Mary doing it by the book for Seapoint show

Singer Mary Black will perform in Salthill’s Seapoint this Saturday night, February 7, as part of a tour to coincide with her autobiography, Down the Crooked Road, published last year by Transworld.

Mary’s life and her musical career are inextricably linked, so for her it makes sense to incorporate excerpts from the biography into the concerts. This will be done in a way that will enhance the songs and will not be a distraction, she says.

“Certain songs conjure up certain images for me,” she explains, mentioning No Frontiers and the reaction she felt the first time she ever heard it, when songwriter Jimmy McCarthy visited her house in Dublin to play it for her.   bring people behind the scenes to tell them a little bit about me.”

When publishing giant Transworld first approached Mary with the idea of an autobiography, back in 2010, she laughed at them. But when she received a second approach in 2013, she didn’t regard the idea as so ridiculous.

Not having a clue where to begin, she sought advice from a poet friend, Theo Dorgan. He pointed out that she had loads of stories to tell and that she should just write those down, then focus on the book’s structure.

“He described it as being like recording an album; you just record the songs and decide on the running order later. That made sense to me,” recalls the singer.

She went home and asked her daughter, Róisín, to start taking down some of the stories.

“She’s an avid reader and I thought she could type them up,” says Mary. “But then she started drawing me out, asking me questions to paint a picture.”

So when Mary was describing her childhood in Dublin’s Charlemont St, Róisín kept asking questions, getting her mother to describe various rooms in the house and give details about Mary’s own mother. In a way, Róisín represented the reader and helped fill in the colour on the canvas of Mary’s life.

For more, see this week’s Connacht Tribune