By Paddy Walsh
There could have been no more appropriate opening song to the night that honoured the late Hugh McLean.
Family, friends and fellow musicians – in many ways they amounted to the same thing – heard Evelyn Gallagher poignantly perform Johnny Cash’s ‘I Still Miss Someone.’
And the many people, who are still missing the Letterkenny entertainer following his passing at the end of January, packed into the Station House Hotel on Monday night to share the memories and the music.
Before taking to the stage, Evelyn, who shared many a stage with Hugh as part of the Envoys along with many a recording studio, recalled her musical connections with the local legend.
“I’m going to miss the duets with him – he was great to perform with over the years.”
The duo had recorded another duet after Christmas entitled ‘Killing the Blues’ and kept in close contact. “I rang him regularly – he was a great character and I will sorely miss him.”
Many of Hugh’s family were in attendance and just inside the door of the function room, a selection of his CDs and some he had recorded with Evelyn were on sale with all proceeds going to the Donegal Hospice.
“Music was a big thing in our house,” Hughie McLean Junior reflected. “We knew all the Hank Williams songs, and George Jones and Merle Haggard tunes before we knew anything else.
“We were brought up in good, proper country music. And Irish music. He liked Planxty and the Fureys and Tommy Makem. And he loved Scottish music as well because his father was from Scotland. And indeed dad spent some time in Scotland.”
There was, of course, many other kites to Hugh Senior’s bow.
“Apart from the music, he loved hang gliding and was doing it when nobody else was hang gliding.”
Back in 1976, the ‘Sunday World’ newspaper sent a reporter and photographer to Donegal to capture the phenomenon deploying the headline ‘Hang in There, Hugh,’ over a two-page spread. “And he kept the newspaper clipping, I was going through some of his stuff in an old briefcase of his and there it was.”
Memories, too, of the family being deployed to help out with their father’s hobby. ‘We used to go with him and carry this hang glider up hills.
He flew off Muckish and we used to go to Achill Island and he flew off there.”
Already flying high as a singer and musician, Hugh Snr. ventured from hang-gliding to flying a plane – taking initial lessons in a Cessna 150 at Eglinton Airport in Derry.
Hughie Junior has also taken flight as a pilot – he and his father members of the Finn Valley Flying Club who were well represented at Monday night’s memorial tribute.
“Dad was also into the vintage stuff as well. When we were kids, he had Jaguars when other people were driving around in Morris Minors and Chevettes. I remember a red one and a white one. He had a good lot of Jaguars after that as well.”
Every year, Hugh would fly to Canada to visit his good friend and fellow musician, Tommy Patton. “Tommy and him started school at the same time so he knew him from the age of five. And Tommy came over for his funeral along with his two sons, Peter and young Tommy, the whole way from Canada.
“Tommy and him used to play music together. When we were young we used to go down to their house for a music session on New Year’s night.”
The name of the late Ted Ponsonby was mentioned more than once – Hugh having taught the teenage Ted how to play the guitar. “And Ted went on to become one of the best guitarists in the country. They were great friends over the years and now the two of them are gone.”
And another entertainer gone to meet his maker in recent times was Seamus McGee. “Dad and Alec Black went down to his funeral and that was a couple of weeks before dad himself died.”
Another prominent local musician to add his tribute and talent to the night was Percy Robinson. “I was in my early twenties when I first met Hugh. I suppose I lost contact after that but in the last three or four years, me and him and Dessie Crerand would play in the Silver Tassie for people with dementia or Alzheimers every Tuesday.
“And I got to know him a lot better and then he and Evelyn would come along to my studio to record and they recorded a great album a few years ago and then only recently they were recording a few more songs.”
Percy recalled the function last April marking Hugh’s sixty years in the music business. “It was a great night here in the Station House and the place was jammed.
“He was such an incredible musician – he could play everything from mandolin, guitar, banjo. And people thought he was just a country singer but he was into every sort of music. Not that long ago, he was singing this real obscure Bob Dylan song and the amount of verses to it – unbelievable. No problem to him.
“And he was into traditional music and folk music and other types.”
Many strings to his bow obviously.
And many strings on stage to join in the tributes to one of the county’s greatest performers – a musical night of eulogy.
Hugh’s sons, Mark and Hughie Jnr, were there along with Joey McDaid, Raymond McDonald and Alec Black, later in the evening to be joined by the great Brendan Quinn.
And many other singers and musicians of note including Sinead Black, Martin Orr, and Eddie Gallagher to name but a few.
The songs continued to the end with Raymond McDonald bringing proceedings to an emotional close with his outstanding rendering of ‘How Great Thou Art’.
A night to remember and echoing another long distant night when an 18 year old Hugh McLean performed on stage for the first time with the Willie Ponsonby Showband in the North Star Ballroom in Carrigart on April 14, 1963.
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