Silly Wizard - Glasgow Peggy

 #Silly Wizard #Andy M. Stewart #Phil & Johnny Cunningham #Scottish folk #Irish folk #Celtic music #traditional

Silly Wizard were pioneers in developing the modern Scottish folk group blueprint, popularizing Scottish music around the world through playing traditional music with a never-before-heard energy, spirit and spontaneity and introducing original songs and tunes written from within the tradition.
Formed in 1972 by guitarists Gordon Jones, Bob Thomas and Bill Watkins and named after a character who shared their Edinburgh flat, Silly Wizard began playing at the capital’s Triangle Folk Club. Soon after singer Chris Pritchard replaced Bill Watkins they added a teenager who would go on to play a crucial part in the band’s image as well as their music, Johnny Cunningham. A tremendously exciting, virtuosic fiddler, who was still at school and often had to be picked up from and returned to the school gates after overnight drives from gigs, Johnny energized the band’s live performances and helped to generate a new young following for folk music.
By the time they released their first album, Silly Wizard in 1976, the band had become a sextet, including Andy M. Stewart, a singer and songwriter with the tradition in his soul, and bass guitar powerhouse Martin Hadden, and were touring regularly throughout the UK and Europe. They were shortly to add a second virtuoso named Cunningham, with Johnny’s younger brother, Phil, replacing Freeland Barbour on accordion, and went on to break into the American market in the most spectacular manner.
Booked to play an opening twenty-minute spot in front of an audience of thousands at Philadelphia Folk Festival in 1979, Silly Wizard, now in its classic five-piece line-up (Bob Thomas having left) won a standing ovation and almost instantly created a huge demand in the US for a brand of folk music that could be as passionate in the low gears as it could be rousingly intense at full tilt and was always presented with wit and an infectious sense of fun.
So began a golden era as Silly Wizard not only headlined folk festivals on both sides of the Atlantic and were capable of selling out the 3000-plus capacity Playhouse in their home town but also branched out into theatre work with the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool and composed and performed the theme tune for Scottish Television’s Take the High Road as well as releasing a succession of consistently high quality, strong-selling albums.
Silly Wizard continued working at a frenetic pace until 1988, when the band that had also included singer Maddy Taylor, bassists Neil Adam and Alastair Donaldson and Dougie Maclean deputising for Johnny Cunningham on fiddle left a gap in Scottish music that has never been filled.
Gordon Jones, Bob Thomas and Martin Hadden went to achieve success in the production side of the recording business.  Andy M. Stewart formed acclaimed duos, first with Manus Lunny then with Gerry O’Beirne. Phil Cunningham remains at the forefront of traditional music in his partnership with Aly Bain and his role at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Johnny Cunningham, after settling in New York, died tragically young in 2003.  From: https://projects.handsupfortrad.scot/hall-of-fame/silly-wizard/

Andy M. Stewart - By the Hush

 #Andy M. Stewart #ex-Silly Wizard #Scottish folk #Irish folk #traditional #singer-songwriter

Andy M. Stewart was a Scots singer and songwriter who was at the forefront of a resurgent contemporary Scottish folk scene in the 1970s as the voice of the Edinburgh-formed group Silly Wizard. In their early days the band held a residency at the small but popular Triangle Folk Club in the city, a Saturday night haunt which typified Edinburgh’s rich folk scene of the time alongside venues like the Crown and Edinburgh Folk Club; at the height of their popularity they toured to great appreciation in Europe and the United States – and sold out an annual engagement at the Playhouse during the Edinburgh Festival. The reasons for Silly Wizard’s success were many, but easy to broadly sum up: on the one hand, the striking musical virtuosity of the prodigiously talented young brothers Johnny and Phil Cunningham from Portobello, on the other the marvelously soft but powerful vocal ability of Stewart, and in between the skills of key prime-era members Gordon Jones and Martin Hadden.
A well-spoken raconteur on the live stage, whose ability to introduce his songs informatively and with genuine humor enhanced the experience of hearing them, Stewart wrote music and lyrics which are – particularly in the case of his ballads – rich and still freshly emotive. A skilled banjo player who used his middle initial to distinguish himself from the elder Scots singer who shared his name, Stewart’s skills lay in interpreting Scottish folk standards and in writing additions to the canon which were at once traditional and modern. His songs ran a range of emotions from the delicate romance of The Queen of Argyll to the knowing humor of The Ramblin’ Rover.  From: https://www.scotsman.com/news/obituaries/obituary-andy-m-stewart-singer-and-songwriter-1997406

By the Hush / Paddy's Lamentation

O.J. Abbott from Hull, Quebec, sang the emigrant and Civil War song By the Hush, Me Boys in a 1957 field recording made by Edith Fowke. It was included in 1961 on his Folkways album Irish and British Songs from the Ottawa Valley, and in 1975 on the Leader album Far Canadian Fields, which was offered as the acoustic companion to Fowke's Penguin Book of Canadian Folk Songs. She noted in the Leader album's booklet:
Although this song obviously came out of the American Civil War it seems to be unknown in the United States. O.J. Abbott learned it from Mrs. O'Malley, the wife of an Ottawa valley farmer, for whom he worked back in the 1880s. We can only surmise that she must have heard it from some Irish-American who wandered up to Canada after the Civil War.
This is an interesting combination of two themes common in many Irish songs: that of emigrating, and of becoming involved in other countries' wars. Of course thousands of Irish emigrants did ‘fight for Lincoln’, and the ‘General Mahar’ mentioned was probably General Thomas Francis Meagher, commander of the famous Irish Brigade that distinguished itself on the heights of Fredericksburg and in the battle of Richmond. His promise of a pension ‘if you get shot or lose your head’ is a fine example of Irish graveyard humour.

Edith Fowke collected this song, also known as Paddy's Lamentation, in 1957, from O.J. Abbott (1872-1962) who was born in Enfield, England, and came across to work in Ontario lumber camps. It has been found in print as a broadside ballad called Pat in America, but it appears that Abbott's version might be the only one collected in oral tradition. The realisation that Irish immigrants were essentially drafted off the ships into the Union Army during the Civil War provides the distressing backdrop for this song. General Meagher led the renowned Irish-American Sixty-Ninth Brigade from New York.

Will Finn and Rosie Calvert sang Paddy's Lamentation in 2018 on their Haystack album Beneath This Place. They noted: A song from the Irish Diaspora, this story was unfortunately true for millions of Irish immigrants who fled terrible conditions in Ireland for the promise of a new start in America, only to be conscripted into a civil war that they had no stake in.

More Maids sang By the Hush on their 2021 CD Fourmaids. They noted: This song is among the first ones Barbara Coerdt learnt when she started getting interested in Irish Music, and she is very grateful to have come across it on Andy M. Stewart's epic solo recording. It is one of the saddest emigrant songs as it tells the story of a man who gets no chance to start a new life but is drawn into the American Civil War, loses his leg and is denied the pension he was promised. In the end he only wishes to be back home, poor in “dear old Erin”—“dear old Ireland”.

From: https://mainlynorfolk.info/folk/songs/bythehush.html