Delia Murphy - the Blackbird from Roundfort
Tom Gillespie
LAST Tuesday marked the 119th anniversary of the birth of Delia Murphy, dubbed the ‘Queen of Connemara’.
A native of Ardroe, Roundfort, she became an international ballad singer having recorded over 100 songs on 78 rmp records in the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s.
Born on February 16, 1902, she was a famous singer with a very distinct and notable voice and she was an ardent collector of Irish ballads.
Her father, John (Jack) Murphy, was a native of Hollymount who made his fortune in the Klondike Gold Rush.
During his time in America, he married Ann Fanning from Roscrea, Co. Tipperary, and they returned to Ireland in 1901. He then purchased the large Mount Jennings estate in Hollymount.
In 1962 she recorded her only LP, The Queen of Connemara, for Irish Prestige Records, New York, on the cover of which her name appears alongside the LP title.
Her father encouraged Delia's interest in singing ballads from a young age. He also allowed travellers to camp on the estate. According to her own account, the young Delia learned her first ballads at their camp-fires.
One of these travellers, Tom Maughan, who was around her own age, introduced Delia to ballad singing.
Tom knew all the ballads of the countryside and sang them for her going to school.
From it she learned ‘If I Were a Blackbird’, which was later to make her famous.
Delia, according to the Mayo Genealogy Group, was educated at Robeen National School, and later at the Presentation Convent, Tuam, and Dominican College, Dublin, where she struck up a lifelong friendship with the singer Margaret Burke Sheridan from Castlebar. She also attended University College Galway (UCG), where she graduated with a Bachelor of Commerce degree.
In UCG she met Dr. Thomas J. Kiernan. They married in 1924, on her 22nd birthday. Kiernan then joined the Irish diplomatic service. His first posting was to London. While there Murphy sang at many venues, including gatherings of Irish exiles, and became quite well known.
It was in the 1930s that she began recording and she told how it all began.
“I was in Herbert Hugh’s studio in London and John McCormack was practising singing ‘Una Bhan’. When he came to the phrase ‘Féach, a ghrá’, I had the nerve to put him right. I suggested he sing it all in one breath.”
There was a man from the HMV record company there and he asked if she would like to record. She said she would and they set up a time for a recording session, and the rest is history.
Delia delighted in telling stories against herself, her favourite being the remark John McCormack made about what made a good singer.
“There are one hundred things that make a first class singer,” he told Delia. “You have ninety-nine of them. The one you lack is a voice!”
In 1939 she recorded 'The Blackbird', 'The Spinning Wheel' and 'Three Lovely Lassies' for HMV.
In 1941 Kiernan was appointed Irish Minister Plenipotentiary to the Holy See in Rome. The Irish legation was the only English-speaking legation to remain open after the United States entered the Second World War.
Murphy became one of those who assisted Hugh O'Flaherty (the ‘Vatican pimpernel’) in hiding Jews and escaped allied soldiers from the Nazis. In 1943, when Italy changed sides, many escaped POWs were helped by the legation to leave Italy.
In 1946 she was awarded Dame Commander of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre.
Kiernan went on to serve as Irish High Commissioner and later as first Ambassador in Australia, and later still in Bonn, Ottawa, and Washington, D.C.
In 1961, while living in Ottawa, Murphy made the recording of ‘The Queen of Connemara’, produced by Kenny Goldstein. Murphy and Kiernan bought a farmhouse in Jasper, Ontario, near the Rideau Canal, where she spent most of her time, even after Kiernan was posted to Washington. Tom Kiernan died in December 1967. Delia was the guest on Desert Island Discs on April, 15, 1952 - her selected luxury was a still for making poteen.
By 1969 Murphy's health was in decline. In November of that year she sold her farmhouse in Canada and returned to Ireland.
She lived in a cottage in the Strawberry Beds, part of the then suburbs of Chapelizod, in Dublin, and died on February 11, 1971.
Delia and Tom had four children and throughout her life Delia balanced writing, recording and performing her songs with a hectic life as the wife of one of Ireland’s most celebrated ambassadors.
In 1939 she recorded three songs for HMV - 'The Blackbird', 'The Spinning Wheel' and 'Three Lovely Lassies' - with which her name became synonymous.
During her illustrious singing career Delia made records in London, Dublin and New York, performed regularly in concerts and on radio and appeared in the film The Island Man, filmed on the Blaskets.
Delia Murphy was a popular extrovert, who liked and was liked by many people. Throughout her years of travel and living abroad she always proudly called Mayo ‘home’ and her diplomat husband promoted modern Ireland abroad in countries like Australia and the USA, home to so many people of Irish descent.