(b Cork City, Ireland, 1 June 1917; d County Down, N. Ireland, 1989). Irish singer and banjo player. Born into a family of musical semi-settled travellers, Barry left home to become a street singer when she was 15 years old. She began by busking the queues outside Cork’s Coliseum cinema, then travelled throughout Ireland by bicycle and horse-drawn bow-top wagon, performing at markets, country fairs, football matches and house ceilidhs. After recording her at Dundalk Fair, Co. Louth, in 1951, the American folk music collector Alan Lomax (see Lomax, (2)) introduced Barry to London where she performed on the BBC television programme Song Hunter and in Irish public houses. She formed a duo with Sligo fiddler Michael Gorman and played in small dance halls in Ireland and America with him, before returning to London during the 1960s in reduced circumstances. Following Gorman’s death, she went home to Ireland and continued as a solo performer. Barry’s powerful street-singing vocal style together with her sparse yet appropriate five-string banjo accompaniments captured the imaginations of folk revivalists and guaranteed her a place in the history of traditional Irish music.
Songs of an Irish Tinker Lady, Riverside RLP 12-602 (?1956)
Her Mantle So Green, perf. M. Barry and M. Gorman, Topic CD474 (1994)
I Sang through the Fairs, coll. A. Lomax, Rounder Records 011661–177420 (1998)
DAVE ARTHUR