Nancy Spain-Christy Moore

Original version by composer.

Courtney Wicks

Biography

Barney Rush
(1946 – 2014)
Barney (or Michael Bernard as he was christened) Rushe was from Sallynoggin near Blackrock in south Dublin. Born in 1946, his father, Patrick, came from near Tuam in County Galway and his mother was Ethel Eliot whose family still farm in Tonagh near the village of Glasson, just north of Athlone. His father loved music and liked to sing and play the accordion. Barney had a brother, Paddy, and two sisters, Eileen and Marie. He attended the Christian Brothers School at Eblana Avenue in Dun Laoghaire, known locally as the Eblana, a place he later recalled in a song, ‘The Boy from Eblana’. His uncle owned The Druid’s Chair pub on Killiney Hill Road in south County Dublin. Barney worked there occasionally in his teens and learned the bar trade, which he would later put to good use in Germany.
Barney Rushe was a shy and thoughtful teenager with a passion for sport and music. He became a lifelong Manchester United fan, having been inspired by the Busby Babes, and his heroes were George Best, Denis Law and Bobby Charlton. He was a keen rugby player and followed the fortunes of his local club, Seapoint Rugby Club, no matter where he roamed in the world.
As a teen, Barney listened to American rock ‘n’ roll and blues, and loved, the music of The Beatles and other emerging British pop bands of the early 1960s. Like many youngsters of his era, he bought a guitar, cut his fringe to look like Ringo Starr and formed a band. For a while they went by the name of Morlock and played the local hops and teen dances.
Later in that era, Barney became more and more drawn to traditional Irish music and to the folk and ballad scene that was beginning to flourish in Ireland at that time. Barney and his friends loved nothing better than to take off down the country with a tent to enjoy ‘the craic’ at events such as the Kilkenny Beer Festival and other raucous gatherings that attracted fiddle players and balladeers from far and wide. He soon began to appreciate folk and trad even more than the pop music of the day.
The English folk revival was also under way at the time and a Dublin man called Noel Fitzmaurice, who was a few years older than Barney and his friends, was keeping up to date with the songs then emerging on the English folk-dub circuit. He also had a keen interest in blues, jazz and other genres, and owned a vast collection of records. Noel was a good friend of the husband of Barney’s elder sister Marie and he introduced Barney and his friends to a wide range of musical influences. He would lend Barney his records and talk to him constantly about various musical genres. This broadened Barney’s musical horizons and had a big influence on the young songwriter.
In the early 1970s Barney moved from Jersey to Spain where he played the Irish bars on the Costa strip. He remained there for more than ten years before settling in Germany where he opened an Irish bar, the Goldner Mond, in Erlangen near Nuremburg. This move proved very successful and Barney eventually ended up with three bars in Germany. He continued to play music but his main focus for many years was on his bar businesses. As the years passed, he occasionally wrote new songs and in the 1990s he composed a number of songs from the point of view of an Irish exile recalling his native shore but they were overly sentimental and lack the magic of his two great early compositions, ‘Nancy Spain’ and ‘The Craic Was Ninety in the Isle of Man’. He recorded an album of his songs around 2000, which contains his own version of ‘Nancy Spain’.
In time, Barney decided to cash in his chips in Germany and get out of the bar business. He returned to Spain where he operated a restaurant for a time and then retired from business to play music full-time once again in the bars and clubs of the Spanish resorts. He took to returning home more often as he approached his sixtieth year and, had he lived, he might have settled down in his native Sallynoggin.
Barney Rushe, troubadour and composer of one of Ireland’s best-loved songs, died suddenly on 27th. September 2014 at the age of sixty-eight while on a trip home to Ireland. A celebration of his life took place in the Garden Chapel at Mount Jerome Crematorium in Harold’s Cross, Dublin, followed by his cremation.

Biography courtesy Gill Publication entitled ON RAGLAN ROAD and Gerry Hanberry (Author).

Declan Lynch

Extract, Irish Independent. October 04 2014.

In 1969, Christy Moore played a gig at a club in St Helier on the island of Jersey. The resident singer at the club was a man originally from Sallynoggin called Barney Rushe, and that night he played some songs that he had written, two of which in particular caught Christy’s attention – The Crack Was Ninety and Nancy Spain.

“We hooked up after the gig and we swapped songs late into the night,” Christy recalls. “When I heard him sing Nancy Spain, I was instantly smitten by this beautiful song.”

Rushe promised to send a tape of the songs to Christy, though when he eventually received it he was a member of Planxty and did not get to record his famous version of Nancy Spain until 1976, with The Crack Was Ninety coming out in 1978.

As Christy observes, both songs have entered the People’s Repertoire and have been recorded many times, though most of the people are not aware that Nancy Spain was the name of a real woman, of a very different kind to the one that we might have in mind when we hear the ballad.

“Barney explained it to me,” Christy recalls. “When he was writing this love song, he needed a name to tie it all together. Nancy Spain was a famous English journalist back in the 1960s, and Barney really liked the sound of her name. That was the name he chose for the subject of his song.”

Born in 1946, he played in bands – mainly blues bands – in the early 1960s. On a holiday in Jersey he found that he could make a living there, playing at the Royal Hotel, a period during which he had that crucial encounter with Christy Moore.

In September 2014 while on a visit back home, Barney Rushe sadly suffered an aneurysm, and passed away.