Fil Campbell was fascinated by the lives of five Irish female singers whose voices were the soundtrack of an earlier generation, she tells Arminta Wallace
It was not a story Fil Campbell wanted to tell. As a singer herself, she had spent much of her musical career trying to get away from the songs - and singing styles - of an earlier generation of Irish women. But as she explains when we meet in the Westbury Hotel in Dublin, some stories just clamour to be told.
"I had been singing songs from various musical backgrounds in the clubs of the UK and Europe for some years, when somebody gave me a set of Delia Murphy recordings," she says. "At around the same time I was given a gramophone player from my grandmother's house, together with a lot of old records.
"So I decided to investigate some of the songs from the 1930s and 1940s, songs I'd learned as a child, with a view to incorporating them into my act."
Campbell says she has always been interested, not just in learning songs, but in finding out where they came from. When she began to delve into the background of these particular songs, she found herself mesmerised by the details of Murphy's life story, and those of other Irish female singers of the period. Somebody suggested it would make an interesting television documentary, so she kept digging. Now here she is, promoting a series of six television programmes, a CD and a DVD.
"The story led the way," she laughs. "I've just hung on and followed." Songbirds focuses on the life and work of five Irish singers: Delia Murphy, Ruby Murray, Margaret Barry, Mary O'Hara and Bridie Gallagher. Did Campbell know anything about these women before she embarked on her mammoth task?
"Very little," she says. "These would have been songs and singers I would have run a mile from. When I was starting my career I wanted to be a folk singer or a pop singer. So I knew the same as everybody else in Ireland - that Mary O'Hara had played the harp and been a nun, that Delia Murphy sang The Blackbird and If I Were A Moonshiner. And that was it."
There was, as it turned out, a great deal more to tell. Murphy's life, in particular, reads like a Girl's Own adventure story. Born into a wealthy family - her father made his fortune after the gold rush in the American West - she married a successful Irish diplomat, but was always something of an independent spirit.
During the second World War, when her husband was the Irish envoy at the Vatican, she became involved with an underground movement, run by priests, smuggling Allied soldiers out of fascist Italy. Her singing career was itself a sort of rebellion: in the Ireland of the 1930s it was considered mildly scandalous for an ambassador's wife and society hostess to "make an exhibition of herself" on a public stage.
"She was an amazing woman," says Campbell. "An unstoppable force of nature, I would say - a warm, strong character who would have been in the middle of everything that was going on in a very positive way."
Margaret Barry was an equally colourful character from a very different part of the Irish social spectrum. Born in Cork to a settled travelling family in 1917, she taught herself the banjo and started playing on the streets at the age of 14.
After her mother died, she set off to tour the country on a bicycle, singing at football matches, cinema queues, fair days - anywhere she could find an audience. She was later recorded by the American song collector Alan Lomax, and her first album, Songs of an Irish Tinker Lady, was released in 1952.
Barry spent much of her subsequent career as a regular at trad sessions in the Bedford Arms pub in London's Camden Town, playing mostly to Irish immigrants. Ruby Murray, by contrast, was a pop star whose rise to fame was as meteoric as any of today's winners of reality TV shows.
The strength of the Songbirds series is its emotional - but unsentimental - focus on each of the women in turn, recreating their lives with the (vivid, often amusing and occasionally poignant) help of archive footage, musical colleagues, family members and, in the case of at least one programme, the Crossmaglen storyteller Mick Quinn. The final programme gives a broader view of this uniquely Irish take on what a more clued-in musical generation would christen "girl power".
From this perspective, Campbell says, it's obvious that although they sang many of the same songs, the five women came from five highly divergent areas of the acoustic music tradition.
"Delia Murphy sang 'come-all-yes' and ballads - the popular songs of the day. She had a really broad accent and got away with singing stuff that wasn't seen as quite 'proper' - but she also recorded a lot of very pure trad songs, although she wouldn't be as well known for them. The same went for Margaret Barry, who mostly sang ballads. At that time it wasn't popular to sing trad songs in Ireland. Musically speaking, we were too busy trying to keep in step with the UK and America."
Mary O'Hara, meanwhile, sang classical art songs in Irish - My Lagan Love, Róisín Dubh, Slievenamon. "She never seemed to breathe," says Campbell. "You know the way you instinctively breathe along with a singer when you're listening to them? The rest of us would be blue trying to breathe with Mary O'Hara.
"Ruby Murray was a pop singer but she had a fabulous voice as well. I was just stunned when I first heard it. I met her a few years ago - a lovely woman. Even in her 60s she looked like Doris Day.
"And Bridie Gallagher led the way in Irish country music. With her most famous recording, The Boys from the County Armagh, she was the first person to be an all-Ireland star, really - but she also shared the stage with such international celebrities as Johnny Cash and Pat Boone, and influenced generations of country and Irish pop stars."
Sonbirds also features Campbell, helped by a stellar cast of guest musicians including Steve Cooney, Laoise Kelly, Tommy Sands and Sean Keane, singing and recording some of her favourite songs from this eclectic bunch. These have been collected on a CD which is due for release this month. And, as she freely admits, to revisit songs one has learned in childhood and teenage years is something of a shock to the system.
"Some of these are songs that we all learned when we were very small. It's very different when you go back and sing them as an adult - even your understanding of the words is different.
"I recently came across an old songbook that I had when I started performing in public in my mid-teens. At the time, like everybody my age, I was a big fan of Janis Ian, and I'd been writing out the lyrics of At Seventeen.
"The words I'd taken down from the album bore no resemblance at all to the actual words of the song - instead, they reflected the understanding and preoccupations of a 16-year-old."
Campbell laughs. She has gone through a fair few chapters of her own life story since those days, she says.
Has she had enough, at this stage, of these singers and songs from the past? "Not a bit," she says. "Actually, I've become quite proprietorial about them - they're all my girls now."
Songbirds will be shown at 7.30pm on RTÉ 1 on Sundays, starting tomorrow. A CD of selected songs from the series will be released this month, with a DVD due for release in December