Original subtitles

♪ It's a brand new day. ♪

♪ Little children hiding in the shadows

♪ Waiting for the changing of the day

♪ Watching for a break between the showers

♪ When they can come out and start to play. ♪

I first heard of Tommy Sands through Pete Seeger.

Pete like my dad, spoke up for the regular guy

and Tommy had written songs that spoke up for northern Ireland.

It's the storey of standing up for the regular guy.

He's one of those guys.

♪ Is there anyone else

♪ Up there?

My first memory of the power of music was listening to my mother

trying to put me to sleep with the power of music, a lullaby.

She used to sing

♪ daily daily sing to Mary da-da-da-da, da-da-da ♪

She's a pretty beautiful singer.

♪ As I went a-walking one morning in spring

♪ for to hear the birds whistle and the nightingale sing. ♪

Small farm was busy most of the time,

especially harvest time, cutting out hay, corn.

Gathering that up. Threshing now was always a very big event.

Normally about seven or eight local farmers

who arrived in with the thresher.

I remember music at night.

One or two of the neighbours in and local farmers and maybe

a bottle or two of stout consumed before the end of the evening.

But anyhow very happy, good times.

We grew up listening to fiddle players, storytellers

and thinking that every house was the same.

We learned a lot from those experiences.

You know, people who were good fun, good storytellers,

good singers, good musicians.

We always got this feeling that they were worth spending time with.

That image I remember of the céilí house, the session house,

making people feel at home with kindness, something to eat,

something to drink.

And sharing of songs and stories is universal and timeless.

My very earliest memory was watching toes tapping table

the same rhythm, regardless of the political persuasion

or religious affiliation.

And I think that probably affected me more than anything else.

How music can connect people, creating relationships that may

not be there so easily without that.

We were able to see the importance of relationships

and neighbourliness and consensus.

In our house growing up, we'd all sorts of Catholics, Protestants,

however the neighbours were.

They were all the same.

The end of the season you'd gather spuds together, you'd do, you know,

you do things help each other out basically.

And you'd be sitting around in a circle in the evening

be a few bottles.

Some of the neighbours, they would go there in the full

intention to sing and the others would go for the craic

and the fun of it.

♪ If you should go across the water,

♪ take me with you to be your partner. ♪

♪ Up the ladder and down the wall, the ha'penny loaf will do us all

♪ A bit for you and a bit for me and a bit for all the family. ♪

I suppose when you're growing up, you look towards the future

and you try to be what you think is the best thing you can be.

Had an uncle, a priest in the Philippines

and he's a lovely man and had an uncle in Africa as well.

He's in Nigeria.

They were very interesting people.

I had a wide view of the world.

I thought of I want to do something like that.

I like the idea of being a priest.

♪ We're all off the Carlow in the black, in the black

♪ to a life that's free from sin,

♪ where no birds nor booze nor living loose

♪ can ever enter in. ♪

There's an expectation that some of us might go that direction

and I went off first to Blacklion and then the following year, Tom.

Tommy went to Carlow.

Ben went to Galway with the SMA.

I was starting to think this is not really for me,

but there's also a time where you think,

what happens if I don't continue?

How are people at home going to think?

And for me it was a very difficult decision to make.

Ben, he was last to go into college and first to leave.

Tom left after that, I left the following year.

He walked home from Carlow to Rostrevor.

He told me as I was walking, I knew by the time I get home,

I knew what I was going to do with the rest of my life.

And that was how he started his life as a musician.

Just as I arrived in Newry, there was a squeal of brakes.

Colum and Ben and Anne and Dean went.

And I think it was Colum who said, your guitar's in the back.

We're going to do a gig in Gormanstown because

the refugees were there. Do you want to come?

I said, yes.

I think it was just that sense of to do what you feel at that time

is the best thing you can do.

And that was the yes which led me in all directions.

♪ There was a farmer in the west with me...

♪ He had a wife who wasn't the best and they called her Immoral Maggio. ♪

We were going to record that demo and we just had this

wee battery tape recorder, which was useless, you know,

the batteries in those days.

So we borrowed an electric one

and of course we didn't have electricity.

The only man nearby with electricity was Neville Brennan's.

So we went across to ask him,

do you think we could borrow some of your power?

He says, well, you can only do it while the cows are being milked.

That's the only time the generator's on

and you'll have to do it in the byre.

That's the only plug you can use.

But no sooner did we start singing (MOOS)

on the background of every song and we had no way of editing that out.

We had been waiting for months for the go ahead

to do this engagement in New York.

I think it was for three weeks in two big pubs in New York.

Played each one of them each night.

It was just another world.

It was like something on the films like, you know.

The man who was managing us was also managing Tommy Makem,

Mike Broadbine.

He was promoting at an Irish concert around St. Patrick's Day.

And he told us when we arrived, you'll be playing in Carnegie Hall.

I didn't really take it in, like how big a deal that was.

I had heard of Carnegie hall, but I didn't know it was like

the thing you aimed to do.

When we left home, my mother said,

stay together now and you don't separate.

And cab would only take four at the most.

But there was five of us and a double base,

so we couldn't get two different ones.

But we were told not to do that and that was it.

So we walked, as you do.

We didn't know how to get to Carnegie Hall.

We had an idea and we're asking the question,

how do you get to Carnegie Hall? And all this,

these people had been waiting to be asked a question like that.

You know, get a good agent and all the smart answers

you could imagine. But it was fantastic.

My fiddle, the strings on it were probably 30 years old,

but I was tuning it up and the G string broke.

And I didn't have spare strings or anything like that.

I'm not proud to say it, but I may be one of the few

fiddle players who ever went onto that stage

with three strings on the fiddle.

But the experience was amazing.

I'd been to Dublin once before, but America was

going very far away, you know.

I could even remember the smells that, you know.

All the colours, everything, you know.

And Vietnam, the war was on at the time

and you'd meet up with lots of Federals coming back.

Some of them were in very bad shape.

Some of them were mentally, you know,

another place altogether, you know.

But it was in a very, very interesting time as well,

because made you realise the world was getting more and more

uneasy and the war was happening.

And then you seen the injustice of it all.

MAN: This demonstration must be non-violent

despite any provocation.

We were very much involved in the civil rights movement.

But then when peaceful protest is ignored, sometimes violent

protest becomes inevitable.

Then when that began on Bloody Sunday, it knocks logic aside.

At that stage I decided I wasn't going to sing any songs

to a Catholic audience that I couldn't sing

to a protestant audience.

Because when violence becomes the norm,

the most rebellious song you can sing is sung with peace.

♪ Pictures of the children hanging in the classroom wall

♪ Frankie Brown's in front of them, a flower among them all

♪ Working for the future with all his heart and soul

♪ who's the one to tell him he be signing on the door. ♪

On the road you'd meet up with Clannad,

you'd meet up on the autobahn and a wee chat, where are you tonight?

Oh, I saw your poster, we're there next week or whatever,

you know, it's great, great, yeah.

But sometimes you didn't feel like singing.

You know, if you've been sitting in the back six hours

and you're hungry and then you had to go on smiling like, you know,

here we are the whole way from Ireland,

you're half delirious from the road, it does that to you.

Those autobahns were the bread and butter for so many Irish groups

for years.

And then East Germany.

♪ I think your nuclear rockets are dangerous for the health... ♪

People at home were saying that's communism over there.

Dangerous crowd.

So that anti leftivism had leaked across the Atlantic

and three mile down the Orion road.

So in our kitchen, not only the orange green thing

was being debated in song, but the east/west left/right

thing was being debated as well.

♪ So would somebody tell me and give my mind peace

♪ (SINGS IN GERMAN)

When we went to Germany, people wanted to hear what we had written.

And that I think gave us a lot of belief in the importance of just

being ourselves and writing our own songs and putting our own thoughts,

thoughts and experiences across.

That was a very important time in our lives.

I remember 1975 being a really busy year.

We were in Germany and Canada and Denmark and Austria

and it was getting to that point where it was all a bit of a blur.

You know, you'd walk out onto a stage

and the gig was the little break in the middle of all the travelling.

Deano was gone down to Osnabrueck.

He's going with his girlfriend, a girl called Susie.

And it was the next morning, there's a man called Horst Tubing.

He says something terrible happened to your family last night

and you're not really taking it in.

He's talking about a burst tyre, a lorry.

I can't even remember what exactly he was saying.

And Dean was dead.

It was a terrible, terrible time.

An absolutely brilliant instrumentalist.

Could have played nearly any stringed instrument and did.

Was a big part of that band. Big part of the group.

Yeah.

Outgoing lad enjoyed himself but again it was very, very difficult

when he died. Couldn't believe it.

Couldn't believe it. Yeah.

Yeah. It was a tough time.

It was a tough time. Yeah.

I was actually at home at the time, I wasn't in Germany.

And a cousin came down to Lurgan to tell me.

It's just a total bolt from the blue, you know.

They were doing very well in Germany at that time

and they were in the middle of a maybe three week tour

and I just could not believe it.

Couldn't believe it.

I remember coming home and going down to the room to my mother

and the whole bed shook with her crying.

It was terrible.

Do you ever get over something like that?

But we were sort of thinking we had Eugene to bring home

and that was going to be very hard, you know.

And that long wait.

I think it was maybe three or four days before he got home.

But again then when you got home that wake went on maybe

for seven days.

All the neighbours that you would have worked in the fields with or

that helped you out, they were just sort of,

they were all there.

But the next morning we went out for the funeral

and I didn't want to lift my head.

And then Fergal McAuliffe started playing Donal Og

on bagpipes.

A slow sad piece.

But suddenly I was able to hold my head up and

eventually wrote a song which helped me.

You'll never grow old, but you'll always be growing

in our hearts, in our minds, in the home you left behind.

You'll never know pain, nor the anguish of ageing.

You'll always be young, beautiful.

We thought about stopping music altogether then, you know,

we talked about it among ourselves and reckoned that Deano

certainly wouldn't have wanted to be the cause of us stopping.

And there was tours lined up a couple of years in advance.

I said I'd step into the preach.

♪ In your daughters and your sons.

♪ You saw the seeds of freedom in your daughters and your sons. ♪

(ACOUSTIC TRAD PICKING)

Going back on stage was definitely difficult.

You could feel that he was still there, but you couldn't see him.

But I'm really glad that we did keep on going

and in many ways carry his memory with us.

Tommy arrived at a point in time where he himself was constructed or

formulated through his rural upbringing and that country wisdom,

that knowingness of what it is to be a good person.

And that coincided the whole folk boom movement.

So he's being influenced by Bob Dylan,

John Baez and that whole folk movement and that radical

perspective of songwriting.

♪ This land is your land and this land is my land

♪ From California to the New York island... ♪

WOMAN: Straight from Ireland to the Guthrie Centre,

Tommy Sands. (CHEERS AND APPLAUSE)

(ACOUSTIC GUITAR PICKING)

♪ My song for you this evening

♪ It's not to make you sad, not for adding to the sorrows

♪ of this troubled northern land.

♪ But lately I've been thinking it just won't leave my mind

♪ to tell you of two friends one time they were both good friends of mine ♪

♪ Allan Bell from Banagh

♪ He lived just across the fields

♪ Great man for the music and the dancing and the reels. ♪

If you're lucky enough to be a singer or musician,

you're given that power

to reach someone in a different way than the usual ways.

It's a great gift in that sense, to go and share songs

that mean something to you.

You might call them your own songs if you've written them.

But they're the result of all the people you've met along the way.

And all ideas and thoughts you have absorbed.

♪ ..And the tears of the people ran together. ♪

♪ There were roses,

♪ Roses

♪ There were roses

♪ and the tears of the people ran together. ♪

♪ I'm still searching

♪ Yes, I'm still searching for a way

♪ we all can learn...♪

Well, Pete, that song that you wrote, I'm still Searching.

It's a beautiful song and I suppose it sums up your own feelings.

You're always listening and learning and searching.

Well, I'm convinced that if there's a world here in a hundred years,

the arts will be one of the main things that save us all.

All us artists are filled with a blessed unrest.

Trying to reach the infinite and never making it,

but never giving up trying.

It's you bringing the leaders of Ireland together

by singing together.

It's little things here and little things there.

Pete, hopefully we'll be back in America to see you before too long.

Give my best to your wife and family.

I surely will, Pete. Bye. All the very best. Bye-bye.

♪ This land is your land this land is my land

♪ From California to the New York Island

♪ From the Redwood Forest Little Gulf Stream waters

♪ this land was made for you and me. ♪

There's a few verses in that which

didn't get into school books and so on.

Well, my dad wrote six verses to that song,

three of which he published and three of which he didn't.

What are those verses? Do you remember them?

♪ I went walking and saw a sign there

♪ and on the sign it said no trespassing

♪ but on the other side it didn't say nothing

♪ that side was made for you and me

♪ in the shadows of the steeple I saw my people

♪ in the welfare office I saw my people

♪ as they stood hungry I stood there asking

♪ Is this land made for you and me?

♪ Nobody living can never stop me

♪ As I go walking my freedom highway

♪ Nobody living can make me turn back

♪ this land was made for you and me. ♪

Beautiful, beautiful.

Originally he was called the Dust Bowl Balladeer.

He was concerned that nobody was singing about hardship

that people had to endure.

I think my dad realised at some point that his voice

became the voice of others.

And so, in a sense, he spoke for other people

who didn't have an outlet, who didn't have a way

of reaching the audience that he was able to reach.

Pete Seeger was very much influenced by Woody.

I think they were attracted to each other, by their commitment

to things beyond themselves.

A better world, one where there's a little more equality,

a little more justice, less greed.

They liked these ideas and I think they realised at some point

that together we're going to reach a lot of people.

(SINGING IN IRISH)

Well, Arty, I'm certainly looking forward to having listened

to yourself on the guitar with Nollaig Casey.

And Nollaig's waiting inside in studio one there.

So after this we'll be having Arty McGlynn and Nollaig Casey.

(JINGLE PLAYS) ♪ Downtown Radio. ♪

Later in the programme we'll be having a chat to Sir Reg Empey

to John Hume, Gerry Adams, Bairbre de Brún and David...

I remember one Christmas, I decided I would do a programme with all the

religious and political leaders.

So I interviewed them all.

Went down with a tape recorder full of stuff down to

the Archbishop to-be, Cardinal Ó Fiaich,

and he says, what sort of a man is Paisley?

I realised at that moment these people didn't know each other.

I said, he told jokes,

well, if he told jokes he can't be too bad.

♪ September the 11th in 1973... ♪

I was born in Stanford on the bay

it seems so long now so far away.

There were pretty flowers all around

they grew up but I grew down.

Will you hear me?

Will you hear me?

I sold my body to buy my food

I was beaten, bullied and abused.

Will you help me turn the page?

I'm a girl of 17 years of age.

Will you hear me?

Will you hear me?

(CROWD SING TOGETHER)

The Good Friday thing that Tommy did.

I was at Stormont and there was a lot of haggling going on.

There was loyalists haggling Paisley.

It was all sorts of things and a lot of people weren't happy.

But Tommy arrived with the children and that sent a very special

message to say, this is our future, our children.

And I don't think people, an awful lot of people,

really realised the significance of all that until maybe later on

when they thought about it. But it was genius what he did.

The idea of bringing music into it.

Music's not an argument.

It's a different force, it's a different power.

And it disarms people, maybe is one way of putting it,

or it helps them to see things in another way.

Whether it's protecting communities, the environment, building a future.

We're always thinking of children.

The children didn't have time to learn a chorus

and I needed it to be very short.

I thought maybe I might get a few seconds on the news.

And we wanted to say everything that needed to be said.

And the chorus went, ♪ Carry on, carry on.

♪ You can hear the people singing

♪ Carry on, carry on

♪ Till peace will come again. ♪

The first man to start singing was Gusty Spence,

Gerry Adams and all those people.

And it was great to see their lips moving through the chorus.

When we left that day, Stormont,

we realised that peace was just like

a little child that'll slip and stumble many times

before it learns to walk but there are enough

helping hands to make sure that one day it would dance.

♪ Is there anyone else up there?

♪ Is there anyone else up there to say there might be another way?

♪ Is there anyone else up there to say

♪ don't kill the children in your wake?

♪ Is there anyone else up there above

♪ to speak of justice, truth and love?

♪ Is there anyone else

♪ Up there? ♪

Do you want to come in, have a listen to that one? Okay.

I sort of changed it around a wee bit there, but okay.

Sounding very good. And then as if you've

been looking around at what's going on at this minute

and built it around an earlier idea.

Is that what's happening there?

As the old people used to say,

if God tells you to kill innocent people, get a second opinion.

Because it mightn't be God at all.

And leaders quoting books and scriptures

and at the same time finding justification

for killing innocent people.

That comes into the song.

Don't do to another that you don't want done to you.

Are you happy enough for that take or do you want to try another one?

♪ You're welcome back again

♪ Won't you stay a while?

♪ Down by the Lagan side

♪ and when we dance

♪ we'll dance together

♪ when we cry we'll hold each other

♪ and when we love we'll love forever

♪ down by the Lagan side... ♪

Wouldn't be too many groups that had been coming from a small

rural place that had playing in Carnegie Hall

and in Moscow and all over the place, like.

Always very proud of them. Yeah.

♪ He said, who owns the teardrops falling in the rain? ♪

I feel very lucky to have played music

and have played so much with my family.

We met so many amazing people.

You hope that the songs and the stories and the tunes

have helped people and made the world a

slightly better place for them.

♪ Home away from home... ♪

Singing is another way of getting across to people.

You're sending something else out there to them.

When they do sing, it brings me to another place, another wee world,

to a place where I want to be.

You know, there's something peaceful about a lot of the songs.

Life and the music,

I see it all as a big learning curve.

And if you happen to help some other people along the way,

that's a mighty bonus.

♪ I remember 42nd Street I couldn't find a place to sleep

♪ Looking for a bite to eat to keep me from the cold

♪ Saw a lonely laughing man beside a burning rubbish can

♪ Waving whisky in his hand Saying welcome to my home

♪ Home away from home

♪ Home away from home... ♪