World United Music: Johnny Duhan

About: Johnny Duhan

Johnny Duhan started his career as a fifteen year old front man with Granny’s Intentions, the most popular beat group in Ireland in the 60s. After rousing Dublin with their soul touch, they moved to London, were signed to the prestigious Deram label, enjoyed considerable success and disbanded before Johnny was twenty one. Johnny started writing folk songs, poetry and prose at this stage. In a career spanning 40 years, his greatest achievement is a quartet of epic albums - Just Another Town, To The Light, The Voyage and Flame - which correspond to the four chapters of his lyrical autobiography, TO THE LIGHT. Johnny’s songs are sung worldwide in a variety of languages, thanks to the focus put on them by Christy Moore, The Dubliners, Mary Black and hosts of other Irish and international singers. His song The Voyage has become a modern classic. Christy Moore has termed Johnny “One of our greatest songwriters.” And the late Ronnie Drew described him as “one of my favourite songwriters.” A new album, The Burning Word, has just been released.

Johnny’s journey is set out in a series of albums that portray his life - his Limerick boyhood in JUST ANOTHER TOWN; his tilt for fame and the girl in TO THE LIGHT; his reflections on family life in THE VOYAGE; and his spiritual quest in FLAME.

“After a number of hard knocks in 2014, I struggled into 2015 with not just a chip on my shoulder but a full beam on my back. One winter morning while carrying this load up an incline in Barna Woods (a place I often stroll through), I found my usual path blocked by a fallen tree, knocked by a storm the night before. Rooted to the spot by the surprise obstacle, I scratched my head glancing around at other smaller trees that had survived the tempest. While making my way around the exposed root structure at the end of the wide trunk I noticed that the bed the tree had grown in was a wide ledge of solid rock, with little or no root room. Examining the roots themselves I saw that the long fibrous tentacles had had to stretch themselves right to the edge of the rock ledge and over it to gain earth support and nourishment to grow. By the great size of the tree, it had been no mean achievement to have flourished and grown for so long. Still thinking of this when I got home from my walk, I jotted an account of my encounter with the tree in my Song Journal, and a few days later a song grew organically from my notes, “The Fallen Tree”. Without strain or effort, other songs started stemming from the same natural source, all related one way or the other to the felled tree, which I began to associate with the proverbial Tree of Life and with my own life history and journey. It took five months to complete the full collection Creation, which I intend releasing as an album in early 2016, to mark the 50th year of my calling in song. A video of The Fallen Tree made by Tony Walsh & Tocar Media will appear on Youtube prior to the album’s release. The title song “Creation” will be released as a single on iTunes and other download outlets in September 2015. For further details of the overall work Creation visit my Official website

Johnny lives in Barna, Galway.

CONTACT: belljohnny@eircom.net