Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 9, 1995 TAG: 9503090040
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: SETH WILLIAMSON CORRESPONDENT
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
On the other hand, it almost got him killed.
Timlin, who performs Friday night at 7:30 at the Donaldson Brown Hotel and Conference Center on the Virginia Tech campus, says he was nearly a victim of industrial sabotage.
"I had one occasion in Northern Ireland in which I came pretty close to losing my life in a situation in which I was the only Catholic in a workshop. I was a carpenter by trade, and a machine that I had worked on was tampered with.... It was quite terrifying."
The machine was what Timlin calls a "four-cutter," a lumber-shaping device containing four cylindrical heads equipped with razor-sharp blades. During a morning "tea break," somebody loosened the cutter heads, which came flying out when Timlin again turned his machine on. "I could have been cut to pieces," he recalled.
But the singer, who has lived in America since 1972, has no hard feelings. His new compact disc "The Flower of Sweet Strabane" is free of the inflammatory political rhetoric favored by some Irish singers.
True, Tommy Makem's "The Winds Are Singing Freedom" speaks of "the battered streets of Belfast" and "foreign rulers" who have "used our land for about 800 years." But it's basically an optimistic pennywhistle-and banjo-laced tune more reminiscent of an American civil rights-era ballad than a bomb-throwing political broadside.
The 44-year-old Timlin, whose concert with Celtic harpist Sharon Scully is sponsored by Virginia Tech's University Club, says he got into music three decades ago in the village of Strabane in County Tyrone. The same folk boom that powered the Kingston Trio and other American folk groups was also inspiring Irish folk musicians.
Timlin says he attended a concert by singer John McAvoy and said to a friend, "I can do that. I can do what this guy is doing."
He was right. He borrowed his oldest brother's guitar and six months later won a local talent competition. He went on to win 10 or 12 competitions in a row over the next year and retired undefeated from the talent competition circuit.
He soon joined the hugely popular Irish folk group the Jolly Tinkermen and toured America and Canada with the band. Timlin recorded six albums with the group, and "three or four" hit singles. The Tinkermen were surreptitiously recorded at a 1972 prison concert for interned Irish political prisoners, and the recording was released as an album to benefit the prisoners' wives. Later that same year Timlin emigrated to America permanently and since then has worked mostly as a solo act.
"I've always called myself a full-time musician, although there've been many years and weeks and months when I've done something else. This is a business which, unless you become very wealthy real quick, you don't do it for money - you do this for love," said Timlin. The singer says that part-time bar-tending is an especially good job for a working musician, since it leaves weekends free for gigs.
However, Gerry Timlin has done better financially with a music career than most folk musicians. "It's paid my mortgages, it's put my children through private school and I'm very happy about that."
"The Flower of Sweet Strabane" has just been released on Timlin's own Coalisland label, named for his home village in County Tyrone. Timlin's clear high baritone is framed by an acoustic mix of uilleann pipes, hammered dulcimer, guitar, long-neck mandolin, tenor banjo, bass, pennywhistle and accordion. Backup vocals by Sharon Scully and the group Whisky River make for a rich vocal blend.
After three decades of singing Irish music, Timlin says there are certain songs he can predict with absolute certainty will be requested by his audiences. Many are sentimental Irish favorites like "She Is Far from the Land" and "Star of the County Down." Others are more recent songs he has popularized himself.
One of these is Stan Rogers' "The Mary Ellen Carter," about five fishermen whose boat went down in 60 feet of water off the coast of Canada after the five had indulged in a bout of heavy drinking. The insurance company paid off the boat's wealthy owners, but the fishermen were left jobless.
Instead of wallowing in self pity or going on welfare, the working men raised the boat themselves.
"The song has this wonderful final verse: 'And you to whom adversity has cast the final blow/with smiling bastards lying to you everywhere you go/turn to, and put out all your strength of arm and heart and brain/and like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again.'
"When I'm done singing this song, I feel so good that nothing in the world can stop me. I can do anything in the world that I want to do after singing that song," Timlin said.
by CNB