"I have a lot to be thankful about," John Whelan said in a February interview. The seven-time all-Ireland button-accordion champion and award-winning, chart-topping recording artist is thankful for the music and the success, of course. But he's also thankful for the friends he's made along the way. Irish musicians and music fans the world over know Whelan as a brilliant player and a loveable wildman, who not only gets audiences to dance in the aisles but dances right there with them. Whelan is so much a part of the East Coast Irish circuit that it's hard to imagine Irish music in the U.S. without him.
Whelan's early life was spent neither in the U.S. nor in Ireland, but in England. He grew up 37 miles from London, in the Luton suburb of Dunstable. But he had three years in the capital first. "I was born in London," he explained. "My father told me they had a one-room flat when they first got married. My sister was the oldest, so she got the crib. And I was the youngest, so I got the drawer. So the first three years of my life, I slept in a drawer! And my dad says when I got too big for the drawer they had to move. So they moved to Dunstable."
More seriously, he explained the family's move in terms of the politics of the time. "About 1962, they had what you call the London overspill. They started developing all these towns past the greenbelt of London. You had 15 miles or so of greenbelt, and then they started developing these towns because London was getting too populated. So my dad got the house where I grew up. It was a council house, but when Margaret Thatcher came into power, she turned housing over to the people who lived in it. You got a rebate on the house depending on how long you'd lived in it and paid rent. So my dad bought the house." In 1980, the same year that Denis Whelan bought his home, John left for the United States. But his time in Dunstable had been well spent; he was already a seasoned accordion player with an album of traditional Irish music on a respected label.
Whelan's start in Irish music came from hearing his family play at home. His father played "a couple of waltzes" on the box, but his grandfather and great-grandfather, who came from County Wexford, both were more serious players. When the young Whelan realized at the age of 11 that he wanted to learn, there was no question who his teacher would be: Clare fiddler Brendan Mulkere. "Brendan was really the pre-eminent teacher around at that time, him and Tommy McGuire in London," Whelan remembered. "But Brendan was the one who traveled outside of London. He came to Luton." Every other week for several years, Whelan met with Mulkere in the Harp Club in Luton. "He had 30 or 40 students, and he maintained that for a long time," Whelan remembered. "Brendan started a lot of good people. John Carty, Christine Considine, and many others."
The young Whelan took to the box easily, and within three years of beginning to play, was asked by Belfast's Outlet records to record an album. The resulting LP was titled The Pride of Wexford. "I look back on it, and I figure it wasn't too bad. There's some errors on there, but I did the whole thing in one day, from 10 o'clock till five. It's pretty good for a 14-year-old kid in seven hours.
"I remember getting the first shipment after the album was done," he continued. "It was really exciting for me. We got this big, heavy box, like 300 LPs or something. We opened the LP, and the cover was there, and I hated the photograph. Then I took the LP out [of the sleeve], and it was The Greatest Hits of Nashville. The whole box was like that! So we had to send it back, and I was really bummed out." Outlet did straighten the mess out, though, and The Pride of Wexford became a steady seller for the small label. Although the album has never been put on CD, Whelan says he'd like to see it reissued, if only for old time's sake. The album holds many memories for him. His accompanist, for example, was pianist Kevin Taylor, a family friend who has since passed away. Whelan also remembers the fine Limerick flute player Paddy Taylor, Kevin's father, whom he calls "a great man." He was, according to Whelan, "the first adult musician to ask me to sit down and have a tune with him."
