15 August 1966
They never had an Irish number one single, but any mention of the Irish folk boom of the ’60s should include The Clancy Brothers. I get the sense they were more loved in the US than by traditionalists back home, but they still sold albums here by the truckload. Their influence on a young Bob Dylan in New York is well known. When Paddy Clancy died in 1998, Irish media reported that 30 percent of all albums sold in Ireland in 1964 were by The Clancy Brothers. I mention them here because The Johnstons were also an Irish folk group centred around a family unit—Adrienne, Luci and Michael, from Meath’s future rock n’ roll village of Slane—and multi-part close harmony vocals, much as The Springfields were too. Add that ‘The Travelling People’ was written by Ewan MacColl, who was drawing on traditional English and Scottish ballads as well as echoing the social justice themes of US counterparts like Woody Guthrie, and you have several major influences of ’60s folk converging here. (Adrienne and Luci here make ‘The Travelling People’ by The Johnstons the first Irish number one single by a group with more than one Irish woman.)
I also mention the Clancys because I suspect the brogue-ish singing style of The Johnstons here is them playing to the same notional US gallery, perhaps subconsciously. ‘The Travelling People’ is from a Ewan MacColl album of songs about the life, culture and hardships faced by the Traveller communities in Britain and Ireland, and certainly the song romanticises their lifestyle as something akin to a Yeatsian mystical vision of the brightly-painted wooden horse-drawn caravan in John Hinde postcards. The skilful arrangement of voices and guitars has texture and sweetness. However, MacColl’s ominous shift in tone for the closing lines (“Winds of change are blowing, old ways are going / Your travelling days will soon be over”) gets glossed over. The Clancy-esque Aran sweater approach to folk music can be warm and pleasant, but ultimately woolly.
