Butch Moore: Showband success.
Butch Moore, lead singer with the Capitol Showband, was at the height of his success in 1965, when he won the National Song Contest to represent Ireland in the Eurovision Song Contest, in Naples, singing Walking the Streets in the Rain.
He was born in Dublin in 1938, the son of Thomas Moore and Nora (née Fay). His father worked in Leinster House for 50 years.The family lived on the North Circular Road, and Butch attended O’Connell Schools, where he sang in the choir. He also performed as a boy soprano on Radio Éireann. He acquired the name Butch because of his resemblance to a character in one of the popular films of his youth .
He began his working career as an apprentice printer but his real interest was in music and singing. He played with a number of bands before getting his big break with the Capitol Showband in 1958. Its line-up included band leader, Des Kelly, and Paddy Cole, who is still involved in music, and an early songwriter for the band was Phil Coulter.
The Capitol achieved a considerable degree of success in the early 1960s. It toured America in 1961, and two years later became the first showband to appear on the new Irish television service. The Capitol played in the London Palladium in 1964 on a night when the lineup included Roy Orbison.
After Eurovision his celebrity status grew in the dance halls. He would later recall narrowly escaping injury at the hands of fans in July 1965, when he was pulled off the stage by a surging crowd in the Arcadia Ballroom, in Bray. But the showband world was to prove a fickle and volatile business for the Eurovision hero. His marriage to Nora Sheridan, with whom he had three children, Karen, Gráinne and Gary, broke up. And his career nosedived after he left the Capitol.
He emigrating to the United States in 1970. There, along with the folk singer Maeve Mulvany, later to become his second wife, he developed a successful cabaret act. They had three children, Rory, Thomas and Tara.
They subsequently owned a very successful nightclub – The Parting Glass – in Millbury, Massachusetts. Butch Moore was employed as chief deputy sheriff, Worcester County, Massachusetts, from 1990 to the time of his death, and was described by a former colleague there as “probably one of the most popular and well-liked people in a county of over 750,000 people”.
Butch Moore died on April 3, 2001, and was survived by his wife Maeve (died 2004), children, Karen, Gráinne, Gary, Rory, Thomas and Tara, brothers, Brendan, Desmond and Thomas, and sister Marie.
‘Doc’ Carroll, born Martin Carroll, was lead singer with 1960s Mayo Royal Blues showband. In 1966, Doc Carroll and the Royal Blues became the first showband from the West of Ireland to score a No. I in the Irish Top 10. His version of “Old Man Trouble” stayed two weeks at No 1 and become a showband era clasic. It remained synonymous with Doc throughout his life.
Doc carroll. No 1 with "Old Man Trouble".
Two years earlier, in 1964, the Royal Blues was signed by Kerry-born promoter Bill Fuller to perform a series of dates at venues he promoted in New York, Philadelphia, Boston and San Francisco. They drew capacity crowds to City Center in New York and other major venues where the sons and daughters of many families from Connaught had settled.
The co-lead singer in the band was Shay O’Hara, from Carlow, and the other members were Vincent and Frank Gill from Claremorris, and Brian Carr, Brendan Arnold, Bobby Smith and Don Flanagan, all from Dublin. They were managed by Andy Creighton.
In 1983, they reformed for a series of shows and attracted a dance crowd of 2,000 in Claremorris Town Hall in June of that year. Their last reunion was in 2001 when they played a week-long series of dates around the country. Doc Carroll stayed in showbusiness and was performing up to a year before he died. He had introduced Donna McCaul from Athlone into his band. Some months later, Donna and her brother Joe won Ireland’s You’re A Star Song Contest.
Over the previous decade, he toured in England where he had a resident band and enjoyed a measure of success on the English circuit. The songs of Fats Domino and other legends from that era were an integral part of his show. He was also an accomplished lead guitar player with a special flair for country instrumentals, most notably the old classic “Wildwood Flower” which was featured on the Royal Blues album “In A Country Field”.
He died at St Vincent’s Private Hospital in Dublin, in May 2005, aged 64. He was survived by his wife Mary, daughters Claudene and Nicola, sons Franklin and Conor.
Ruby Murray was born in Belfast on March 29, 1935, to a Scottish father and an Irish mother. She had an operation for swollen glands when she was only six weeks, which left her with an unusually husky voice. A childhood visit to see the minstrel performer G.H. Elliott inspired her to join a children’s choir, and soon she was performing solo. When she was 12 she made her professional debut on Irish television and two years later, with her mother as chaperone, she was touring in variety.
Ruby Murray. An unusually husky voice.
Over the next five years she appeared in revues throughout Ireland and Scotland. When the touring show Yankee Doodle Blarney played at the Metropolitan Music Hall in London in 1954, the television producer Richard Afton, who had been responsible for her Irish television appearance as a child, spotted her again and signed her to succeed Joan Regan as resident singer in his television series Quite Contrary.
Ruby Murray’s first appearance on the show prompted the record producer Ray Martin to give her a contract with Columbia Records. Her second release, “Heartbeat“, went to No 2 in the charts, and was followed by the song which was to become a Number One hit ans her signature tune, “Softly, Softly“. Three more Top Twenty hits followed, “Happy Days and Lonely Nights”, “If Anyone Finds This, I Love You”, and “Evermore”. Also in 1955, New Musical Express readers voted her Britain’s favourite female vocalist and she appeared in the Royal Variety Show.
The following year she had an acting role as a chambermaid in the Frankie Howerd comedy A Touch of the Sun, and made the first of two successful tours of the United States. During a hectic period in the mid-50s, she had her own television show, starred at the London Palladium in Painting The Town with Norman Wisdom , appeared in a Royal Command Performance, and toured the USA, Malta and North Africa.
Though she was to have two more modest record hits, “Goodbye, Jimmy, Goodbye” (1959) and “Change Your Mind” (1970), and continued to headline variety bills in the provinces for another two decades, her career was never to reach such a peak again, while problems in her personal life plus the stresses of her career were complicated by a growing addiction to both alcohol and valium.
In 1957, while appearing in a summer season at Blackpool, she met Bernie Burgess, a member of the vocal group the Jones Boys. They married in secret 10 days later. Burgess became her personal manager and, during the early 60s, they toured as a double act.
In 1955, she had five different songs in the UK Top 20 simultaneously, a record only equalled later by Michael Jackson. But by the end of 1955 British audiences were being captivated by the rock n’ roll of Bill Hailey and Elvis Presley. Ruby’s career began to falter. Her last chart hit was in 1959. But she continued to perform right up until her health failed.
When Murray fell in love with the comedian Frank Carson, who was already married, the stresses it put on her marriage increased her reliance on alcohol. She joined Alcoholics Anonymous and twice spent time in a psychiatric hospital after nervous breakdowns. When she and Burgess divorced in 1977, he was awarded custody of their two children Julie and Tim, now the singer Tim Murray.
The same year she began living with Ray Lamar, a theatrical manager for Bernard Delfont, and in 1993 they were married. Though it was a loving relationship, the chronic alcoholism persisted, despite repeated attempts by Murray to stop. (When she did stop, she would smoke 80 cigarettes a day.) In 1982 she was arrested and fined for being drunk and disorderly – she spent a night in a cell and is said to have entertained the police with her hit songs. Her name lives on in Cockney rhyming slang as the rhyme for curry.
For the last two years she had totally given up drinking, but her liver had become irreparably damaged and for the eight months until her death she was a patient in a nursing home. The LBC broadcaster Lee Stevens, her manager for 12 years, said, “She gave happiness to millions of people, but sadly she never found real happiness herself.”
Ruby Murray died in Torquay, Devon, on December 17, 1996. At her beside were Ray Lamar, ex-husband Bernie Burgess and their son and daughter Tim and Julie.
Ruby Murray was the subject of an hour-long documentary Ruby and the Duke presented by Northern songwriter and performer Duke Special and broadcast on RTE on January 18, 2011.
The UK Top Twenty for March 16, 1955
1. Give Me Your Word, Tennessee Ernie Ford. 2. Softly Softly, Ruby Murray. 3. A Blossom Fell, Nat King Cole, 4. Mobile, Ray Burns. 5. Let Me Go Lover, Ruby Murray. 6. Mambo Italiano, Rosemary Clooney. 7. Naughty Lady of Shady Lane, Dean Martin.8. Let Me Go Lover, Dean Martin. 9. Finger of Suspicion, Dickie Valentine.
10. Let Me Go Lover, Teresa Brewer.11. A Blossom Fell, Dickie Valentine. 12. Tomorrow, Johnny Brandon. 13. Beyond the Stars, David Whitfield. 14. Happy Days and Lonely Nights, Ruby Murray. 15. Heartbeat, Ruby Murray. 16. Wedding Bells, Eddie Fisher. 17. If Anyone Finds This I Love You, Ruby Murray. 18. Lonely Ballerina, Mantovani. 19. Shake, Rattle & Roll, Bill Haley’s Comets. 20. A Blossom Fell, Ronnie Hilton.
Dana was born Rosemary Brown in Derry on August 30, 1951. In 1970 as a teenager she represented Ireland in the Eurovision Song Contest, singing All Kinds of Everything, and brought home the country’s first victory in the contest. Dana recruited her father as her manager and followed with hits including Who Put The Lights Out?, Please Tell Him That I Said Hello and It’s Gonna Be A Cold, Cold Christmas. She ideintified publically with her Catholic upbringing, notably with songs such as Totus Tuus, commemorating the visit of Pope John Paul II to Ireland in 1979.
Dana: Eurovision winner and politician.
In the 1980s, she moved with her husband, Damien Scallon whom she married in 1978, and family to the United States, where they were involved with a Christian broadcasting network. She returned to Ireland in 1997 to contest the Irish Presidential election as an independent. She came in a credible third, ahead of the Labour Party candidate. In 1999, again as an independent, she contested and won a seat in the European Parliament representing Connacht-Ulster.
She has declined to associate with any political party. She campaigns on family values, most notably in her opposition to abortion. Her decision in 1999 to oppose a government proposed amendment to the Irish constitution to place some restrictions on abortion, which put her at variance with mainstream Pro-Life movement in Ireland, the mainstream political parties and the Roman Catholic Church, on the basis that in her eyes the anti-abortion amendment wasn’t anti-abortion enough, lost her much of her original support. The defeat of that amendment was blamed on ultra-conservative elements, who were accused by other anti-abortion campaigners of destroying the likely last chance to impose stricter abortion restrictions in Ireland.
In 2002, Dana Scallon contested a seat in the Irish general election, again as an independent. In what was seen as a backlash against her stance in the previous abortion referendum, she lost disastrously, getting just 3.5% of the vote and losing her deposit.
Scallon lost her seat in the elections to the European Parliament in June 2004. Interviewed later she said: ”I have no regrets about my political career. It was a wonderful five years and I loved it. While I hope I will be best remembered for my work as a politician as well as an entertainer, my main priority has always been to be a good wife and mother.”