I’m sitting in a dressing room in RTÉ with the Queen of Country, Philomena Begley. She’s to appear the next evening on The Late Late Show Country Special (which aired two weeks ago). “The last time I was here was with Shane MacGowan,” she says. “I was meant to be doing a snippet from A Pair of Brown Eyes because of me and Ray.” (She and fellow Irish county star Ray Lynam are namechecked in the lyrics). “But what happened was Shane wanted to do A Fairy Tale of New York . . . Sure I didn’t know it and, to be honest with you, he didn’t know it either.” She laughs.
She’s getting her photo taken as we talk. “No close-ups now, I’ve no Botox,” she says to the photographer. “Can you airbrush this?” she says a little later. “I got photographs taken in Nashville on Music Row once. I had this pink suit on and a wig.”
Like Dolly Parton? Not quite like Dolly, she says. But she recorded in Dolly’s studio didn’t she? “I did aye, in 1975 and I did a couple of shows out on the park with Marty Robbins in Nashville.”
I tell her that I once went to Nashville with my wife and a friend and we played on Music Row. Everyone we met was a country musician, I say, every taxi driver, every waitress. “It’s bringing coals to Newcastle,” she says.
“Lean in, I want smoky eyes,” says the photographer. “Rar,” he adds, like a photographically-literate tiger.
Philomena shakes her head in mock despair. “I need to see some of these photographs,” she says. She looks at the photos and approves. Is she not a fan of having her photo taken? She shakes her head. “I’m 80 years of age,” she explains, while reaching down to fix her boots.
“You can still touch your toes!” says the photographer.
“I’m only realising that myself,” she says, with wonder. “My balance is dodgy enough. I fell a number of times. I tripped over a Hoover. And another time I tripped over the dog . . . I went up to turn the TV over and didn’t see the dog on the mat.”
She talks about this sort of thing on stage, she says. “I told them about tripping over the Hoover and the dog. And I told them about a night I couldn’t get out of the bath when I was away in England . . . I took the plug out with my toe and let the water out so I wouldn’t get drowned. I was doing a show over in England in the last year or so and I told them, ‘Any of you older women never get into the bath on your own’.”
The photographer is finished now and we’re sitting at a big-illuminated dressing room mirror. I ask her about growing up in Pomeroy in Co Tyrone. “My father was a breadman,” she says. “There were five girls and three boys . . . You could have gone out and left your door open. It was a happy time. We enjoyed life and looking back on it now, there were no phones and that’s ruined the whole thing for youngsters nowadays.”
What was the first record she ever bought? “The first record we bought was Gene Stuart, Come on Home and Sing the Blues to Daddy. I would have been a good friend of Gene in later years . . . He was from Tyrone.”
She always sang. She sang in choirs and at Feis Ceols. She won 10 shillings at a roadshow for singing Brahms’ Lullaby with another girl. She sang over the sewing machines at Fisher’s hat factory in Cookstown where she worked when she left school. “I was clipping rabbit fur hats at the time . . . I’d start up singing . . . ‘Bless them all, bless them all, the long, the short and the tall, we get no enjoyment from Fisher’s employment’.” She laughs. “It was only a bit of craic.”
One day she got up on stage as a dare and ended up being asked to join the Old Cross Ceili Band, which also happened to feature her future husband, Tom Quinn. What did she sing? “I’ve a notion I did Forty Shades of Green . . . Then the boys came looking for me to see if I’d go out for a couple of nights.”
At the start they played céilí music at dances but the music morphed into country and the Old Cross Ceili Band morphed into Philomena Begley and the Country Flavour. “The American forces radio had a country show and one of the fellas in the band used to listen into that . . . He had got some records of Hank Williams and Kitty Wells . . . The first country song [we did] was My Son Calls Another Man Daddy . . . The first one that that got played on the radio was one called You’re Here Today and Gone Tomorrow.”
Why does she think country music is so popular in Ireland? It’s partly because Irish country music is designed to be danced to, she says, “It was about the beat – quickstep and jiving . . . Way back in the early days, everybody would say, ‘If you can’t dance to Big Tom you can’t dance’.” And everybody can identify with the lyrics of these songs, she adds. “They talked about people dying and the way it is . . . I do that song Deportees [Woody Guthrie and Martin Hoffman’s song about a real plane crash involving deported migrants] and I put a lot of emotion into it.”
The Country Flavour originally went out playing “the carnivals”, she says. What are the carnivals? “Have you never heard tell of the carnivals? The carnivals started in Easter and went on into September. We played seven nights a week.”
The carnivals stopped with the Troubles, she says, but the band kept playing. “We just went on and we did what we had to do. A lot of the bands didn’t come to the North but we kept going . . . The Troubles were bad, but we kept on.”
Weren’t they robbed once? “At a carnival one night a couple of boys came in looking for money . . . There was nothing to it at all.” She doesn’t really want to talk about the bad times.
In 1974 she and Tom married and they had three children, two girls and a boy. She left The Country Flavour and started a new band called The Rambling Men. Tom stopped touring eventually to focus on farming. And she endeavoured to be home after gigs before the children were up in the morning. Does she work on the farm? She laughs. “I wouldn’t do anything except maybe stand in the gap if he wanted to move cattle from one field to another.” She laughs. “He’d tell me to hide in case I scared them.”
She’s toured all over the world. In 1975, Porter Wagoner invited her to Nashville to perform at the Grand Ole Opry and to record in the studio he owned with Dolly Parton and she has returned there many times over the years. She met people like Tammy Wynette and George Jones. “I recorded What’s Wrong with the Way We’re Doing It Now? by Justin Tubb. I heard him doing it and I went to Porter the next day and recorded it. The next night he gave me a cassette tape and I was talking to his father [Ernest Tubb] and nothing would do till he went away and they got a tape recorder and played it for all the singers that were there.”
Did she miss gigs when Covid brought it all to a halt? “Oh, big time,” she says. “Big time.”
The lockdowns came after a difficult year. “I had a heart operation in 2019 and it went on to September because I got an infection,” she says. “I went back in January to do a tour with Mike Denver and then Covid came . . . I was a wee bit down for a while there. I wasn’t in a good place. Don’t get me wrong, I was still going out and doing what I had to do but the second lockdown . . . ”
She shakes her head. It wasn’t helped by bereavement. In 2020 her close friend, Rose, died. “She lived with us 44 years . . . Her family were renovating the house and she come to stay with us for a while and then she stayed and that’s the way it was . . . She was just part of the family and the children loved her and she was like a second mother to them. It was an awful blow. Shocking. And after that there were deaths in the family . . . It does take its toll on you after a while.”
During the Covid lockdowns she and her son Aidan Quinn, also a country singer (as a child he would join her onstage to sing Dear Santa), ran little gigs on the farm for the neighbours. “Every Thursday they went out to clap the nurses and doctors. But Aidan put the gear up and me and him went out and sang. I’d sing Like Old Friends Do but the neighbours all got to hear about it and they all came and were out on the road and we had to distance them all.”
She’s glad to be back singing. “Nowadays to be honest I would be very nervous,” she says. “Sometimes I don’t know what it is, but I’d be standing there and I’d be dying [but] once I hit the first note I’m away. I talk my way around it. I tell the audience exactly how I feel and if anything happened me that day I would tell them.”
She’d be lost without singing, she says. “It’s my life and my medication . . . Going out every night I tell people it’s them that’s keeping me going.”
Back in October she celebrated her 80th with a weekend of gigs in Bundoran. “I remember coming up to the Great Northern [Hotel] and saying to my daughter who was with me, ‘I can’t believe all these people are here’. The place was sold out for all weekend for months beforehand.”
Did she think when she started that she’d still be doing this in her 80s? “No! I thought I’d be dead!” She laughs. “I can’t even express how lucky I am to get as long out of it.”
There’s still a vibrant country scene. She’s featured on a new range of country music stamps issued by An Post. She also recently appeared in bed with Nathan Carter in his video for the song The Morning After. Was it difficult having to share a bed with him? “Definitely not. The craic was mighty . . . Nathan and me can have a bit of banter.”
She’s always had good collaborators. She talks about The Way Old Friends Do, a record that she recorded with fellow Irish country legend Margo O’Donnell. As if on cue, a head peers in the dressing room door. It’s Margo. “Are you all right?” asks Margo looking genuinely concerned.
“I’m just doing a wee interview here,” says Philomena. “We were talking about the time you and I did an album.”
Margo’s face lights up. “Oh, we had a wonderful time. It was the best time of our lives.”
“We had great craic recording,” says Philomena. “I didn’t know all the words of the songs and she was lying on the ground holding up the words.”
What year was it? “96,” says Margo.
“Is that it?” asks Philomena.
“I’d known Philomena forever,” says Margo. “And then Tony Loughman, Lord have mercy on him, he managed Philomena, and was doing dates for me, and he had the idea we should go to Nashville and do a CD. I went over a week before her to try and line up as much carry-on as I could and I went to all the grand ladies of the Opry and I said, ‘Philly’s coming out’. They all knew who Philomena Begley was and I said, ‘Would youse come in?’ and they just said . . . ” She puts on an American twang: “‘Just tell us the time and the place and we’ll be there’. And they were!”
“On the DVD they’re all around us giving us a big hug,” says Margo.
They start listing the names of the county music stars who came to the session: Jean Shepard, Kitty Wells, Jeanne Pruett, Jan Howard, Jeannie Seely, Skeeter Davis. Skeeter gave Philomena two sequined jackets that she still has. “I tried one on the other night.”
Do Margo and Philomena remember when they first met? “I met her in Beragh Hall [in Co Tyrone],” says Margo. “I was playing with The Keynotes. You had recorded, Come My Little Son.” She sings: “‘Come My Little Son and I’ll tell you what to do’. And she came out to the dance I was playing at . . . That’s when we met and we’re friends ever since . . . It was always Philomena and Margo. It was just us for a long time. Susan [McCann] came along much later.”
They reminisce a little. “There was a lot more fun then,” says Margo. “I think it’s very serious now. It’s all business now. We did an awful lot of things for love . . . You could write a book about it.”
“We could write a book,” says Philomena. They look at each other and laugh. “But the two of us would need to be dead before you could publish it.”
