Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Mary has music in her blood and a woman’s heart
Irish singing legend Mary Black talks about the highs and lows of her 50 year career
Mary Black has enjoyed more than her fair share of “once in a blue moon” moments in a singing career spanning almost 50 years.
But one stand out moment has to be when Hollywood superstar Steve Martin jumped on his private plane for a whirlwind 24-hour trip to Dublin in order to record a duet with the Irish music icon.
“I got a call out-of-the-blue saying he’d love me to go over to New York to record this song that he’d written, which he thought would really suit me,” Mary told me during a recent chat on Zoom.
“He was writing songs and he had different artists guesting on his album. He plays the five-string banjo. He’s very into bluegrass.
“But I’d just come back from America and I remember thinking, ‘Oh God, I don’t think I could face it’.
“It was coming up to Christmas and I couldn’t face another trip to America.
“I said, ‘Is there anyway we could do it here and send it over to him?’”
The funnyman agreed to fly over his engineer. Mary added, “But when it was all being organised he decided, ‘Ah, feck this! I’m going to come over as well’.”
As the Planes, Trains and Automobiles star’s jet was refuelling at Dublin Airport, Mary brought him out for “a bite to eat” at The Pig’s Ear on Nassau Street, Dublin.
“We went for a night of music as well in a real traditional music pub. There was a little session that he sat in on and I sang a song,” she recalled.
“He stayed 24 hours and flew home in his jet, out to the airport at about 11 o’clock and he was back in New York in four hours.”
It’s well worth checking out the song in question, “Calico Train” on Martin’s 2009 album “The Crow”.
“It was a great experience. He’s a shy guy,” she said.
“He walked in and he said, ‘I feel really nervous meeting you!’
“And I went, ‘What!’
“But once he got used to us and he got comfortable he started telling stories and had us laughing when we were having the meal.”
It was a case of history repeating itself when Mary was asked to jet over to America to record another duet.
“Again, I was only home from a trip and I’d just snuggled into the kids again. They were young,” she recalled.
“I said, ‘I don’t want to head back out’.
“It didn’t happen, but it was number one in the country charts for eight weeks.
“So that would’ve been a great launching pad. But I don’t regret it.”
America, she reckoned, “might have taken off more if I had put more time and effort in”.
“But I’m happy with the way it worked out,” she stated.
“I was never hugely ambitious. I wanted a life as well. I didn’t want a career to become my life.
“I had to have the two, because I had kids at home. I had my three week limit to be away at any one time.
“And I had that guilt when I was away from them anyway, so I didn’t want it to be more than that. I had to have gaps between the three-week trips.
“Because we went to Australia, New Zealand, Japan and all over Europe. We were busy. We had to work it out that I wasn’t away for too long.”
Two out of her three kids are, of course, famous musicians in their own right.
Mary’s daughter is the talented singer Roisin O and her son Danny O’reilly is the frontman of The Coronas, which
turned out to be an unfortunate band name at the start of the pandemic.
The world’s media made a big song and dance about it. But there’s no such thing as bad publicity.
“Oh, they got such slagging for that,” Mary said.
“At one stage people were saying, ‘Would you not change your name?’
“I said, ‘You may as well call yourselves
The Vaccines’.
“And Danny said, ‘I already thought of that. There’s a band called The Vaccines’.
“We joked about it. After six weeks it fizzled out. Covid-19 seemed to be the thing they started to call it then, which is lucky. The Coronavirus wasn’t as prominent.”
Was the mother-of-three, whose eldest son is a surveyor for Dublin City Council, weary about her two younger children following in her footsteps?
“I was always glad that they went to third level. I didn’t push it,” she explained.
“At one stage Danny was thinking of dropping out of college. He was doing a business degree.
“And I said, ‘You’ve one more year to do. Put it in your back pocket, you’ll have it to fall back on if, down the road, music doesn’t work out’.
“I did say to them, ‘It’s not just about talent. There’s hugely talented people who never made it. It’s about luck.
“Some people are unlucky and they don’t get those opportunities the way other people do’. So, they were warned. They knew then that it wasn’t a given.”
Mary’s husband Joe could also tell them a thing or two about the fickle entertainment industry, seeing as his family owned the Dolphin Disc music stores and record label, which released albums by the likes of the Wolf Tones and Paddy Reilly.
Joe himself branched out with his own labels. First, he set-up Dara Records to bring out Mary’s albums and then 3ú Records for the kids.
“It’s an interesting concept, the way it turned out. I didn’t want to be on the same label as all these ballad singers because
I didn’t think it was cool,” she said, laughing.
“Dara means second in
Irish, so it’s second generation. And then when it came to Danny and Roisin, it’s 3ú
Records because they didn’t want to be on the same label as their mother!
“3ú, of course, is third. So the third generation for the next generation. It’s just funny how it all happens.”
Dara Records released
I was never hugely ambitious. I wanted a life as well. I didn’t want a career to become my life.
one of the best-selling Irish albums of all time with “A Woman’s Heart” compilation.
“It was just an idea that a couple of us had. Originally, it was going to be all the Irish artists on the Dara label, male and female,” Mary recalled.
“The more they were looking at it”, however, it dawned on them that “there’s much more women than men” on the label.
“And I said, ‘Why don’t we leave it all women?’” Mary added.
“Eleanor Mcevoy was in my band at the time and she was singing her own songs backstage and I heard her singing ‘A Woman’s Heart’ and I loved it.
“I said to Joe, ‘Eleanor has this beautiful song and if it’s going to be all women maybe she could record that song for the album?’”
Someone at the label said, “We really want to have established artists.” But then Mary suggested, “I’ll do a duet with Elenor. It’s her song and I’ll sing it with her, so that will cover that.”
“We thought it was just a compilation that would be nice for Christmas,” Mary added, “but, Jesus, didn’t it take off like wildfire.”
It’s still Mary’s most requested song. “It’s unbelievable. It seemed to connect with women,” she said.
“And it connected all through the gay marriage thing. Women were coming together, singing ‘A Woman’s Heart’ during the divorce referendum.
“‘A Woman’s Heart’ became the song they sang defending women’s rights. All that sort of thing.
“It became an anthem for women almost. It’s played its part in Irish music history.”
How did Mary meet Joe?
“I knew him through friends. And friends of ours played on the same football team as him. I used to see him in the library,” she answered.
“A friend of mine used to fancy him big time. And she’d say, ‘Let’s go there, maybe Joe O’reilly be there’.
“So we’d cross paths. We didn’t hit it off immediately. We just didn’t see each other in that way until it just happened one day. I was 20.
“We were coming back from a Dublin game and we stopped in a pub with a gang in Navan and somebody cracked a joke and I just looked at him and he looked at me and there was an instant thing.
“I didn’t know at the time he was feeling it as well, but I felt it. And then it just took off from there.
“It just happened in a moment really. We both remember the moment. It’s funny.”
They tied the knot when Mary was just 24 and Joe was 26.
“Very young. At the time we didn’t think we were that young. People got married younger back then,” she reflected.
“It’s the luck of the draw really when you’re getting married. It’s a lottery anyway, whether you know somebody long, whether you live with them for five years before you marry them. It still depends on a lot of things. And we were just lucky.”
She also said: “I have to say I’ve been very lucky in my career and I’ve been protected by Joe. Joe had the music side from a business perspective.
“We’d say no to things if it didn’t suit us. And he could do that for me.
“He understood that I didn’t want to be away from my kids much. I was lucky that way, that I had that cushion with Joe.”
Mary is rightfully hailed as one of the biggest Irish artists of all time, but she was far from an overnight success.
“I met someone there at the weekend and he said to me, ‘I remember you serving me in the burger place on Talbot Street’,” she recalled, laughing.
“I used to work as a waitress. I used to work in a wool shop. I worked in Dolphins Discs after I met Joe.
“Back then, I wasn’t making money from music. But I never picked a job that would tie me down too much, that I couldn’t leave in case something happened.
“So, I wasn’t going to be a civil servant or a nurse, or anything that people would be saying to me, ‘You’re mad leaving that job’.
“I wanted to make sure there was plenty of space for music.”
What’s been the highs and lows for Mary?
“One of the highs was walking out onto the stage in The Royal Albert Hall to a full house back in the early ‘90s. I couldn’t believe it. I had to pinch myself,” she said.
“On a personal level, having my kids and seeing them do well. I’ve two gorgeous granddaughters, which is another pride and joy moment.”
Another recent high was an honorary doctorate Mary received from UCD in March.
She continued, “The lows? I lost my drummer Dave Early in a car accident (in 1996) and that was a blow, my God! He was in his forties. You don’t expect that to happen. So that was a low.
“I’ve had a few low moments in my life. Normal lows.
“A little bit of depression hit after my first child was born, postnatal depression. I had to go on antidepressants and I had some counselling. It’s one of those things.
“It happened a second time then at the height of my career, I was hit by it again. But at least it wasn’t as frightening the second time. The first time around is always the most frightening.”
Why did it return?
“It just came on me. I think I was under a lot of pressure,” she revealed.
“It was at the height of my career, around ’93-94 and I was flying. And maybe I was doing too much and it got in on me.
“It didn’t take me as long to recover from that episode, probably six months.
“I really feel we need to talk more and more about mental health.
“And I say to young people, ‘If you feel bad just go and get help, talk to someone, or go to your doctor. Don’t try and fix it yourself ’.
“And that’s what I did. Thankfully, it hasn’t happened to me again. Twice in my life I got hit by that and it wasn’t nice.”
Mary still gets a real buzz from singing live.
“I didn’t realise until I was actually back on stage how much I missed it. It was emotional. I was choking up a few times,” concluded Mary, who will perform at the Doolin Folk Festival ( June 10-12).
“The festival in Doolin will be fantastic. It’s going to be great to get back down to Doolin and have a festival in a tent and get that whole vibe again. I’d like to get to see a few of the gigs. We’ll probably stay for a few days.
“Also, we’re doing Ratoath Theatre on June 9, that’s a warm-up gig for the folk festival. And later in the year we’re in the Belfast Ulster Hall, Vicar St and The Olympia, all in October. So, I’m still dipping my toe in the water.”
And long may it continue...
The Doolin Folk Festival takes places between 10-12 June. Tickets can be bought from www.doolinfestival.ie
Mary Black will perform at Moath Theatre on 26 May, Ratoath Theatre, Co Meath on 9 June, Doolin Folk Festival on 10 June, Ulster Hall in Belfast on 20 October, Vicar Street on 23 October and The Olympia on 28 October.
For further information check out www.mary-black.net