For someone who became king of the Irish folk scene, it’s ironic that the young balladeer Johnny McEvoy had little or no interest in Irish music as a child growing up in Banagher County Offaly.

“My father was big into Ceili music but I wasn’t. I think it was a kind of rebellion on my part,” he recalls. “I was more into Radio Luxembourg. This was the sixties when the Beatles and Bob Dylan were huge, I loved music growing up but was very shy and it was only during my teenage years that I began to broaden my outlook,” he said. “I loved Johnny Cash and Hank Williams and used to save up for weeks and weeks to buy their records. I’d cycle to school every day and sing all their songs– then wonder why everyone was looking at me strangely!”

As time went on Johnny nurtured his love of music by accompanying his brother, who played the accordion and later his friend Michael Crotty to explore his musical abilities. “It was very easy in those days to get up and sing,” says Johnny, “you didn’t even have to be very good! Michael would play the guitar and I was on the tin whistle. I learned a few chords of the guitar later– I wasn’t much good,” he says modestly “but knew enough to get me by.”

Johnny celebrates forty years in show business this year and has deservedly earned a reputation as one of the greats of his era. It was in the sixties that the handsome young performer first began to make his mark on the circuit with local gigs and UK tours and it was also around this period that he began to write his own material– which proved to be the secret of his success.

Following on from the success of ‘Boston Burglar’, ‘An Bonnáin Buí’ and ‘Banna Strand’, one of his most famous compositions ‘Muirsheen Durkin’, set him on the road to international recognition– and amazingly the song that hit the charts both at home and abroad was composed during a quiet few moments at home. “I used to stand in my bedroom and play base and harmonica and my mother heard me singing ‘Muirsheen Durkin’ and suggested I record it,” he says.

With the ability to produce such moving compositions as ‘Long Before Your Time’, the moving story of a couple in love and the tragedy that befalls them, it’s not difficult to be drawn to Johnny the man as well as Johnny the performer and his story is an inspirational one.
He has lived with depression for almost half his lifetime and his candidness in speaking about it has earned him great respect. Not only has relating his experience helped others but, he admits, talking about it and its effect on his life has been something of a coping mechanism for him.

“It’s over twenty-five years now that I was first diagnosed and it’s the most frightening thing to go through. I had nobody to talk to and nobody to turn to,” he confides. “For me, singing is a great release and I would recommend singing or writing to anyone suffering. I always said if I got through it I would go public and try to help others. Because it’s not talked about, people don’t understand it. The physical act of singing helps me immensely,” he adds. “It releases good endorphins and even if I know I might be in the depths of despair three hours later, for the time I’m on stage it helps greatly.

“It’s great to know that famous people like Spike Milligan had depression and lived with it and it doesn’t have to stand in the way of you living your life. I want to say ‘this happened to me, this is how I feel now and I have come through it’.”