Christy Moore archive explored in New Year's Eve documentary

Legendary folk singer donated materials to mark 80th birthday

After turning 80 earlier this year, Irish folk singing legend Christy Moore donated his entire personal collection to the Irish Traditional Music Archive (ITMA) in Dublin. This collection contains a vast store of rare manuscripts, recordings, letters, setlists and unseen lyrics that opens a window into a creative spirit and social conscience that has shaped generations.

For more than 50 years, Christy Moore’s music has reverberated throughout the world. A singer, collector, storyteller and activist, the songs that he sings help to tell the story of Ireland - the good and bad, the triumphs and hardships.

'Cartlann Christy Moore', a new documentary from ITMA and TG4, uses these collections to explore the life and music of Christy at a level never captured before. Directed by Ciarán Ó Maonaigh ('Brendan Gleeson’s Farewell to Hughes’s', 'Sé Mo Laoch'), the film features new interviews and recordings of Christy, along with contributions from some of Ireland’s best-known artists.

“I love the idea of my songs being in the archive and some young person in Australia or America, Clare or Belfast, being able to go on a website and get the words and hear the tune and the melody and have the chords,” Christy says. “Songs have a power within them to draw us in, affect us and cause us to go forward with laughter, or to shed a tear, or to stand up and be counted. Those things are what make great songs.”

“Encountering Christy Moore and his personal collections, I was struck by the sheer vastness of his output over almost 60 years,” says film director, Ciarán Ó Maonaigh. “Countless songs and melodies that are engrained into our consciousness as Irish people. His focus, energy and all-out to commitment to song was fascinating and awesome to behold.”

“It is a tremendous honour that Christy Moore is placing his trust in the Irish Traditional Music Archive to illuminate his artistic philosophy, his deep gratitude to those who preserved songs before him, and to inspire younger generations to continue composing in the traditional ballad form he has mastered,” says ITMA CEO Liam O’Connor.

While he grew up in Newbridge in Kildare, where his father Andy was an Army man who died young, Christy had close connections to the Ardmulchan and Beauparc/Yellow Furze areas outside Navan, where his mother, Nancy, was from.

“The ways my mother could sing” Christy wrote on his memoir’ One Voice’. “As a small boy, I listened to her play the piano and sing old songs and new songs.”

Nancy Power grew up on the banks of the Boyne, he wrote. Her father, Jack Power, worked at Ardmulchan, a large Georgian estate near Navan, in the parish of Seneschalstown or Yellow Furze. Her mother was Eily Sheeran from the cotton mills.

“Mammy had one brother, Jimmy, who died in hard circumstances in Birmingham,” Christy wrote. “Nancy had an idyllic childhood, and from what I can gather was a very happy and much-loved young girl. The older people of the parish still remember her from 70 years ago and tell me of her beautiful voice and her zest for living. The estate which Jack worked on was owned by Sir Alexander Maguire, an absentee landlord whose fortune was made from boxes of matchsticks. She sang in the church and school choirs, and also became a renowned soloist as her fine soprano voice developed. She knew about lyrics and melody and voice projection and communication.”

The late parish priest of Dunsany and Kilmessan, and Rathkenny Revels founder, Fr Michael Murchan, recalled that it was his aunt, Julia Elmes, a teacher in Yellow Furze National School along with her husband Frank, who inspired this love of song and music into the young Nancy Power, and who recognised her talents.

Julia was from a family with a long tradition of school teaching, as a daughter of Johnstown school teachers Pat and Elizabeth Sheridan, and had also taught in Cannistown for a period.

Christy writes: “All of my early memories of mammy are musical. I can imagine myself as a baby sitting at her feet by the piano as she played and sang. Old Irish songs, hymns in Latin, bits of opera, light and classical, pop songs and lullabies. She loves to play and sing. She instilled music in all of us.”

Both Christy and his mother, widowed at 37, experienced difficulties with alcohol and were estranged for a while.

But he wrote: “Much later on, when we both had our drinking behind us, we grew very close again. We would drive out again across the Curragh, down by the Liffey, up the Hill of Allen, over by Father Moore’s Well, below the Red Hills through the Sandy Hills, once of twice heading off to the Boyne Valley to see the Boyne meander past Ardmulchan, and she would sing gently again, and we’d drive in silence and the world seemed perfect.”

Based in Dublin, ITMA is a living archive serving a living tradition, at the core of that is its philosophy to engage contemporary artists with archival materials to inspire new art. In recent years, this philosophy has manifested itself through ITMA’s own productions, which include its 'Drawing from the Well' YouTube series, the 2024 series 'Taoscadh ón Tobar', which aired on TG4, and the 2024 feature documentary 'Brendan Gleeson’s Farewell to Hughes’s', which premiered at the Dublin International Film Festival, was nominated for Best Documentary at the 2024 Irish Film and Television Academy Awards, and has been screened and broadcast across Ireland, the UK, New Zealand, Australia and Japan.