David Hammond is a big man. In the words of an old back-of-thebus song, he has an arm like a leg. Sitting surrounded by lurchers in his book-filled Belfast house, he is the full of the room and could pass for some ancient and powerful laird. There is a "scoops cabinet" dangerously full of yellow whiskies and the air is thick with cigar smoke and hospitality. His trousers have risen up to his shins to reveal, in all their shocking glory, the trademark boots - yellow cattle-dealer boots which very deliberately stayed on even amid the stiff collars and black tails of the Heaney Nobel presentation in Stockholm.
In Belfast terms, Hammond is a vital presence. His various roles over the years as schoolteacher, BBC man, singer, film-maker and director of the Field Day Theatre Company have all been informed by an intense belief in his own place. His love of the landscape and his faith in the people who populate it, might have made him something of a maverick among those who prefer to look elsewhere for confirmation, but more importantly, he also became a magnetic and liberating focus for those who shared his way of thinking.
Over the years he has become the centre of a large, mischievous and very talented worldwide web, a network of kindred spirits all connected by a late-night cordless phone which stretches from Antrim to Dublin to Newfoundland to Nashville.
And at the heart of it all is a love of singing and songs. Wellknown for The Wee Falorie Man in particular, Hammond has a huge repertoire backed up by an intimate knowledge of the history of the songs, many of them learned from his parents.
"Nowadays it would be called `a heritage' but what they really had was a legacy, and it was to do with isolation in the country, a lack of a formal education and a culture that survived because it wasn't interrupted by church or by school. These songs were more precious to them than the so-called popular songs of the day coming out of the gramophone. They had a choice of what they wanted to sing for themselves and what they chose fitted their outlook on life. And it was a very dramatic anthology of songs that they had. It included love-songs, great songs of disappointment, songs about great violence and so on. There was a terrific range of human experience there and it had been tested over several centuries because those songs survived and survived very handsomely."
Hammond's parents moved to Belfast from north Antrim in search of work and this brought with it many cultural collisions. As country people they never really embraced the city and their thoughts were always of going home. His father was Church of Ireland and his mother was a Presbyterian.
She spoke in the Scots tongue and came from people with leanings towards Home Rule. But despite the historic enmity between the parents' respective denominations and the more obvious sectarian divide that existed in Belfast, they both instilled in the young Hammond, not only a great love of language and song, but also a way of approaching life in the North.
"If they were alive now and I described them as being sophisticated they'd get a great laugh. But they were sophisticated people. They had some kind of vision of what life should be like and even though they never talked in those terms, they had little navigational charts that they stuck to. There was a sense of oneness about them, nothing tribal in them. At Christmas-time we would be taken to the Catholic chapel to see the crib or when we went on an excursion train to Warrenpoint, we got the boat over Carlingford Lough to Omeath and got in the jaunting car to go to the Calvary. They had enough sense to know that there was a oneness in Christianity and that Protestantism wasn't the only road."
At school however, Hammond began to encounter other strands of Protestantism which had no interest in the old songs, not even the songs of Thomas Moore and certainly not in the patriotic songs he was being taught by southern Protestant teachers who had come North after the Treaty.
Here, under the banner of religious education, was a different approach to singing, and the young schoolboy was not impressed by everything he heard.
"You'd get evangelical teachers and you'd have to learn chants like `I'm H-A-P-P-Y, I'm H-A-PP-Y, I know I am, I'm sure I am, I'm H-A-P-P-Y' and I hated that. I loved the majestic and colourful and beautiful language of the old songs and that was a terrific thing to encounter in early life - all the classical and literary references in those old songs. So then if you got trashy evangelical gospel tunes and they were accompanied by daft words, you got fly for them.
"But I liked the church music in the Church of Ireland. The psalms were all chanted and every two weeks the morning service was in plainsong. I also liked the Wesley hymns which were very stirring, joyful hymns of triumph. I didn't like the patriotic hymns though, I thought they were gloomy and morbid."
IN the early 1940s, Hammond discovered the work of the geographer-historian E. Estyn Evans. He describes it as "a revelation" in the sense that Evans was talking about the kind of culture Hammond wanted to examine further. Geography classes at school were filled with sketch-maps of Liverpool and the Amazon basin and yet the richness around him was never mentioned. And so, Hammond and a few friends began to cycle around Ireland armed only with bags of porridge and no real permission from their parents.
He began to encounter the landscape and the people his mother (and Estyn Evans) had talked of. In later years, in the mixed company of youth hostels, Hammond further uncovered the "oneness" that he was after and found that it usually took its firmest shape whenever songs were sung. In the Northern Ireland of the 1950s, Hammond fell in with people such as Hugh Quinn, Hamish Henderson, Jerry Hicks and Sean O'Boyle, all of whom shared his interest in singing, and soon there was what Hammond refers to as "a little underground movement".
"Then when the BBC began to be interested there was a terrific series called As I Roved Out. Sam Hanna Bell was in charge of it here and he was collecting songs. So were people like Seamus Ennis, Peter Kennedy and Sean O'Boyle. And it was all to do with technology. A thing was invented called the tape recorder and for the first time on the radio you had real people singing real songs. It was all part of that oneness of a culture that schools had never taken account of. I remember getting a songbook that time called The Songs Of The Irish Brigade and it was published by the British army. It was a book for Irishmen living abroad in the Royal Ulster Rifles, the Irish Guards, the Inniskilling Fusiliers and Dragoons and so on. You had Orange songs and you had rebel songs in the same book. That was a terrific wee book!"
On the other side of the Atlantic, the early rumblings of what later would be called the 1960s Folk Boom were beginning. In 1956 Hammond made his first visit to the US where he met Pete Seeger and Jean Ritchie. In Chicago he stayed with Big Bill Broonzy and spent time with his mother and his aunt, both former slaves, aged 105 and 107. He recorded an hour with Studs Terkel and also managed to make his first LP for Tradition Records.
It was in Jean Ritchie's house on Long Island that he first met Liam Clancy, who, along with his brothers and Tommy Makem would soon become the most famous Irishmen on the planet, closely watched in White Horse by the young and eager Bob Dylan. It was an exciting time.
"I remember in America I heard two names that I had never heard before. One was Elvis the Pelvis and the other was Harry Belafonte. I thought they were calling him `Hairy Belly' Fonte and I thought that was very outspoken even for America! I was totally intent on the traditional movement. I was seeing Irish songs coming up in American songs and I sent home a huge parcel of books by people like John Lomax and Alan Lomax and those books have been my constant companions.
`YES, I remember Dylan alright, but he was only a kid and nobody paid much attention to him at all. The Clancys were setting the thing up but Dylan was doing the reverse taking it down, mumbling, and using the currency of the tunes to fit his own words. It never ran in parallel with the Clancys because he was very much in tune with the present time and the protest movement and so on. He didn't strike me as someone who was going to be significant but that was my fault. It was nothing to do with Dylan, after all I thought Riverdance was going to be a failure!"
Hammond continued to visit the US, but also managed to work for many years as a teacher and sang songs such as Casey Jones to a classful of boys in Belfast's Orangefield, which included Van Morrison. Later it was perhaps inevitable that the talent-hungry and idealistic BBC, in those days shepherded by people like Sam Hanna Bell, would soon be fertile ground for Hammond, who regularly sang and wrote scripts throughout the 1950s and 1960s, eventually taking up a post as a producer and inviting people such as Seamus Heaney and Brian Friel to contribute scripts to schools' programming.
Between the singing and producing, Hammond became a public figure with undoubted influence and, within Belfast, an increasingly unique and important voice. But strip everything else away and David Hammond remained an exceptional singer of the purest (as opposed to the "purist") variety.
"I never described myself as a traditional singer because I knew I wasn't one. I came to it from a background of learning and it was much less instinctive. But there is no more powerful experience than to be sitting in a room with people who just sing songs to each other. The human voice. My father would have used the expression `it takes you out of yourself' and we would now use the word `transcendental'. But it is like that - there is that intimacy and you can express something in song that you cannot express in speech. The music comes out of the heart. It comes through the head but it starts in the heart. You don't need a typewriter or a pen or a page and even if you don't know the words, the tune can get a hold of you. And those tunes are so elemental that they pierce the top layer." David Hammond can hold an audience, large or small, with extraordinary skill. His manner is genial, generous and maybe not entirely devoid of craft - not for nothing is his film company is called Flying Fox for a reason. Once those cattle-dealer boots are planted on a stage, the huge frame and the innocent face do not quite prepare the listener for the voice that first emerges perhaps to sing I Wish My Love Was A Red, Red Rose or maybe a few children's street songs such as My Aunt Jane or Fair Rosa. As Seamus Heaney puts it in his poem `The Singer's House', Hammond's voice has "a hint of the clip of the pick".
"The idea is not for people to say you have a great voice. It's much better for people to say it was a great song you sang. The voice doesn't really matter. In a way if you have a very good voice it spoils the song because people start listening to the voice. I'm not saying that traditional songs are better than Mozart or Beethoven, but I am saying they are equally important and that a woman like Sarah Makem with her imagination and her perfect, effortless singing can lead you anywhere into a love song or into the desolation of the human spirit. These songs tell you what people actually felt and that is why they are important."