O'hegarty, Charles
The More I Travel
In the early 1960s a young British folk singer from London read about the budding folk boom in the USA and wanted a piece of the action. As he and his wife already had travelled through Europe, the Middle East and Africa they didn't hesitate to pack up and go. So, this folksinger added an "O" to his name and became Charles O'Hegarty. Charles and Anna arrived in Canada in 1963 and stayed until early 1965. Then they entered the USA, lived in San Francisco and Los Angeles before they crossed the whole country to go to New York. By then it was early autumn of 1965 when Charles became part of the Greenwich Village scene - and continued to do so until 1970. This is a very brief sketch of Charles O'Hegarty's life in the 1960s - and if you have an "in the right place at the right time"-notion you're absolutely correct. Charles connected to several important folk scenes in Canada and the USA, played the Berkeley Folk Music Festival and many famous folk clubs of the day, recorded a folk-rock single for Verve-Folkways and became a singer-songwriter with his own repertoire. But nowadays only a few people remember Charles O'Hegarty (who died in 2010). And he's not a household name in the annals of '60s folk music - obviously due to a lack of available recordings. Through our association with John Townley, Lollipoppe Shoppe got to hear three unreleased songs by Charles, recorded by John at his Apostolic Studio in 1969. These wonderfully written and sublimely arranged originals cried out to be released - so they started to dig deeper in the hope of finding enough material for a whole LP. Now, after two years of work they can present a retrospective LP+CD-set of '60s studio and live recordings by Charles O'Hegarty, gathered together from six different sources, recorded between 1964 and 1970. Of the 16 tracks on the LP only one has been previously released - and the CD includes seven additional tracks (also unissued). With this release - organized in collaboration with Anna and Marika Hegarty - we hope to set the record straight and put Charles O'Hegarty back on the map of 1960s folksingers/singer- songwriters.