The Ballad Sheet with Eugene Dunphy

 

The album was released on the Tara label in 1978 and included nine tracks, all featuring the singing of Christy Moore who was ably assisted by Donal Lunny on bouzouki and Jimmy Faulkner on guitar. The B side, track three, featured a rip-roaring ballad about a group of fun-loving lads who were making their way from Dublin to enjoy a well-earned break in Douglas, Isle of Man. The album was called Live in Dublin, and the rip-roaring ballad was ‘The Crack was Ninety in the Isle of Man’, written by musician Barney Rushe.

Described by Christy Moore as ‘a very talented man’, Michael Bernard (‘Barney’) Rushe was born in 1946, in Sallynoggin, Dún Laoghaire, County Dublin. In the 1960s, he secured a residency spot at the Royal Hotel, David Place, St. Helier, on the isle of Jersey, and it was while playing at a folk club in Jersey in 1968 that Christy met up with Barney, the two men sharing songs and striking up a friendship.

Christy was so impressed with two of Barney’s songs, namely, ‘Nancy Spain’ and ‘The Crack was Ninety’ that he earmarked them for inclusion on a forthcoming album which he hoped to record with his fellow band members in Planxty.
“They didn’t really work out,” recalled Christy with a roguish smile, “I think some of the guys thought that they weren’t ‘up to the mark’ – how wrong they were!”

Like many true-born minstrels before him, Barney’s itchy feet took him on a journey, from Jersey to Ibiza and then on to Nuremburg, Germany, where he managed a pub for a while, and from Germany, he moved to Spain to entertain tourists in resorts such as Malaga.

In 1999, he released ‘Born Again Strangers’, an album of his own songs, one of which was ‘The Crack was Ninety in the Isle of Man’. Two years later, when his name had assumed an almost iconic status in the world of Irish folk music, he appeared in an episode of ‘Christy Moore Uncovered’, a six-part series broadcast on RTÉ.

But while on a trip home to Sallynoggin, he suffered an aneurysm, the condition resulting in his death on the 27th of September, 2014. His old friend Christy Moore sang at his funeral.

Continue reading in this week’s Ireland’s Own