Delia Murphy’s father, Jack was lucky in the Klondike gold rush, north western Canada. During his time abroad he was said to have married Ann Fanning of Tipperary. Jack was raised in Hollymount, County Mayo where they returned and bought land. Delia was born in February 1902. According to various reports she made friends with travellers who camped on the land. She loved their singing and was said to have learnt some songs from them. She attended the local school, followed by a convent school in Tuam and University College Galway. A contempary was believed to have been William Butler Yates. The political situation at the time was seemingly that the Irish were being displaced after losing the war for independence.
Delia met her Gaelic husband Thomas J Kiernan in Galway. She married at 22, he was 26 or so. Neither family attended the wedding. They were involved in the Irish free state but Thomas reportedly got a move to London. She began singing at parties whilst in London, and subsequently music halls. She made some recordings. Three songs most associated with her are The Spinning Wheel, Three lovely lassies and The Blackbird.
Thomas worked away, reportedly being sent to Bonn and Ottawa. Reportedly Delia returned to Ireland in 1951. She was said to have featured regularly on BBC radio. She later went to live in Canada where she made her first cd, The Queen of Connemara. After Thomas’s death in 1967 she moved back to Ireland, to Dublin. The songs she accumulated and sang over the years included a version of The Boston Burglar, the story of a man who supposedly broke into the union bank and stole an insignificant amount of money as a protest against colonial exploitation. The cd entitled Delia Murphy has Irish songs from times gone by and is a collector’s item.