Johnny McEvoy

He turns 75 in April, but Johnny McEvoy is living proof of the timeworn adage: you’re as young as you feel. Darragh McManus spoke to the folk performer as he continues his nationwide tour

The veteran folk singer is back on a nationwide tour with his new album The Eclectic. Darragh McManus spoke to him

The legendary folk troubadour Johnny McEvoy is on a nationwide tour until March, followed by a tour of the US and Canada, as well as playing in the UK for the first time in 25 years. He’s also just released a new album, The Eclectic, his fifth in as many years.

He has the vim and vigour of a man half his age. Ironically, a decade ago Johnny says he was “in the doldrums, going nowhere. I was playing gigs I didn’t want to play. Meanwhile, the record company had decided to just release compilation albums, which are grand for making money but I wanted to record new material. I went about ten years without doing new material. At times I just felt, I can’t go on with this.”

Things changed dramatically when Darren Farrell became his manager, and Johnny’s career started to take off again. He says, “I was doing what I wanted to do again, singing my own songs, getting lots of work. We started doing theatre tours around the country – I do two a year now, in spring and then around October-November.” Then there’s The Eclectic, a double-album encompassing a broad range of songs and styles, including one beautiful track, simply titled ‘Thomas’, in honour of Johnny’s late brother. The cover is a beauty, too: a silhouette of a man against a galaxy of stars.

“That was Darren’s idea,” Johnny says. “He took the shot of me standing, and superimposed it onto the sky full of stars. We tried lots of covers and this was the one we liked best.”

You suspect that Johnny’s own artistic sensibilities played a part too, given that he began life as a visual artist. After leaving school, he did “various jobs – from washing bottles to washing cars – anything at all to keep me going.”

Eventually he began studying graphic art at night school and working for an ad agency as a commercial artist. “I intended to stay at it,” he says, “to get better. I wasn’t great and I wanted to move up in the industry. Then the singing came along and that just took over.”

He always loved to sing. Growing up in Co Offaly, Johnny “sang constantly, even in bed. I’d sing until 11 at night. All the songs out of Ireland’s Own and old songbooks, I knew them all. My mother must have thought I was mad.

“I always loved folk music, more than anything: The Weavers, Burl Ives, Hank Williams…they were the kind of records I bought when I first got a bit of money. I’d play them constantly on an old record-player we had; so much that my sister knows as much about the likes of Hank Williams as me!

“It was on all the time. I know it drove my father mad. He was always saying, ‘Turn off that ould stuff.’ He only liked céilí music.”

The early 1960s, he recalls, was “a great time” for folk music. Young Turks coming on the scene in Greenwich Village, RTÉ playing a lot of folk on radio and television. And of course, The Clancy Brothers were riding high.

“They were great because they sang songs that anyone could sing,” Johnny says. “Old songs that we all knew, but maybe had forgotten about, sung in their own style. We discovered that we had this wealth of great songs. As a young fella, I used to sing them at parties.”

While studying in Rathmines, he met a guy from Waterford, called Michael Crotty, and they became friends. Johnny takes up the story: “We’d go around everywhere on his scooter and eventually began going to the folk clubs and bars. I realised this is what I want to do.

“I started in late 1963, when I was 19, and got a break with a ballad session on RTÉ, which is still going today. I took it very seriously and worked all the time to try and break into the business. I wasn’t trying it out for a few years; I’d made up my mind that this was what I was going to do for the rest of my life. I was very single-minded about it, and still am today.

“Anyway, all this was interfering with the job, so…I gave up the job. I chose music instead. Thankfully, I’ve been working steadily since.” The Eclectic is out now on Trad Nua Records. See johnnymcevoy.com for tour dates