Celtic Music: Mary Black

Mary Black was born into a musical family in Dublin, Ireland. Her father was a fiddler, her mother a singer. Her brothers had their own group, The Black Brothers, and her younger sister Frances has been a successful singer in her own right. She began singing at age eight, and when she got older performed in Dublin clubs with her brothers. While she has recorded a lot of traditional Celtic music material, her family's background is not solely in traditional music, and she has, as a result, been interested in other genres of music.

In the late '70s Black joined the group General Humbert (named after a French general who aided the Irish rebels in 1798). On two of their albums, all except one song, "Crazy Man Michael" from Fairport Convention, are traditional, and Mary's singing is featured on half of them. She left that group and released her first self-titled album in 1983. She spent a few years in the '80s with DeDanann but kept up her solo career as well.

Mary Black is not noted as a songwriter but rather as one with a great ability to pick songs from a variety of songwriters and interpret them beautifully. Her 1987 album By the Time It Gets Dark illustrates this very well with a wide variety of material from songwriters from many lands and genres.

Mary Black's voice has been often praised for its pure tone and her albums have been used in high fidelity stores as a benchmark of quality in evaluating systems. While vocal purity is certainly a great asset, it's not enough. What has made Mary Black one of Ireland's leading singers relies also on her ability to pick and interpret great material and present it both live and in recorded form in a winning fashion.