Eastbayri.com

BRISTOL — If you’re ever fortunate to hear a performance by Irish native Robbie O’Connell, there’s one thing you should know in advance: Please don’t ask him to sing “Danny Boy.”

Mr. O’Connell learned what many American audiences expected from a “real” Irish singer when he left his home of Tipperary to tour the states for the first time in the early 1970s. 

Working as an Irish entertainer during his school vacations, Mr. O’Connell would be greeted by catcalls from listeners from Boston to Los Angeles who failed to recognize his original songs as well as the traditional Irish numbers he was singing.

He’d later write about the experience in his popular satirical song, “You’re Not Irish,” whose chorus goes: “Oh, you’re not Irish, you can’t be Irish, you don’t know ‘Danny Boy.' Or ‘Toora-Loora-Loora’ or even ‘Irish Eyes.’ You got the hell of a nerve to say you came from Ireland. So cut out all the nonsense and sing ‘McNamara’s Band.’”

Of course, “Danny Boy” represents Irish music about as much as “Yankee Doodle” typifies American music.

“Irish music is such a wide spectrum — everything from The Pogues to John McCormack and in between,” said Mr. O’Connell, who doesn’t need to list his credentials to prove to anyone that he’s the real, er, McCoy. His roots and his musical pedigree speak for themselves.

Born in Waterford, Ireland, he grew up in Carrick-on-Suir, County Tipperary, where his parents ran a small hotel. “That’s how I got into music — I started doing music at the hotel on the weekends,” said Mr. Connell from his Bristol home recently. “By the time I was 14, I guess I was an opening act. I never intended to play music for a living; it was just a hobby. But I found myself still doing it and really enjoying it.”

His musical lineage may have played some part in his perseverance. His mother was a sister of the Clancy Brothers — ”Paddy,” Tom, Bobby and Liam — who found fame in the 1960s and are credited for bringing traditional Irish music to the American masses. Mr. O’Connell spent a year touring folk clubs in England before studying literature and philosophy at University College Dublin. 

Enter the Clancys

During his school breaks he toured the United States, but got his first big break in 1977 when his uncles asked him to perform with them in place of Liam, who was working on his farm. At first, Mr. Connell was hesitant to join his uncles because he felt much of their music was “old hat.” He soon learned otherwise.

“I quickly realized that they were very masterful about the way they put a show together. They were working with very limited musical ability; it was all theatrics and showmanship,” he said, adding that the common image of the Clancy Brothers as a “rah-rah drinking group” was, like a lot of Irish music in general, a misconception.

“When you look at the body of work the Clancys did, they didn’t do that many drinking songs — it was the people who imitated them who did,” he said, noting there were three to four “Clancy Brothers-type groups” in every Irish town at that point.

On stage, Mr. O’Connell occasionally jokes about the stereotype of Irish drinking songs — tongue planted firmly in cheek — when he introduces the song “A Jug of Punch” with “The common misconception in America is that all Irish songs are drinking songs, and it’s not true because the love songs outnumber the drinking songs by about 10,000 to one. But some of those are about the love of drink so it gets a bit murky.’”

With the Clancys, Mr. Connell toured the globe and in 1992 was invited — along with Tommy Makem — to perform at Madison Square Garden for Bob Dylan’s 30th Anniversary concert. (Dylan had been friends with the Clancys, particularly Liam, for years.) Although they were received well and the star-studded affair exposed the Clancys to one of their biggest audiences — the broadcast concert was seen by 200 million people worldwide and released in both CD and DVD form — Mr. Connell’s said he was ultimately disappointed with the group’s performance of Dylan’s “When the Ship Comes in.”

“It was totally bizarre,” he said. “We went in for the afternoon rehearsal and everything was fine. But when we actually came out on stage, the monitors were so loud it was like standing under Niagara Falls. It was totally disorienting. We did our thing, but it was out of tune and I wasn’t happy with it at all. But what can you do? It’s a live thing and the audience responded well.”

He did meet Dylan during rehearsals, but they didn’t get much further than the initial greeting. “He’s a strange fish — hard to figure out. He said hello to me and that was about it. He’s not the most personable guy. Even on stage he doesn’t talk much,” said Mr. O’Connell.

Solo on the side

All told, he spent 19 years performing and recording with the brothers, then another 10 with Liam and sometimes Donal, Liam’s youngest son. (Although the brothers have all since passed, Mr. O’Connell performs with Donal and Aoife Clancy, Bobby Clancy’s daughter’s, as The Clancy Legacy. The trio released a CD of the same name last year.) 

“Hearing all about (the Clancys’) glory days — a lot of unprintable stuff — was wonderful. We had a great time,” he said of the Clancy Brothers.

At the same time, however, Mr. O’Connell was also pursuing his solo career — as well as his future wife. He met Roxanne in Framingham, Mass. and they got married in the mid-’70s. Shortly after, however, the couple moved back to Ireland to run the family hotel for three years after Mr. O’Connell’s mother was killed in a car accident in 1976. 

“But the economy in Ireland in the late-’70s was even worse than it is now. I also realized I wasn’t cut out for that. I wanted to write music and play,” said Mr. O’Connell, explaining their move back to the states. Eventually the couple located to Bristol after Ms. O’Connell started teaching at Roger Williams University and raised four kids. 

Mr. O’Connell signed a contract with Green Linnet and released his first album, “Close to the Bone,” in 1982. “That changed everything. You have no credibility in this business until you get that first album out,” he said.

Although his debut featured only three original songs, Mr. O’Connell started writing more of his own as the years went on. “I’m kind of steeped in folk music; I write about events and people. They’re more like short stories than they are commercial songs,” said Mr. O’Connell, who waits to be inspired rather than sit himself down every day and force himself to churn something out.

Not surprisingly, much of his inspiration comes from his homeland, which he still visits several times a year. What he misses most, he said, is the country’s topography. “The landscape puts melodies in my head. I find myself humming something and I say, ‘What the hell’s that?’ I realize it’s the beginnings of a song. It sounds funny, but when I leave Ireland I feel heartbroken to be leaving the actual countryside behind.”

The immigrant experience

He also draws on his own experiences as an Irish native transplanted to a different country. A recent song, “The Shores of Newfoundland,” was inspired by the fact that so many people who live in that Canadian province are from about a 30-mile radius of Waterford, Ireland, where he was born. It got him to thinking that he probably has relatives there he doesn’t know about.

“So I wrote a song based on a simple thing of a young guy who goes out there, his ship gets damaged and they pull in for repairs and he meets a girl and doesn’t want to leave,” said Mr. O’Connell, whose father and grandfather both worked on boats and whose great-grandfather was a sea captain. “Fifty years later he’s still there — it’s the whole immigrant experience. An awful lot of what I write about comes from my own experience as an immigrant, or extrapolating from that experience and fictionalizing it. That’s been a rich source of material.”

And it’s a theme that any immigrant can relate to, he said, pointing to one of his more humorous originals, “Hard to Say Goodbye,” about longing for one’s homeland. “I’ve had people — Chinese people or Germans — come up to me and say they’ve had exactly that same experience of being caught between two different cultures,” he said.

Which brings us back to “You’re Not Irish,” Mr. Connell’s song that pokes fun at a Yank’s opinion of what constitutes a “real Irishman.” Although it’s become a crowd favorite, some audiences still don’t get the hint.

“Even though I sing that song, (American audiences) still ask for ‘Danny Boy,’” said Mr. O'Connell. “Almost every night I play, I get asked for ‘Danny Boy.’ I just say I don’t know it, although I probably do know it. The only reason I shy away from stuff like that is because all my career I’ve always tried to do new music and stuff people aren’t familiar with. I feel so many other people are singing those songs and somebody’s got to put new blood into the thing.

“So far it’s working — still getting away with it after all these years.”

For more about Robbie’ O’Connell, visit www.robbieoconnell.com.