How many songs are there about Napoleon Bonaparte? Lots, says Frank Harte, who has collected many of them on a new double CD. He talks to Mic Moroney about the balladry of old BoneyThe traditional singer and song-collector Frank Harte lives in Chapelizon in what looks, from the outside, like a tiny cottage. Yet inside the front door is a wonderland of bookshelves and art, with a spiral staircase plunging down into a spacious basement of more books, CDs, tapes, a draughtsman's desk, etc. He leads me through this dark, dense clutter, and out beyond the kitchen into the blinding light of his enormous back garden. We sit in the sun while Frank, a cheery, hale 67-year-old, shifts fluently between conversation and scraps of song. It's a little corner of Eden: birds chase around our ears, the air is alive with insects. A few yards away is the Liffey, an earthy-brown ooze like a Laveryscape of light and colour. A heron picks off salmon fry as they wiggle downstream. "There's an otter over there as well," says Harte, reminding himself to take out the little row-boat with his son, and a chainsaw to chop some fallen trees clogging up the river. Despite his tall, urbane, muscular frame, Frank has the voice of a burly little docker, with a kind of old Dublin brogue which they don't manufacture any more. He uses it to rich effect in his singing: the high, penetrating, nut-coloured timbre belting the words across in his declamatory street-singer's style, which can deliver anything from ballsy rapping to plaintive, flailing laments. You'd need a month off truly to trawl his latest two-CD set, My Name Is Napo- leon Bonaparte, his fourth recording with Donal Lunny, whose exquisite stringsettings allow Harte's open-time balladry to breathe. It's all about how Napoleon is remembered in traditional song, and in an extremely fat little accompanying booklet, Harte embeds the songs in their historic and folk-historical contexts. "Academic historians have ignored the ballads, but I consider them to be an unwritten history," he says. "Whether they are strictly true or not is not important - they are the expression of our people. If they're exaggerated, it's because that's what people felt. I have a saying: `Those in power write the history, those who suffer write the songs'. And given our history, we have an awful lot of songs . . ."In his notes, Harte teases out the codes and references behind such well-known songs as The Bonny Bunch of Roses; "big" aisling-style songs such as The Green Lin- net; or the classically ornate Napoleon's Farewell To Paris - "that goes back to the hedge schools where people were taught Greek legends and the classics".Some songs came from England which, although officially at war with Napoleon, still produced popular songs singing his praises, such as The Eighteenth of June. Others are heartbreakers: The Isle of St Helena, The Bonny Light Horseman, The Wounded Hussar, even the uptempo, anticonscription ditty, My Son Tim. This last sentiment recurs in The Saxon Shilling from 1840s Ireland, or the recent song, The King's Shilling, written by Ian Sinclair. "People certainly weren't fighting for King and Country, but because they were hungry," says Harte.

"Ireland was England's granary throughout the Napoleonic wars. Some farmers made a fortune. But after Waterloo, everything collapsed, and the landlords started evicting tenants to bring in the big grazing farms, which led into the Famine. So we were all very affected by Napoleon."Napoleon is like Mount Everest in terms of the amount of songs that are still there. There are things in the songs which amazed me, like when they sang that he took 300,000 men with him to Moscow - in fact he took 670,000, and came back with 24,000 - to me, that's mind-boggling. It was all about the glory of France and the Empire, but during that period, they didn't seem to care how many were killed. Wellington, too - he marched them in and marched them out. At Waterloo, there was something like 62,000 killed in three days."But the ballads weren't examining this from a logical point of view. We were hoping Napoleon would come and liberate us from the other tyrant in the place - and the fact that we might have been swapping one tyranny for another never seemed to enter the equation."Harte originally picked up all the songs aurally from singers such as Culleybackey man John Kennedy; Donegalman Eddie Butcher; or others such as Liz Jeffries, Micho Russell, Geordie Hanna, Joe Holmes and Kevin Mitchell. He also constantly pays tribute to such latter-day collectors as Terry Moylan, Sean Corcoran, Tom Munnelly, Michael Ó Dhomhnaill ("and his father before him"), Len Graham and Padraigin Ni Uallachain. Harte himself enjoys regular visits from a new generation of singers, such as Karan Casey and Niamh Parsons. A retired architect who is laboriously indexing his "1,000s and 1,000s" of songs and recordings, Harte is a repository of folk history - a bit like his native Chapelizod, with its little square and sloping streets and its old sanatorium/barracks up on the hill (Chapelizod, he tells me, appears in the 1798 ballad The Bold Bel- fast Shoemaker). His father left home in Sligo at 13 and came to Chapelizod to work in the local pub, which he eventually bought. It is now called The Villager, although when the Hartes owned the place, it was called The Tap - "the last one in Dublin to sell porter straight from the wooden barrel". "You'd never know what you'd hear in there, from" - he lifts into song - " `she's only a bird in a gilded cage' to old English music-hall songs. Or Peter Leech would sing Boulavougue. Then you'd get the ould tearjerkers, and my father's pub was full of ould Dublin fusiliers. When they'd get a few jars, Mick McGrahame would get the brush and frogmarch up and down, but there was no animosity."My father came from a family of 13, and nine of them ended up in America. And my grandfather was six years old in the middle of 1847 - Black '47 - which, when you look at it that way, was only yesterday. These were great people, to have survived the horrors of the Famine." His next two projects will relate to songs of the Famine and of the Irish navvies who laboured in Britain. "I think the songs always functioned to give the people hope, to vindicate them as people with a proud history."Harte's father fought as a republican during the Civil War. "He never talked much about it, but he loved De Valera. He would have died for De Valera. He also loved poetry: Oliver Goldsmith, Davis's songs, the Land League, Fontenoy - anything that lifted the Irish head, my father was proud of. He sang out of key" - this, almost ruefully - "but at least he sang, and like many another lad, I didn't listen to him. He could have told me what his life was like, or what his father told him, but at the time I was too busy looking after my own family. "But I will always be eternally be grateful to him and to all the people who gave us freedom. I mean, where would we have been under Margaret Thatcher? And a few years ago, you and I wouldn't be sitting here on the banks of the river - we'd be hewers of wood and drawers of water, tugging our forelock to some ould landlord."He gives a big, exasperated sigh. "I cannot understand the mentality of those who seek to deny or decry the sacrifices of the people - not the blood sacrifices, but the everyday sacrifices of those that maintained the pride of the Irish race throughout the years of persecution and deprivation to leave us with our sense of humour, and the music and the songs, and the hopeful outlook that we have. I tell you, it'd make you cry."