Writer & Singer Carmel Cullen

Delia Murphy c 1940
Carmel Cullen

Writer and Singer Carmen Cullen 

I recently received information from Carmel Cullen niece of the well-known singer Delia Murphy about herself and a show she currently performs; she goes on to say:

I am a niece of Delia Murphy and the show Hello Delia Murphy has been devised by me. I give the talk and sing her songs and am accompanied by musician Gerry Anderson”. 

Born in Co Tipperary

Carmen Cullen was born in County Tipperary and is the niece of singer Delia Murphy. She has been traveling with the show ‘Hello Delia Murphy’ since 2009. It has been on the programme of Listowel Writers Week, The London Irish Centre, Bealtaine Festivals and over a hundred more.

Her Novels

Her first novel, Two Sisters Singing was published by Liberties Press in 2013 and is loosely based on her iconic Aunt Delia. Hello Love, her second novel, was published by Liberties Press in 2017.

Teaching Career

Carmen was Head of English in Coláiste Dhúlaigh Secondary School in Dublin for more than twenty years and is now a full time writer. She has given Readings and provided writing workshops widely, for many years.

Poetry

She has published four collections of poetry and her book, Class Acts, Drama for the Junior Certificate, a collection of plays and workshop material for schools, is currently on the Applied Leaving Cert course.

She completed her MA in Creative Writing in Trinity College in 2009 and now lives in Bray, Co. Wicklow.

Biography of Delia Murphy 

No woman performer made a bigger impact on the Irish Entertainment scene since Delia Murphy. In the late 1930s, all through the war years, and for many years afterwards, she had the nation singing along with her in songs like The Spinning Wheel, Three Lovely Lassies from Bannion, The Moonshiner and Dan O’Hara. She was a unique personality on stage and off, and is credited with laying the groundwork for the Irish Folk Revival.

Carmel’s talk is special for the following reasons:

Hello Delia Murphy’ is told and Delia’s songs are performed by a family member.

The event provides a unique slant on Irish Social History and the cultural climate of the times.

It underlines the fearless nature of Delia Murphy as a woman and as a singer, who promoted Irish folk songs and ballads at a time it was almost impossible for a married woman with children to have a public profile, in particular in the show-business world.

This illustrated talk allows audiences to re-connect with their past and sing along with songs much loved and fondly remembered.

Delia was married to Ambassador Thomas Kiernan and Hello Delia Murphy looks at how he helped her in her career, despite the fact that an Ambassador’s wife should he seen and not heard.

The talk explains Delia Murphy’s meteoric rise to fame and how the tradition she began has been taken up by well-known ballad groups and performers, to the present day.

A small charge applies to the event to cover the cost of the musician. However, this can be negotiated further, if necessary.

You can contact Carmel directly through her website: carmencullen.com

 

Extracted from an article, about Delia Murphy written by Mary Russell, which first appeared in The Irish Times on Wed, April 23rd, 1997

ON February 17th 1924, a young couple married in University Church, St Stephen’s Green, Dublin. Neither set of parents attended it was rumoured each thought their own child was marrying beneath them. The groom Tom Kiernan at 27, four years older than his bride was a tax inspector who would later carve a career in the diplomatic service of the Free State. His bride was Delia Murphy, the blackbird of ballads who sang her heart out through the good times and the bad times.

Media consultant Aidan O’Hara, who met Delia a few times in the late 1960’s when she was living in Canada when he was a teacher there, had just published her biography entitled If Live Till I Die. He set himself the task having already collected a lot of material on the singer he describes as Ireland’s first pop star.

When she died, no one did anything about it and I thought that a little odd, so I made a radio programme about her and then a television one. She’d made a great impression on people and she had the whole country singing but of course that area of music ballads and come all ye’s was not thought to be very respectable. Anyway, I wrote the book because I felt someone should.”

To jog the memory of those who may have forgotten and to inform those who have never heard of Delia Murphy, the songs which she made famous were The Spinning Wheel, I’m A Rambler I’m A Gambler, If I Were A Blackhill and the one that’s been in my brain for the past three days, Three Lovely Lassies From Bannion.

As a young man, Delia Murphy’s father Jack, had gone to the Klondike to find gold but instead found dollars enough to marry a young Irish woman and bring her back to Mayo where he bought the Georgian house in Claremorris at which he had stared, in awe as a child. It had a chandelier inside and an orchard outside.

There were eight children in the Murphy family with Delia the wild one, always banging out with the tinkers who camped in nearby Featherbed Lane. It was one of them, a boy called Tom Maughan, that she learned many of her songs.

She went barefoot to the local national school and was later sent to the Dominican convent in Dublin’s Eccles Street (where, improbably. Dr John Larehet told her she had a voice like a crow and finally to University College, Galway where she gained a B Comm degree. It was while she was at UCG that she met Tom Kiernan.

Her father didn’t take to Tom, even though when he had a bit of local trouble with the taxman, Tom was able “to get him out of it“. Nevertheless, the couple married and within a year had had their first child.

Among her circle of friends, Delia Murphy was known to be good fun, always ready for a laugh and, of course, to sing a song. The image she projected of herself and one which the many anecdotes in this book readily confirm was of someone who could always be relied upon to say the brazen, daring thing; someone who would come out with anything. And, it seems, she did. Having helped Lady Gregory with her taxes, Tom was invited to bring Delia with him to stay in Coole Park where Yeats visited at the time.

Delia was considered to be a bit of a character and, like Brendan Behan after her, was someone everyone had met or at least had a story about. And because one story has to be capped by another, many of them are hard to believe.

Her nephew, Leo Cullen, retells one about her spitting into the fire in St James’s Palace and then rebuffing the foot man who appears at her elbow with a golden spittoon. “Get away, boy,” she tells him, “it was far from spittoons I was reared”.

This was at a time Cullen explains, when her talent for singing had no outlet and frustration with the restrictive diplomatic lifestyle was beginning to show, for Tom had by then been appointed to a top post in London. The frustration lifted, however, when they returned to Ireland.

Tom was seconded to Radio Eireann where he held the post of Director of Programmes, and Delia’s singing career took off. She began by singing at parities and functions, then concerts and soon HMV were knocking at her door.

In all, something like 100 songs were recorded over the years although Delia put the figure at 300. Her reception was mixed but the area of music ballads and come all ye’s was not thought to be very respectable. Ballads were considered rough, pub songs but as the more her songs were heard, the more popular she became though never, it has to be said, with the middle class, who preferred something more exalted.

Ireland, at that time, was entering the world stage and few actors wanted to be reminded of their humble, rural origins. For Delia, however, it was a happy time. In her mid-thirties, with four children, she was at last doing what she’d always wanted to and what she was good at. Her success stemmed from the fact that, she had a good year, could retain a melody in her head, had a phenomenal memory and was confident in what she was doing.

Tom’s Dublin posting was followed by one to the Vatican where the family spent the war years. “Everyone here is on intimate terms with the Almighty,” Delia wrote home. They stroll around the churches on Sunday armed with two chairs as a rule, and don’t take the least notice of the priest who is trying to preach a sermon.

In 1946, Tom Kiernan was posted to Australia which he found a wilderness after Rome. “He didn’t like it very much,” says his son, Colm Kiernan, now an academic in Australia, “and Delia hated it.” She finally returned to Ireland on her own to tour the dance halls and parish halls of the country, playing to packed audiences. In her last years, she found some peace, living on a small farm in Canada but returned to Ireland where she died, in 1971.

There is, an aching sadness to Delia Murphy’s life story as she was ill equipped to commute between the boisterous informality of rural Ireland and the rigid formality diplomatic circles.

Her best epitaph comes in a quote from Liam Clancy. “Her main contribution was that she made us feel that we could respectably sing our own songs”.

 

 

 

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