For Frank Harte, singer and architect, location is everything. His back garden in Chapelizod runs down to the Liffey, a surging weir and a flotilla of hopeful ducks. He was raised here, in north Dublin, but it could be 100 miles from the city and Harte is proud of his vista - overhanging trees, healthy water and the deep-green shades of summer. His self-converted cottage reflects his interests - architecture, poetry, art, history and song. A keen eye will spot many treasured photographs of great singers such as Eddie Butcher, Darach O Cathain and Joe Holmes. And just like his beautifully situated house, Frank Harte is someone whose sensibilities are both urban and rural - something evident in his vast repertoire of songs which ranges from the traditional ballads of loss and emigration to the bawdy music hall romps of Victorian Dublin.
"I was lucky. My father had a pub and so I was well aware of the urban tradition of singing. But at an early age, in the summertime, we went down to the cousins' farm in Sligo and we milked cows and went to the bog so I also got a knowledge of that rural life. That was a lousy time in Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s. It was Tarry Flynn time. But in the middle of all that I went to a fair in Boyle - all this noise and roaring and hand-slapping and then suddenly, above all of it, I heard a tinker singing The Valley of Knockanure. I realised this was a different song to anything I had ever heard before. It was telling a story about an event in our history and it clicked in my head. I followed that tinker around all day as he was selling his ballad sheets and singing his songs. I started looking for that song and by the time I had it, I had found another five because my eyes and my ears were open to the fact that we had a song tradition. Once you're aware of it you can't avoid it. There are people in Dublin 4 who will never even know it's there because they have their ears tuned to some mid-Atlantic place or to the stock market report."
Collecting songs began early. He remembers buying ballads from a man who sold them by the sheet at the side of the Adelphi Cinema. These and the thousands collected since are now all on one massive database on the Harte computer - an extraordinary resource of songs in all their variety.
But Frank Harte's interest has never been purely academic and he is widely regarded as one of our greatest traditional singers. He sings every day of his life and always has - whether on a stage in the US or at home as he makes the tea or feeds the ducks. His enthusiasm is infectious and behind it all lies an unshakeable pride in the traditions of his own place.
"It was a great mixture of people in Chapelizod - Catholics and Protestants - and of course there were a lot of Chapelizod people involved with the British army in the Ordnance Survey in the Phoenix Park. There was also a fair few of the old crowd knocking around - the Dublin Fusiliers who had come back from the first World War and they all had their input too. They had these songs about soldiers going away to war and leaving the sweetheart behind and they were all tearjerkers. I would also hear a lot of the old music-hall songs and Victorian melodrama songs such as She Was Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage or . . . things that would tear your heart out, bring tears to your eyes.
"Then there was man called Jack Scales who had been in the Free State Army and he had all these recitations like The Green Eyed Yellow Idol and the whole pub would go quiet for him. There was always great order - dead quiet - and then Ben Dumbrell would sing a Scotch collection of Harry Lauder songs and Mick Smith would sing The Bridle Hanging on the Wall - and dare anybody else sing it!"
Traditional songs have been commercially presented in many ways over the years, from the 78 rpm recordings of Delia Murphy and Joe Maguire to the rip-roaring ballad groups such as the Clancys and the Dubliners. Frank Harte, singing in the more traditional, unaccompanied mode, moves in a world where much is made of tradition and which can appear exclusive to those who might not find traditional singing an immediately accessible form. In this context, Harte prefers to insist on the singer's absolute right to choose his or her material rather than deal with any external questions of purist rigidity.
"I don't see anything wrong in selecting the songs you want to sing. A traditional singer is not singing for a commercial audience so he doesn't have to please an audience.
"A commercial singer may have to repeat the same song ad nauseam because that is what a crowd in a pub is looking for and certainly the ballad group is alien to the tradition in all respects. All that comes from the Clancys, which is only yesterday. It's a very important byway in the tradition but that's all it is.
`But there is a strong tradition constantly running and these are the people you don't hear about - people that will never produce a CD or will never be on television or radio. How many people know the singing of Gaby McArdle from Fermanagh? He's a great stylist and has a great collection of local songs. Whatever it is about singers who learn all those hundreds of songs for no reason other than the pleasure of singing them and the pleasure of you or me saying "that was a great song!" That's the only reward they're ever going to get!
I'm not up to be judged by anybody. I often say to an audience that I'm going to sing for them and it doesn't matter one iota to me whether they like it or not. It's not going to diminish the value of the song as far as I'm concerned. An audience seems to accept that - and if they don't, then they have no business listening to the type of songs that I have to sing."
Frank Harte's most recent recording is 1798 - The First Year of Liberty. It contains many of the traditional songs of '98 including Henry Joy, Roddy McCorley and General Munro. Accompanied by Donal Lunny, he sings with great conviction of people long dead and believes that such historical and political songs have always been an essential and insufficiently recognised part of Irish expression.
"My father was very proud of being Irish. He had no crisis of identity whatever. He knew what he was and where he came from. He spoke with pride of the Land League and Parnell and Michael Davitt. Today there are people who sneer at the Irish patriotic expression, but he had a pride in that. He would recite poems about the Irish Brigades that fought in France. He would tell you about Patrick Sarsfield and O'Donovan Rossa. These people were revered because they strove to improve the lot of the Irish - for people who had no recourse to anything.
"And I think the songs and the poetry sustained the people in the midst of the deprivation in which they existed. It maintained their spirit as Irish people and it vindicated them as people of worth. The feeling that if we had nothing then, by Christ, we had great men that went before us!"
Many songs which might fall into the category of "rebel song" have come into a certain disrepute - often only heard only from the mouths of reckless drunks or from crowd-pleasing ballad groups. The historical context of the songs is often lost and they can then become triumphalist, tribal and terrifying. Revisionists dismiss them as crude and even those less hostile to the songs might find some of them anachronistic, insensitive and just a little embarrassing - especially if they fall in behind Chesterton and his reference to the Irish people: "All their wars were merry and all their songs were sad." Frank Harte strongly rejects such views as ill-informed and short-sighted.
"There was nothing merry about 1798. Thirty thousand people were killed. At the Battle of New Ross nearly 3,000 rebels were killed on one morning alone. And yes, the songs can be used in a triumphalist fashion but of all the songs on that record of mine, there's only one triumphalist song and it's Croppies Lie Down. And that same song is still being sung and its whole purpose is to abuse and get up the nose. All the other songs are laments - we lost!
"A lot depends on the context - where you sing it and how you sing it. The song Henry Joy can be sung in a militaristic way but on my recording Donal Lunny hit this plaintive chord and I realised it was a plaintive song. These songs are the unwritten history. It was their only means of expression and they could do it covertly. You always get this thing about forgetting about the past, but you have to take us as a people. You are what you are. You've got to face the past honestly if you're going to have any sort of an honourable future. Should I forget someone like Charles Stewart Parnell? I sing of Parnell with pride, but quite apart from that there is the attraction of just singing the song. The Blackbird of Avondale has a lovely air to it and the words are something I have an association with from earliest childhood. So why should we forget about the political songs - Fenian songs or Orange songs? Should we forget about the love songs too?"
1798 - The First Year of Liberty by Frank Harte and Donal Lunny is on Hummingbird Records.