Given Andy Irvine’s earliest musical influences-Woody Guthrie, the Carter Family and Appalachian string-band music from the 1920s-it’s not surprising that he grew up to become a traditional folk singer. What’s surprising is that Irvine isn’t American, he’s Irish.
“I don’t know why I got so interested in American folk music; I just remember the first time I put a Woody Guthrie album on the turntable and heard Woody singing `Take a Whiff on Me,’ I was hooked,” recalls Irvine, 52, reminiscing via long distance from his apartment in Dublin.
“There was just something about Woody’s voice and guitar sound,” he adds. “And I’ve always been interested in songs about the common man.”
It’s 10 p.m. in Ireland, and Irvine’s about to turn in early for a change; he’s catching an early flight the next day to begin a tour of Hungary. A voracious reader, he’s enthusiastic about the book he has bought to read on the plane: “A Labor History of Ireland,” very much in keeping with his literary tastes.
“I feel that I’m very driven by history,” says Irvine, who also is fascinated by vintage American labor movements. “People so quickly forget the heroic stances taken in the past by people who stood up against social injustices in general and created the life we know today. That’s the kind of thing I like to write about and sing about.”
Irvine, who headlines Friday at the Abbey Pub, 3420 W. Grace St. (312-478-4408), has been singing about the heroism of the common man for more than 25 years, combining Irish, American and Scottish influences in a sound that has in turn influenced countless Irish folk groups. Along the way, the balladeer has played with several near-legendary traditional Irish folk groups, including Sweeney’s Men in the 1960s and Planxty in the 1970s and early 1980s. Most recently affiliated with Patrick Street, Irvine is touring solo, accompanying himself on bouzouki and mandolin.
A child actor whose film career was cut short by the self-consciousness of adolescence, Irvine traces his interest in folk music to the skiffle music of Lonnie Donegan, who had hits in England and the U.S. in the late 1950s and early ’60s.
“On the back of one of Lonnie Donegan’s records he mentioned a guy called Woody Guthrie,” Irvine explains. “I had never heard of anybody being called Woody, and I ordered one of Guthrie’s records. It took two months to get it.”
Guthrie, Irvine discovered, was in a hospital in New Jersey suffering from Huntington’s chorea, the debilitating disease that killed the singer in 1967.
“I used to write to him in the hospital,” Irvine says. “He couldn’t write back, unfortunately, but the people who took care of him told me he got my letters and they would write back his messages to me. So I never met Woody Guthrie, but I got closer to him than most people got.”
From there, Irvine moved on to discover old-timey Southern string-band music, mountain music and the Carter Family. “Most of my friends didn’t share my musical tastes,” he acknowledges. “I was considered very unfashionable and eccentric. But I still love that stuff and do some of those old songs in concert.”
Irvine, it should be noted, doesn’t neglect his Irish heritage. His most recent solo release, “Rude Awakening” (Green Linnet) pays tribute to Guthrie and American author Sinclair Lewis, but it also features songs about 19th Century Irish rebel Michael Dwyer and Irish labor leader James Connolly. In concert, he’s also apt to sing about Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata and Australian geologist Douglas Mawson, an Antarctic explorer of the early 1900s-and throw in a few Bulgarian tunes dating from his travels in the Balkans in the late 1960s.
“The plaintiveness of the Bulgarian melodies is very appealing,” he says. “And the time signatures aren’t something you stumble across every day in Irish music.”
Irvine is enthusiastic about traditional music’s future in Ireland. “Kids of 17 are more into rock ‘n’ roll, but there are a lot of people in their 20s who got into Irish music through (traditional) bands they heard in the 1970s and ’80s,” he says.
As for traditional Irish music’s fortunes in America, “We have our brief little surges of popular appeal, but it’s always going to be minority stuff,” he says.
“It doesn’t really concern me, though, because I do what I do regardless, and I get audiences that are willing to listen,” Irvine adds. “I’m not saying that I draw an intellectual audience, but I do attract an interested audience, and that makes me feel good.”
