After 1,125 Cork songs in The Echo, Jimmy says: It’s time for my final bow

For 22 years, every week without fail, Jimmy Crowley has sent me a missive containing a different song about this uniquely glorious place we call Cork.

His The Songs Of Cork column has become an institution in The Echo, and a constant reminder of the profoundly deep and meaningful connection between music, people, and place in the Rebel County.

Today, after amassing an astounding 1,125 songs, Jimmy is hanging up his quill and the column he sent me for today's print edition in The Echo, will be his last.

At 73, the singer/songwriter wants to channel all his energy into other projects; his work here is done. And what a body of work he has left us.

As he reflected on his 22-year journey with The Echo this week, Jimmy called his column “a benevolent fund for the people of Cork”, adding: "It’s been a labour of love, we gave it a good old lash. 

I feel I’ve said as much as I can say about Cork songs.

He admitted: “I’ll be lonesome for the column, and I’m just knocked out by all the people who contributed songs and ballads to it over the years, people like Pat Daly and Denis Twohig, they were so good to me,”

“I have a lot of slow-moving projects on the go, and I want to channel my energy into them.”

Those projects include putting the finishing touches to his 15th album, which is in the can, and a novel. 

Jimmy is also pursuing the production of a screenplay about romantic characters in the 17th century - he was just on the way back from a meeting about that as we spoke this week.

He said of The Songs Of Cork: “I’m sure there are many more songs out there, but it’s good to bow out while the audience is still wanting more. 

To leave something like this behind is a good  thing.

A recent visit to Australia with his partner in music and life - in rhyme and in time - Eve Telford, left Jimmy feeling energised, but reflective. Hence his decision to focus all his attention on his ongoing projects.

We at The Echo, past and present, can only thank him wholeheartedly for his brilliant endeavours over more than two decades.

One of Jimmy’s big motivations for his column was that a song that was once vibrantly alive dies when the last person who knows it expires. He wanted to save them from that fate.

He can rest assured that he has done a great service to Cork, and its musical history, and ensured that the songs he has highlighted will live on forever.

Researchers of the future will forevermore be thankful to Jimmy for bequeathing his remarkable archive of 1,125 local songs to posterity, along with his trademark, beautifully eloquent preambles. He has done the city and county and Irish music some service. And then some!

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It was towards the end of 2002, when Jimmy Crowley entered the Echo’s offices in Academy Street with a proposal for a new weekly feature.

The singer/songwriter wanted to publish a different song or ballad pertaining to his home city and county and its people each Saturday, to build up a musical archive that would be left for posterity.

Jimmy knew plenty of tunes and ditties already - he had written some bangers himself - but wanted to use the column as a means of gathering more from our army of readers.

And so, on Saturday, December 7, 2002, began the hugely popular The Songs Of Cork column, with the first ballad, The Groves Of Blackpool.

Back then, I recall pondering how long such a column would last. How many songs about Cork and its people could there possibly be? Fifty? Surely not a hundred?! ‘I’ll give the column a year... maybe two, tops,’ I thought.

How little I knew then about the music and song that has been part of the patchwork of Cork since time immemorial! And how much I have learned since, thanks to the pen and musical mind of Jimmy Crowley.

I hope you, dear reader, have learned a few things too along the way, about this remarkable city, this singular county, about its people, its past, its present, and its future, through the medium of 1,125 songs and lyrics.

Each week for 22 years, Jimmy faithfully sent his column to The Echo: a brilliantly written preamble - he is a wonderful wordsmith as well as a buccaneering balladeer - followed by a precious song plucked from the Cork ether.

Just listen to his description of one of the best-loved of all Cork songs, The Banks Of My Own Lovely Lee: “If you go to Thurles, and hear the Cork fans singing just one verse of The Banks, like, how can you bate that? It can’t be bet! I’d hate to be a Tipperary fan, to hear The Banks coming right through the stadium.”

A travelling bard, his emails have pinged into my inbox from all corners of the world: From New York in Ameri-cay, as he calls it, to Newcastle; from the ports and cities of Europe, to the New World, and further out, exotic places where even the Cork diaspora has not yet dared to tread.

Occasionally, just occasionally, mind, he even sent me a column from his beloved Cobh!

Some of the songs you will have known - classics and old favourites like Beautful City, Bantry Bay, and The Armoured Car; others were obscure and perhaps just a scrap of a chorus and a verse, as Jimmy sought the complete ballad. They were interspersed with the odd classic from his own back catalogue - like The Boys Of Fairhill and Johnny Jump Up.

He never missed a column, but came mighty close a few times.

“There was one time, I was having an ECG check on my heart,” he recalls.

I was in a hospital bed and I thought, Jeez, I have to work on the column, John is expecting a column, and there were wires everywhere! Someone brought in an old laptop, and I got it through then.

“It was done from a hospital bed on more occasions than you might think. But we didn’t miss, ever.”

Smashing through the 1,000-song barrier in 2022 was an amazing achievement, and Jimmy admitted then: “Never in my wildest dreams did I think we would make 1,000. I can’t believe it, it’s extraordinary. It’s been a pleasure, I never thought it would go for this long.”

Could any other place than Cork boast such an extensive musical library?

Jimmy gave an insight into why this might be, when he outlined his belief that Corkonians use the medium of song to project their culture to themselves and the outside world. “We have an indigenous spirit,” he said, “which gives our songs a magical quality. There’s a defiance in Cork, maybe the Rebel Cork thing... there’s a confidence about Cork and its people, maybe an over-confidence.”

Among the musicians paying tribute to his 1,000th song in 2022 was his old friend Christy Moore, who toured Cork with Jimmy in 1976. “Jimmy has been a master collector of songs. Blood and Bandage to the core,“ said Moore.

Singer John Spillane said The Songs Of Cork series was “iconic” and “testament to Jimmy’s great scholarship and the rich biodiversity of the Cork song tradition”.

Cork composer Peadar Ó Riada said: “God only knows what corner or cranny he pokes all the songs from, but he does so consistently, to keep providing songs for our paper.”

After he hit that 1,000-song landmark, Jimmy racked up another 125 for good measure. Now he can concentrate on making more beautiful music, about life and death, love and loss, and - I’ll stick my neck out here - his beloved Cork.

Bualadh bos, Jimmy!