An Irishwoman's Diary

POLITICIANS, teachers, priests and clergy have eulogised it. Comedians have "gagged" on it. Marriage counsellors "swear by it". And choirs. . .well, choirs have sung it with such passion that it may be an essential listing for many concerts to come. Johnny Duhan is talking about The Voyage, a song written by him and immortalised by musician Christy Moore in his cover version released 20 years ago. The author never realised it would become such an international success, translated into many languages, when he sat down to write a tribute to his father.

“When I die, don’t waste money on a funeral; just dump me in a dustbin and chuck me in the Shannon,” John Duhan senior, a merchant seaman, used to quip after he had had a few drinks back at home in Limerick. Duhan senior didn’t believe in life after death, or in the Virgin birth, but he attended Mass with the family when he was at home.

He gave up going to sea when young Johnny was 10 or 11, and when the “crew” at home had grown to eight. Although he took a job as a maintenance engineer in a clothing factory, he still retained his love of ships and shipping and his lack of fear of shore-based institutions. One day, after Johnny had returned from school the previous evening with particularly vicious weals on his arms and legs, his father accompanied him to school.

Duhan senior confronted the principal, a Christian brother, who refused to take action over the offending teacher. “Dismissing my father with a wave of his hand he tried to turn his back on us,” Duhan writes, “but my father caught him by the shoulder and asked him to take off his collar and come outside.”

The principal didn’t take up the challenge – “he stammered and stuttered and then slinked away with his tail between his legs”.

This is one of a number of stories that Duhan relates in To The Light,described on the back-cover blurb as the "only full-scale autobiography that we know of that has been written entirely in song". And it "took 40 years to finish", Duhan laughs, sitting over a coffee in Barna, Co Galway, and describing how it came about.

As his second effort at this form of publishing, the new book is shaped by the lyrics to songs on four of his albums. It is constructed as four separate stage performances, he explains in his introduction where he describes a recurring dream, or perhaps nightmare.

In the dream, he is on the stage of a large theatre – larger than he is used to playing – and a full house has given him an enthusiastic welcome. As he starts singing, a fire breaks out at the back of the hall, the audience dashes to the exits and he is left “alone and bewildered in a pall of smoke”.

If it relates to his deepest fear, it is one that he has sought to overcome during a career that has spanned several generations. It wasn’t an easy start, growing up in a city which is now suffering the worst effects of thoughtless planning, where the terrifying experience of a cold knife to one’s warm throat in a dark alley was almost a rite of passage; and where the loss of a son resulted in his mother’s breakdown.

Christine Duhan had her own very difficult start, having been orphaned out to a blind relative after her mother died. She was only four at the time, and her bereft father had been "lost to drink". It was a measure of his parents' love – as reflected in the words of The Voyage– that they survived the loss of their first-born son on the same day that John Duhan senior also lost his own father.

Duhan junior, always an optimist, was determined to turn his face to the sun – and perhaps it is no accident that one of his favourite literary characters is the dreaming knight, Cervantes’s Don Quixote. He remembers climbing a timber-stack in Limerick dockyard as a boy and being pierced in the hand by a splinter.

“As well as the throb of pain, I also recall a clear blue sky mirrored in the Shannon and the sweet smell of woodbeams stacked along the wharf where my father’s freighter was moored with raised flag, ready to sail.”

For much of his early career, he says, he lived like the wandering knight, under the “dotty illusion” that if he aimed for the stars he would “get the girl” – or Dulcinea. Tilting for that fame on the road in the 1960s and 1970s with the band Granny’s Intentions,he never quite made the “big time”.

But many of his songs more than made it, with other voices – those of the Dubliners, the Irish Tenors, Mary Black, Tommy Fleming and the aforementioned Mr Moore. The late Ronnie Drew once described him as the best songwriter in the country; and Duhan was bowled over by Drew’s integrity when the Dubliner phoned to ask permission to change one word of a lyric.

Duhan did “get the girl”, after several false starts – and discovered the good earth and sang to plants and vegetables on her parents’ east Galway farm. His book has much much more about his escapades on the road, his adventures in love, his big adventure with Joan to rear a family of four.

And he intends to elaborate, to fill in any gaps, during a tour which starts in the Town Hall, Galway, on Thursday night, and continues in the Draíocht, Blanchardstown, Dublin on March 6th and 7th, before heading by compass points south, north, west and south again over the next four weeks.

To The Lightsells at €15 in paperback, and more details of it and the tour can be found at www.johnnyduhan.com.