From mother to son

Born in 1965 into a large Irish Traveller family in County Offaly, Ireland, folksinger and storyteller Thomas McCarthy grew up with songs ‘in abundance’. Every Traveller family, he remembers, ‘pumped music’ into their children at that time.

Indeed, Thomas learned many of the traditional songs he sings today from his mother, Mary, and other older relatives. His learning, he says, was strict. His mother would listen carefully as he practised a song, and if he got it wrong would interrupt, ‘you’re drifting off there, I don’t know where you’re going at all, but you’re not on the right track’.
His mother insisted that the young Thomas work hard to master a song to perfection, because only then could he ‘give it a twist here and there’. This ‘twist’ was important. ‘You never sing a song the same way’, his mother taught him, ‘you don’t want it to become monotonous’.

Music, labour, and the problem with technology

Irish Travellers, Thomas recalls, used to be welcomed by the Gorja [people who are not of Romani or Traveller descent] in his childhood. This was not only because of the essential labour Travellers provided, but also because of the entertainment they brought with them - their wealth of songs, dance and stories. Thomas even remembers occasions when Gorja hid Travellers’ horses, so that the Travellers could not move on and the Gorja could enjoy their music and dance for another night.
Things changed in the 1970s. The widespread use of plastic, Thomas says, ‘obliterated the need for buckets and chairs to be fixed’. The mechanisation of farming around this time also forced many Irish Travellers out of their traditional seasonal jobs.
But according to Thomas, it was the portable TV that killed off the centuries-old music traditions he had grown up with. When Travellers ‘could attach a car battery to a portable TV’, singing traditions ‘died out overnight’ on their sites; ‘It became uncool to sing the old songs which were their heritage, their backbone’.

Striving for recognition

In 1980, the Irish government commissioned a report that concluded that Travellers have contributed enormously to music-making within the dominant population, carrying tunes, songs and dances from town to town, making and repairing instruments, and transmitting their unique style of playing the uilleann pipes and the fiddle.
Yet there is a little recognition of the influence of Travellers on traditional Irish song performance. Thomas is motivated by a deep desire to counteract this neglect.
In his own compositions, such as ‘Moving Us On Again’ (Herself and Myself, 2014), he brings attention to the prejudice and discrimination Travellers face in mainstream society. In his performances, he talks about Irish Travellers’ contributions to culture and society, leading young Travellers to question the assumption ‘that they’ve got nothing to be proud of’.
Charismatic, entertaining, with impeccable comic and dramatic timing and an overwhelming wealth of old songs, Thomas is bringing Irish Traveller song traditions the attention and visibility they deserve.