“I know this sounds odd, but I may be the only Irish-ish person that loves Longford,” John Murry tells me. “My ex’s mother once said, ‘Who lives in Longford?’ I loved it because no one goes there. It’s just got such an interesting history. It reminded me increasingly of Mississippi.”
I have rarely interviewed a more interesting fellow. A close relative of William Faulkner – his grandmother was the author’s first cousin – this singular American (and Irish-ish) musician, whose conversation moves as slowly and unstoppably as the river that named his home state, is no longer resident in our fine midlands. Recently married, Murry moved back home after years feeling welcome in Ireland. He now speaks to me from Boston.
“So I’m still in Ireland,” he says with a laugh. “There’s a pub we go to that’s called the Druid that looks just like another pub in Galway. It has all the arts-festival posters, all the Fleadh posters.”
We can all think of at least one American celebrity who felt themselves driven from the United States to Ireland by the recent restoration of Donald Trump, but Murry reacted in the opposite fashion.
“When Trump was elected I felt a responsibility to be here,” he says. “I feel somebody’s got to do something. People need to be able to fight. And I’m not quite sure what I mean by that.”
Murry furrows his brow and ponders his Native American heritage.
“It’s a disturbing kind of time,” he says. “But this country was here before. It was here when my relatives were here. My relations have the oldest bones found on this continent, right? And I’m watching Americans get deported. When I say ‘Americans’, I mean, they may be Latin American or Central American or whatever, but they’re Americans more so than Donald Trump.”
There is a lot more swampy talk in a fine new documentary from Sarah Share entitled The Graceless Age: The Ballad of John Murry. Named for his acclaimed 2012 album, the film begins in Ireland and then takes Murry back to his native soil in Mississippi.
It is a tale full of sorrow, abuse and Gothic poetry. We hear about the lingering Faulkner influence: though Murry was adopted, his grandmother said he was “more like Bill than any of us”.
It does not seem to have been a happy childhood, but he does remember being always having books around. One can hardly be surprised that someone who grew up so close to Elvis Presley’s childhood home – and was steeped in the Delta blues – ending up grabbing a guitar.
The wrong sort of formative experience arrived when, appalled at what they saw as delinquent behaviour (it doesn’t sound like much), his parents sent him to a fundamentalist Christian “rehabilitation” facility. He was there repeatedly abused by older students. It feels reductive to ask whether that trauma is at the root of his tortured music and of previous problems with heroin addiction. But it is also an unavoidable response.
He shows no offence.
“There’s certainly some relationship,” he says. “If you were to go back into my childhood, I would say that music in the church – even in the church choir – was the transcendental thing that made me feel the art of the invisible. But, to another degree, I think I started [music] in the same way that everyone else does: I kind of wanted a girlfriend.
[ John Murry: 'Songwriting? To me it just happens and that’s all there is to it'Opens in new window ]
“It’s been a thing I’ve never been able to shake. I’ve tried a lot of my adult life to fight against myself. We live in times when it’s not terribly easy to make a living doing these kind of things: make a film, make a record.”
Murry does not, however, downplay the lingering influence of the abuse.
“Those experiences as a teenager made me angry and they made me write,” he says. “They gave me a lot of rage. And I didn’t know what to do with that, whether it was to abuse my body and then to write about that and to create things about that. That to some degree took the place of abusing my body. It gave me the opportunity to realise you can play music. You don’t have to destroy yourself in the same way.”
He smiles as he tells me about an inspirational lecturer who, after he finished a degree, was pushing him towards graduate school at the University of Chicago when she saw him and his band play a hugely well-received gig. “Why the hell are you going to school?” his mentor remarked, approvingly.
Somewhere in there he found an escape in Ireland. Celebrating his time here, he reveals an apparently endless knowledge of Irish literature, music and wider culture
“That was the permission that I needed to do this,” he says. “There was something my daughter said. During the pandemic I said, ‘I think I’m going to do something else. This is not working out.’ She was, like, ‘Good luck!’ I was, like, ‘What do you mean?’ She said, ‘You’ll make another record. That’s what you’re going to do.’ And she’s ultimately right.”
Murry has a reasonable claim to that rock-journo cliche of being the best artist you’ve never heard of. The Graceless Age, his debut solo record, was roughly positioned in the confluence between folk, blues and whatever “roots” means, but the searing confessional tone of the lyrics was all his own.
In the mid-1990s he had become hooked on heroin and, as Share’s film explains, had at least one close encounter with oblivion. Little Colored Balloons, an epic nine-minute track on The Graceless Age, envelops us in that darkness. “Saran wrap and little coloured balloons,” he sings. “A black nickel, a needle and a spoon. You say this ain’t what I am. This is what I do to warn your ghost away.”
I was wondering whether he had any concerns about revisiting his often traumatic past in a documentary, but I guess he has been doing that in song for years.
“I didn’t know that it was going to go in that direction when we first began doing it,” he says of the film. “So it did require some persuasion to get it done. I feel like men who experience sexual assault like that don’t generally speak about it. And I just felt here’s a way I can do something. Sarah Share and I go back and forth. I’ve known her for so long. But we basically hold the same belief about a couple of things, and one is that patriarchy and toxic masculinity are destroying the world.”
Somewhere in there he found an escape in Ireland. Celebrating his time here, he reveals an apparently endless knowledge of Irish literature, music and wider culture. Every second answer, delivered in a barely modulated Mississippi accent, swells with quotations and citations.
Other fine records, such as The Stars Are God’s Bullet Holes and A Short History of Decay, followed. He became part of the domestic furniture. He lived in Kilkenny. He lived in Dublin for “five or six months on the canal – couldn’t have been a lovelier place” – and remembers “sitting there reading Stanislaus Joyce”.
Murry found his special place in Co Longford. He talks to me about Mannix Flynn and Aidan Gillen. You can see him briefly in Paul Duane’s recent horror film All You Need Is Death.
The longer we talk, the more I realise he has a complicated sense of belonging. He couldn’t be a more unambiguous manifestation of the American south, drawling like something from Carson McCullers (or from his own second cousin). But he now belongs elsewhere and everywhere.
“Let me think how to say this,” he says from Boston. “I see Ireland as home. I don’t see this country as something that’s recognisable to me any more. So I see it as a responsibility to be here and bear witness and to do whatever I can to stop the onslaught of whatever this is.”
The Graceless Age: The Ballad of John Murry is in cinemas from Friday, May 2nd
