|
|
Hi, I'm Jimmy Smith and I would like to welcome you to this long overdue 'Mighty Avons' website.
The purpose of this website is to for the moment to go back in time to 1960 when a fledgling musician from County Cavan decided to move from playing traditional music in St. Brigid's Ceili Band to an ever growing music, which became known as 'Country 'n Irish'.
|
Unfortunately for me at the time I wasn't a traditional music
aficionado and therefore one reel sounded like another and I was
fortunate to be the drummer in the band. Hence my problem was
immediately removed as I didn't have to know the melodies of any of the
tunes.
Myself and two other members of the Ceili Band decided to
form a dance band, which I named as the 'Avons', and luckily the move
paid off as this type of music had caught on in the dance halls all
over Ireland.
|
Towards the end of 1960 with our new outfit going quite well we hired
the services of Larry Cunningham a singer from Granard, Co. Longford,
who was beginning to make waves in his own local area. Larry came to a
rehearsal in the farmhouse that I lived in and I can remember when he
hit the low note in the Jim Reeves song 'He'll Have to Go', he
literally almost brought the house down around our ears!
|
|
After
the practice, I escorted Larry to his Austin A30 van which was parked
in our lane way and himself and myself had a high-powered meeting in
the moonlight regarding his joining the band as lead singer. His
bargaining ploy was as follows: "I'm getting thirty bob a night at the
moment from the band I'm in, and if you give me fifty bob a night I'll
join the Avons".
Larry was advertised to appear with us in the
town hall in Cavan a week or too later but he told us he had the
toothache and was unable to appear, but he was there at our next gig
and for nine years afterwards.
The Avons were doing nicely in
Cavan, Monaghan, Leitrim and Longford and would have probably remained
gigging in these counties for the duration. However, Jim Reeves the
famous American country singer died in a plane crash and that was the
most significant thing that ever happened to the Avons.
Eddie
Masterson, who was practicing as a solicitor in Carrickmacross, County
Monaghan, was listening to the radio a few minutes after Reeves's
passing and immediately put pen to paper, our should I say "pieces of
paper"?, and wrote a tribute to the dead singer. This I must say was
done before they actually retrieved Jim's body and on the following day
Eddie passed on these lyrics to me as I drove through Carrickmacross
the following evening.
The following Wednesday the song was
rehearsed in the Astoria ballroom in Bundoran, County Donegal and as
they say in the music business, "the rest is history".
|
|
|
|