One evening at the tail end of the 1970s I folked up at Barnsley Folk Club, upstairs in The Wheatsheaf at Town End, not knowing what to expect from the night’s guest. It was Donal, bespectacled, with an exuberant auburn beard flowing from his chin and a scarlet beret on his head. In his hands a tiny, gorgeous Fylde Ariel guitar. At the end of the night I came away, a little star-struck, with this LP in my hands. It’s been a firm favourite ever since.
Maguire was born in Drogheda but came to England as a fifteen year old in 1963. For a time he was resident at The London Singers’ Workshop, home of Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, Bert Lloyd and Seamus Ennis. By the time he released this album in 1979, though — his first, and on his own label — he’d moved North and was based just across the border in Rossendale in Lancashire.
It divides more or less evenly between tunes, accompanied, and unaccompanied songs. The tunes he tackles on mandolin and / or banjo are the big ones: The Gold Ring, Jenny’s Welcome to Charlie. The playing’s not flash or hasty, but there’s a perfect balance of wildness and control. Huge drive and energy.
As a singer, the voice is dry and slightly nasal. He performs in the high style favoured by Joe Heaney and Paddy Tunney: ornamentation a-plenty but the emphasis on control and restraint. So there’s an aching Meeting is a Pleasure, the suitor too humble for the girl he’s in love with; and a quietly joyful reading of the classic broken token song A Lady Fair.
These would be enough to sell me the record. But three songs are far more flamboyant. The first is The Widow of Westmoreland’s Daughter, full of farcical partner-swapping with all manner of bawdy shenanigans on the wrong side of the blanket.
The second two have as much fun with the English language as you can have without Stephen Fry. Heenan and Sayers, an account of an epic bare-knuckle scrap in 1860, in which both fighters carry a thunderbolt in each fist. The accompaniment steadily builds a head of steam, while the story’s told in (what my university tutors were teaching me to call) a properly mock-heroic style. Sayers ‘unleashed a savage blow / right unto Heenan’s nasal, and made the claret flow.’
But the absolute high point is The Star of Sunday’s Well, from which the record rightly takes its name. He lucubrates his ditty in a tale of unrequited love, for a young lady well-known for her consumption of Beamish stout, a fifteen-stone beauty who spurns her would-be inamorata in favour of the local grocer’s assistant. Unaccompanied, sung to a glorious, arching minor key tune, it’s a miracle of florid Celtic word-bending and contains my favourite couplet in all of folk song:
I wish I could administer / A modicum of Guinness to ‘er
He made The Clergy’s Lamentation a year later, smoother sounding, and then a long career-related hiatus before Gilded Chains and Sordid Affluence, which uses jazz guitar and saxophone. Interesting, but less to my taste.
You can find an older, neater Donal, shorn and shaved, singing Star on YouTube. It’s a shaky phone video recorded in a noisy bar in County Donegal. At first there’s movement, bustle and hubbub but, gradually, the whole pub falls quiet to listen. As should we all.
