18 July 1981
Most recently interpreted, inter alia, for a primetime BBC audience by west of Ireland farmer and Alan Partridge lookalike Martin Brennan, this was some traditional Irish ballad from the days of all our forefathers and foremothers – or so I thought. But no; it was a million-selling US number one in the year 1900!
The US charts back then were based on sheet music sales, I should add. ‘When You Were Sweet Sixteen’ had been composed a couple of years before that and is therefore a Tin Pan Alley standard. I choose to believe that Finbar Furey—or perhaps the mysterious Davey Arthur, who was never really explained to us—had plucked it ripe from their extensive vaudeville collection.
The Fureys’ performance, if that isn’t too exuberant a description, is bare-bones folk with Finbar front and centre: his sandpapery voice, his plaintive banjo. Tin Pan Alley being long gone, this is probably now the song’s definitive version.
This single also got into the UK top twenty and The Fureys onto Top Of The Pops, a decent chart showing that you may initially attribute to the expats of every Irish Centre across Britain. But wait; check out The Fureys’ TV performance in the video below, with its lingering close-ups of a young(-ish) Finbar peering intensely from under his brown curls. Could it be that ‘When You Were Sweet Sixteen’ cracked the UK charts because of thirst for Finbar Furey?
