BOSTON GLOBE
Boston's Balladeer
Eugene Byrne refuses to let cancer weigh on his spirit or silence his rollicking Irish music.
Living on airs as a performer for more than 35 years earned Eugene Byrne the unofficial title of Boston's grandfather of Irish music. Surviving cancer and returning to the stage also make him its comeback kid.
---------
When Eugene Byrne scans the young, loud, swarming crowd from the stage of the Black Rose pub near Quincy Market, it's a Guinness-sprinkled tableau that he's seen thousands of times. "I can tell from the moment I walk on the stage whether I can motivate this audience or not," Byrne says later. And that's not the whiskey talking. It's a distillation of more than three decades of singing Irish ballads for a living; the 59-year-old Dublin native is recognized by his peers as the grandfather of Irish music in Boston today. Then, with the energy and showmanship of an entertainer half his age, Byrne launches into another high-intensity night of love stories and laments.
The customers, for the most part, seem to take the music for granted. To many of them, the mention of Boston automatically summons up images of Irish bars and strains of Irish music. The songs are familiar and expected. But it wasn't always that way. When the popular Irish dance halls in Roxbury shut down in the early 1960s, Boston was temporarily parched for places where Irish music could be heard. That is until a few years later, in 1967, when Byrne arrived with his guitar, band, and the notion that skyrocketing interest in Irish folk music, a sound that had already propelled the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem to international fame, could find a home in what some consider to be the most Irish city in America. "I came here for six weeks and basically never left," Byrne says of his journey to the United States "There was no Irish entertainment in the area. It was a barren land."
A burly man and a singer and storyteller who routinely engages his audience - "So, where are you from?" - Byrne blazed a trail that many other Irish musicians have followed in the last 35 years. "If it wasn't for Eugene Byrne, I don't think I'd personally be making a living from Irish music," says Sean Cunningham, 38, a Cork native who is the founder and lead singer of Sunday's Well, a ubiquitous presence on the Boston circuit. "He's the one who kept it going in Boston. He's the Red Auerbach of Irish music."
But Byrne's gregarious presence nearly vanished from the scene. In 2002, he was diagnosed with colon cancer, which came close to killing him. That condition has been treated successfully, but Byrne has a small "spot" on one of his lungs that doctors are watching. Still, he won't - or can't - stop singing. "The way I feel about life is to live it for every second," Byrne says, seated in the living room of his home in Dover, New Hampshire. "If I can't sing, I'll talk. And if I can't talk, I'll try to dance."
His American-born wife, Maura, agrees that the man is irrepressible. One of his first requests after colon surgery, she recalls, was to ask for a frothy pint of Guinness from his hospital bed.
Byrne's US debut was at Carnegie Hall in New York, where he played a St. Patrick's Day concert as part of a touring group called the Blarney Folk. A more typical venue for the group was the Harp & Bard in Danvers, a legendary Irish pub that opened in 1968 and is considered the pioneering site of the musical genre in Greater Boston. When Byrne went solo, he traveled throughout this country and Canada, eventually establishing a semi-permanent residency at the Black Rose, which did for the Irish scene in Boston what the Harp & Bard did for the North Shore.
Makem, an actor-turned-musician who joined the Clancy Brothers in the mid-1950s to churn out a rowdy, rousing type of Irish music that had never been heard before, also lauded Byrne's longevity in a job that can burn out even younger performers. "Eugene is a fighter," says Makem, who also lives in Dover. "When he had [cancer], he had a wonderful attitude, a very, very positive attitude, and it paid off in a large way. He's kicking up a row as much as he ever did."
It's the only way he knows. While some singers feign amnesia when asked to belt out a ballad considered hopelessly trite or overly maudlin, Byrne will perform the song if he knows it. "I went through that phase where I'd say, 'I sing this song every single night of the week.' But now, if someone tells me, My grandfather used to talk about you. Would you play such and such?' I feel great," he says. Byrne was performing from a stool until last month, a concession to the physical demands of the job, but has since kicked it aside. He will perform at the Seacoast Irish Festival in New Hampshire in August, as well as run tours to Ireland. Although the songs he learned in Dublin become farther removed from their roots with every year, Byrne himself seems unchanged. "I love to sing, and I love to tell stories," he says, "and I love to have people sing along with me."
Boston is changing, however, and the same demographic trends that made the city a more diverse metropolis also mean that Irish traditional music might have a limited life here. Byrne, for one, thinks that the vitality of Irish music will always have a place on the Boston social landscape, and he intends to continue performing his up-tempo, singalong-friendly version as long as his health allows. "I'm like the old bull. I'm not going to run forever," he says. "But even when I'm 74, I'll be singing."
On his living room wall hangs a painting of three musicians - one playing precisely and clinically, another going through the motions, and the fiddler in the middle charging furiously and passionately through his music. "There's very few people in the world who can make a living doing what they love to do," Byrne says, looking at the picture across the room. "I'm still the guy in the middle."
Brian MacQuarrie is a member of the Globe staff.
(c) Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company.
© 2007 Eugene Byrne
Article by Brian MacQuarrie - BOSTON GLOBE