Recalling from a distance a night of joy and poignancy

There’s a familiar line from an old Frank Sinatra hit – Love’s Been Good To Me – of, “It only seems like yesterday as down the road I go,” and on a quite dreary night in January as I flicked through the TV channels, when sleep seemed to be uncharacteristically distant, a voice from the past suddenly swept back into my mind.

It was a voice of softness, gentle romance and of country roots which transported me back to an early summer’s evening in Salthill when four of us ambled along The Prom, had a pint or two in Lonergan’s and O’Connor’s, before tipping through the doors of Leisureland to hear one Nanci Griffiths in concert. [In those days it was okay to have a pint or two and drive!].

It's an evening that I cannot put a date on, even with the help of the social media machine, but I sense that it was either in the late 1980s or early 1990s, when many of us across Ireland had fallen hopelessly in love with the music, voice and personality of a young woman from Texas, with titles like ‘From a Distance’ and ‘Lone Star State of Mind’ sending us into something of a joyous state of melancholia – if that’s possible.

A few years back, during the ‘height’ of Covid in August 2021, there was a 30-second mention on one of the radio news bulletins that American country singer, Nanci Griffiths, had passed away at the ago of 68 from natural causes. I was even surprised she was that old given that her concert night in Salthill only seemed a few years previously . . . but of course the passage of time with an ageing mind and body, too regularly seems to freewheel out of control.

Anyway, back to television that kind of lonesome night, and like a fly being enticed into a silvery web, I tuned into a programme by former pop presenter Dave Heffernan taking a look at the life and times of one Nanci Griffiths, a documentary, which like life itself, weighed out pretty equally, measures of joy and sadness.

There may be many of a younger generation unfamiliar with her songs, voice, childlike face, rounded plucs [the latter, a lovely Irish word for plumpy cheeks], and a kind of one-to-one chemistry that she always seemed to have with her audience. A voice of peace and happiness but as emerged in Dave Heffernan’s little peek into her life story, these were gifts that she sadly couldn’t embrace in her sojourn through this world.

Pictured: Nanci Griffiths: The softest of country voices and an enchanting smile who gave so much joy to her audiences . . . but on a personal level, a troubled and reclusive soul who died alone.