nearby warships could reduce Waterford to rubble but Moore wonders if Meagher squibbed the moment revealing “the reluctance of Young Ireland intellectuals to roll the dice”.

Meagher was allowed out on bail and continued his original plan, riding to Slievenamon mountain to address 50,000 supporters while wearing a tricolour sash. He went on to Carrick-on-Suir where he was shocked by the size of the mob, “whirling in dizzy circles and tossing up in dark waves with sounds of wrath, vengeance and defiance.” He was giddy with the thought of native Waterford volunteers marching triumphantly into Dublin.

However Waterford stayed quiet as it did in 1798 and the revolution was a dismal failure. The excuse for an uprising was the suspension of habeas corpus on July 23, 1848 and warrants for leaders still at large. The hope was the peasantry would rise up but most were too demoralised by Famine to think of revolution. British leaders in Ireland including the Duke of Wellington, still formidable at 80, were determined to stamp it down before it started. William Smith O’Brien rallied 3000 men erecting barricades in Mullinahone Co Tipperary. However O’Brien was indecisive and had no taste for battle preferring to allow undermanned British cavalry ride through than risk arrest.

The revolution was destined to fail as an urban political movement lacking a base in the countryside. It lacked support of the Catholic Church which feared revolution would unleash anti-clerical excesses as it did in France where the 1848 workers’ rebellion resulted in the death of the Archbishop of Paris. The one feeble battle came at Ballingarry on the Tipperary-Kilkenny border on July 29 where 200 rebels with a few guns and pikes chased 46 well-armed police to Mrs McCormack’s farmhouse. Mrs McCormack pleaded with O’Brien her children were inside. He accompanied her to a window via a cabbage patch to secure their release. After rebels threw stones at the house, police replied with rifles killing two. The rebels returned fire but police superior weaponry at close range put them to flight. News of the “cabbage patch revolution” quickly spread and Young Ireland leaders were rounded up and arrested. Meagher was caught at a Tipperary roadblock and sent to Kilmainham jail.

Though Meagher was not present at Ballingarry, he was accused of high treason “levying war on our Sovereign Lady the Queen in her realm” and of “marching in a warlike manner”. Meagher, O’Brien, Terence MacManus and Patrick O’Donohoe faced a special judicial commission in Clonmel within sight of Slievenamon. The jury found all four guilty but asked the judge to show mercy to Meagher given his young age. Chief Justice Blackburn said the Irish knew the consequences of “making war on the Sovereign” and ordered Meagher to be hanged with the others: “afterwards your head with severed from your body, and your body divided into four quarters, and to be disposed of as Her Majesty shall think fit.” Meagher refused to plead for mercy and looked forward to a “higher tribunal where many of the judgements of this court will be reversed”.

Mindful of turning bumbling rebels into martyrs, Britain commuted their sentences to transportation. They would spend the rest of their lives at Van Diemen’s Land in “gentlemanly obscurity”, as colonial secretary Earl Grey put it. Moore argues their success came after their departure from Ireland. Meagher and others invented a new cultural vocabulary of nationalism, gifting Ireland the idea of an independent nation that Britain could never kill off. They stayed in the news with a series of legal challenges, political lobbying, writing books, articles and pamphlets, and most eye-catching of all, mounting daring escapes.

A year after being sentenced Meagher left Dublin on the Swift with O’Brien, MacManus and O’Donohoe. They arrived in Hobart October 17, 1849. They were joined by John Mitchel, Kevin O’Doherty and John Martin, all victims of the Treason Felony Act. Meagher was impressed by his new surrounds, writing “nothing I have seen in other countries – not even in my own – equals the beauty, the glory of the scenery through which we glided up from Tasman Head to Hobart Town”. The upper class prisoners were offered a ticket-of-leave and could seek work, keep their pay, and arrange their own accommodation (unlike five farm labourer rebels from Waterford involved in the revolution, who got no special conditions when transported to Australia). The only proviso was to promise to stay in their allotted areas. Smith O’Brien refused to accept this bargain and was sent to Maria Island. The rest were allocated to districts away from each other. Meagher was confined to Campbell Town 130km north of Hobart.

Meagher said his new surrounds “consisted of one main street with two or three dusty branches to the left and at right angles with these a sort of boulevard in which the police office, the lock up and the stocks were conveniently arranged.” He moved to nearby Ross which he called “a little apology of a town”. He made friends with Catholic priest William Dunne and courted convict’s daughter, Catherine Bennett whom he married on February 22, 1851. At Lake Sorell he secretly met his comrades Kevin O’Doherty, Martin and Mitchel where the borders of the three men’s areas met.

Despite Meagher’s pregnant wife and the beauty of Van Diemen’s Land, he plotted escape to America. MacManus, Meagher, O’Donohoe and Mitchel all escaped in quick succession between 1851 and 1853. To keep their gentlemenly status intact, the political prisoners formally quit their ticket-of-leave before escaping. Mitchel entered the Bothwell courthouse in great style with a comrade toting a gun before passing his resignation note to the astonished clerk. He eventually escaped to America where he sided with the Confederacy in the Civil War.

Meagher’s path to escape was well trodden, first descending down the mountains to Westbury near Launceston, where there were sympathetic Irish and a Catholic priest who offered shelter in a church cellar. When the coast was clear, Meagher was transported to the Tamar river and rowed 40km out to sea to Waterhouse Island in Bass Strait. There he spent ten miserable days with other escapees until the American whaling ship Elizabeth Thompson picked him up.

After swapping ship in Brazil, Meagher arrived at New York to a huge reception in May 1852. Then-president Millard Fillmore offered the Irish refugees from Australia “safe asylum and full protection”. With the support of the Irish-dominated Democratic Party at Tammany Hall, Meagher became a dashing presence around the city. He inspected military parades, and had a club, military guard and even a polka named for him. He quickly sent word to his wife to join him in America.

Before his letter arrived, Catherine had their child, a son who died of influenza aged four months. Catherine left Hobart for London on February 5, 1853. She went to Waterford where she was met by 20,000 people exalting the wife of a hero of 1848. She went to America with Meagher’s father but was overwhelmed by her husband’s celebrity status and their reunion was not a success. Suffering from ill health and pregnant again, she returned to Ireland to live with her father-in-law. In May 1854 she died aged 22 after giving birth to a second son, also Thomas. He survived into manhood and corresponded with his father but never met him. Meagher remarried in 1855 this time to New Yorker Elizabeth Townsend.

Unlike Mitchel, Meagher offered strong support to the Union. Meagher felt gratitude for his adopted country, renounced his British citizenship in 1853, and worked to instill US patriotism among fellow Irishmen. When war broke out Meagher enlisted in the 69th New York State Militia which fought at the First Battle of Bull Run. When its commander Michael Corcoran was captured, Meagher returned to New York to use his oratory skills to recruit Irishmen and became Brigadier General of the Irish Brigade.

The Irish mostly supported the North but didn’t support the end of slavery, concerned black people would take their jobs. But after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, Meagher came off the fence and supported the freedom of the slaves, losing him the support of New York Democrats. In a letter to Lincoln he said “recruits come in slow, though thousands upon thousands cheer me as I entreat and exhort them to rally round and stand to the last by the Glorious Flag of the Union.” A document at Waterford Treasures museum incorrectly said he was a pall-bearer at Lincoln’s funeral and his name is not on the pallbearers’ list maintained by the Library of Congress. He was, however, among the honour guard.

After the war ended in 1865 he accepted the appointment of Territorial Secretary of Montana, and became acting governor. Meagher believed Irish-Americans would thrive in the rural environment, which Lincoln established in 1864 out of Idaho. Meagher had the contradictory mission of civilising the wild west while depriving Native Americans of their lands.

There were other challenges. Montana’s first newspaper editor Thomas Dimsdale was an anti-Fenian and was involved in Montana’s Vigilante Committee with Republican Party stalwart Wilbur Fisk Sanders. Sanders and Dimsdale called Catholics and immigrants “miscreants”. They hated the Irish Democrat Meagher who wanted to populate the region with fellow countrymen and establish Catholic schools. After Meagher granted a reprieve to Irishman James Daniels convicted of manslaughter, Daniels was surrounded by vigilantes and was “hanged with the pardon in his pocket.” Meagher was warned to leave the territory or suffer the same fate.

Meagher died in 1867, aged just 43. He fell overboard from the steamer G.A. Thompson (ironically similarly named to the ship which rescued him in Tasmania) at Fort Benton into the Missouri River and drowned. An acquaintance, Captain James Fisk, wrote Meagher was on board to visit friends but “got on a spree….went to bed…was heard to get up and got out on the guards – a splash was heard – and the once brilliant and brave man was seen no more. Another victim of whisky.” Not everyone believed it was an accident and many pinned the murder on Sanders who was also in Fort Benton that day. Sanders had a political motive holding ambitions of being a Senator and feared Meagher would stand in his way. Sanders said Meagher had committed suicide.

Whether it was an accident, suicide, or something more sinister, Meagher left a big legacy for a short life. Many in the green battalions of the Civil War swore the Fenian oath and became battle-hardened recruits for the Irish Republican Brotherhood which eventually led to the 20th century’s IRA. Both Irish War of Independence leaders Eamon de Valera and Michael Collins used the American diaspora and their money to great effect. As the British commander in the 1798 rebellion Lord Cornwallis predicted, these Irish emigrants “would embark with a spade and return with a musket”.