Jimmy Crowley's distinctive voice is akin to a statement of what you see is what you get - there are no frills. The Cork balladeer sings and plays it from the heart. He is a great fan of the Irish language, a folklorist, and a collector of songs penned by ordinary people who feel moved to write about current events in their lives or their cities.
His new CD title is Sex, Sca and Sedition; earthiness is what Jimmy Crowley is all about and he backs it up with a fine voice and the ability to make instruments hum.
A lover of the sea, he sailed on the Asgard and afterwards wrote a haunting ballad, My Love is a Tall Ship. He has recorded a song about the infamous "Bandon Car", the notorious Garda patrol on the west Cork approaches which drove the fear of God into those who had tippled too well. He has also revived old ballads such as Salonika, and is adamant that everything happening around us is worthy of a song, just as the poets and bards in past times set down current events in song or rhyme. The telling and singing of it now, he believes, are worth recording. And that's just what he's done.
Can you name a ballad in Irish about Bill Clinton? Probably not, this is the first one. Briste Bill is about Mr Clinton's trousers. C.J. Haughey does not escape either, and the reference to chandeliers must be left to readers' imagination.
There are ballads about the millennium, the new Cork tunnel, Mick Barry, the great bowler, and interpretative centres. Jimmy is convinced there is a place for the urban ballad in the national archives, and that in years to come, the archivists will be coming back to the CD, which he financed and produced.
He is currently on a tour of Britain and next October he will be featuring at a Celtic festival in New Orleans, where, no doubt, the soul and blues fraternity will be enlivened. Slide guitar and bodhran - why not?
He has also written a play with songs about the Maoist era in Cork in the 1960s and a futuristic novel is under way which will depict a Celtic utopia. He has completed a degree at UCC in folklore and Irish, and hopes to go on to do a master's in music at the University of Limerick.