Fiddler Mary Malone came because, when she was a young mother, someone once gave her a homemade tape of Irish folk legends, The Fureys, a group of Dublin brothers that helped put Irish traditional music on the map.
Will Hill came because, as a teenager, he first heard the uillean pipes played by Finbar Furey on two now-collectible LPs, when Furey was young and still had a head of curly hair. Hill brought those albums with him to The Shanachie Pub in Ambler on Monday night to have them signed by Furey, who made a stop in the Philadelphia area while touring the east coast to promote his new CD, “No Farewells, No Goodbyes.” He was accompanied by performer Brian Gaffney.
And the actor, singer, poet, songwriter didn’t disappoint—not in any way. He signed the albums, performed the songs that first endeared the Fureys to American audiences, mesmerized the crowd with his intricate piping, and made everyone laugh with his stories. Like the one about how, as a young man, he asked famed ‘60s folksinger Tom Paxton if he would mind if he altered one of Paxton’s songs a bit. “I was cheeky back then,” he confessed. “Tom Paxton looked at me with his cold blue eyes and said, ‘What are you going to do with it?’”
He was going to rewrite it for banjo, Furey explained. Oh, and change the words a little.
There was a long, deadly gap in the conversation, Furey recalled. Then Paxton said, “Oh, go for it.”
So Furey did. And the Fureys recorded Paxton’s “I Will Love You,” catapulting it to number one on the Irish charts. “Then one night I get a phone call. ‘Finbar?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘This is Tom Paxton, Finbar.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Bastard! I’ve been singing that song for years and nobody’s hardly heard it!’” Furey roared almost as hard as the audience, who began singing with him at the first song and to the last.
