Music: Tommy Sands is a shot in the arm to folk music. He owes nothing to artifice: the fire he lights beneath story after story is the product solely of wood sparking wood, nothing more, nothing less.
Telling one's own story is a perilous business. There's the urge to embellish, edit and amend to suit one's blameless self-image; then there's the danger of assuming that every last trinket of "news" will warrant rapt attention on the reader's part, and finally there's the inescapable possibility that for every rapt reader ravenously consuming tales tall and small, there might be another yawning in the shadows, struggling to engage with the minutiae of someone else's life.
Mercifully, Sands resists the temptation to yield to the first of these hazards, and he's possessed of a steely self-editor who cuts backward and forward through his life with great finesse. And finally, he applies the same rules of brevity and wit to his prose as he does to his songwriting. All of which adds up to a gabháil-full of stories jostling for space, and delivered with an intensity more usually associated with short stories than autobiographies.
Sands strikes the right note from the beginning, by noting that "music is too valuable to be confined solely to concert stages". Once the initial high of live performance and the early experience of fame (however local or global) has passed, any musician worth his or her salt will crave the chance to swap songs and celebrate life's tidal ebb and flow in the company of others.
And it's this unstoppable appetite for company - and for solace - that pushes Sands ever outwards: to the blackest forests of Germany, to the near side of a curtain in an enclosed convent (all the better to teach a nun a few guitar chords, m'dear) and to the heady courtyards of Stormont, where the sound of Sands and a gaggle of singing children was the spur that helped push weary negotiators towards accord in the Good Friday Agreement.
Raised in south Co Down among "Fenian fiddles" and "Orange drums", Sands was equipped from the cradle with a facility for concord. From there he travelled far and resisted every temptation to let the simplicity of his story be twisted into a helix by an eclectic gathering of protagonists: under-age inmates in a US jail, unhinged German groupies, fellow songwriter Pete Seeger and the crystalline-voiced Joan Baez. Sands trawls effortlessly, unpicking universal truths from the quotidian, a songman whose pen is indeed mightier than anyone else's sword.
Siobhán Long is a traditional music critic
The Songman: A Journey in Irish Music By Tommy Sands Lilliput Press, 266pp. £20
