Randall Stephen Hall.
Singer. Songwriter. Poet. Storyteller.
Writing Songs without formula or recipe.
Interviewed by “Hugh Midden” at the Moon Shed. Co. Antrim.
* If any of the WEBLINKS don’t click, just cut and paste them into your search engine and you will be rewarded with some entertaining songs and interviews.
Stephen Hall has been writing songs for as long as he can remember.
He grew up, and went to school, in north Belfast at the height of the troubles.
It had a deep impact on his songwriting and poetry. It set him off on a journey of discovery beyond the confines of his own perceived tribe. The journey continues to this day. (He’s really out there, man.)
Is this an easy thing to do? To jump the boundaries? “No. At first, as a child I was completely at the mercy of hints and clues as to who I was or where I belonged, culturally. But when I picked up my first guitar the very first thing I did naturally, was to make two strings “drone” together. The harmonies came later”.
So do you think you carry a Celtic or Gaelic heritage in your DNA? Irish, Scottish and British? “Yes. All those and more. Though it’s more complex than that. As I see it, you come into the world with a wee package of influences, which, over time, push you in a particular direction, creatively. With me the “identity issue” keeps returning in my songs, poetry and stories like “THE ISLAND “ or “THE TREE” which I use with children and adults or “SCUTTARISH” more recently. This is a new song, suggesting a new way of looking at identity in the north. By combining “Scots” and “Irish” together to create one new word. https://soundcloud.com/randall-stephen-hall/scuttarish-28-11-14
“In Ireland, in general (whatever your label or distinction) there are many ancient and modern links with other parts of the world. All coming and going like different waves upon our shared coast. So whether it is Irish Trad or Scots Gaelic, Scots (two different things), Folk, Gospel, Blues, Reggae, Funk and Americana, I’m open to all these influences.” Here is “THE BREAD SONG”, from the early 1980s . . . https://soundcloud.com/randall-stephen-hall/the-bread-song-circa-1980
I don’t tie myself down to just the one thing musically or lyrically. I like to tell stories, at times represent the life of one person like “THE BALLAD OF WILLIE NELSON” hung outside his mother’s house in Ballycarry, during the 1798 Rebellion or “THE REIVER & THE GAEL” a large group of people, exiled to Ireland from the borders of England and Scotland around 1600. https://soundcloud.com/randall-stephen-hall/the-reiver-and-the-gael-2008 Hidden history and forgotten events, seeking a new voice.
You first got airplay on the Gerry Anderson Radio Show, back in 2010 with a song of yours called “The Wee Wee Man”. How did that happen?
“Well, the song grew out of many many workshops with children from around 1997 to the present day, in many schools in Ulster. Up in Donegal and as far south as Dublin and Cashel. I began doing home recording with a wee USB mic called a “Snowflake” made by blue. This made all my recordings clear so I just began “painting with sound”, in layers, using my voice, harmonies, handclaps, a Kenyan hand drum, just anything really, if it sounded good in my wee lugs.”
“I played on Gerry’s show the first time 14.5.10 with John McKeever and Barry Tipping. Then, over the next year we played on the show four times. It was great fun. Great craic. There was pressure too, but Gerry made it seem like you were just talking to him. I’ll always be grateful to Gerry for giving me a wee shove. I still call him the Medicine Man. He was and still is some Indian. Sadly missed. It was all very encouraging at the time. A kick start and it didn’t matter, with which foot!”
Here’s part of an interview from 24.9.10 the morning after launching my first CD, “Songs from the Moon Shed/The Wee Wee Man” at the Black Box, Belfast, 23.9.10 which Gerry introduced. https://soundcloud.com/randall-stephen-hall/gerry-anderso-interview-24-9 Interviewed live on Radio Ulster with myself and my friends in the band, the Moon Shed: Rohan Young (Bodhrán), John McKeever (Guitar), Michael Sands (Banjo), and Barry Tipping (Guitar).
And how are things now?
“Well, my next CD, called “Re-Wired” should be out in May 2015. I brought out a wee Sampler CD called “WINTER CALLING” last Christmas 2014 and it was well received with some interviews (The Arts Show. Derry. BBC Radio Ulster with Michael Bradley), and some airplay from Brian Mullan and Ralph McClean, during the Belfast Nashville Festival. I was playing there 4.3.15.
So, more to follow then and more live gigs?
“Yes. Absolutely. I’ll keep you posted Hugh”
* More info about “Hugh Midden” can be found at “HUGH MIDDEN SPEAKS” on Sound
AS one who believes (staunchly) that songwriters are the unsung heroes of the singing thing (with some exceptions who are better left unmentioned as too many couldn’t carry a ‘toon in a bucket’ as they say in Music City, USA) the song which fairly hit me plumb between the eyes was ‘The Ballad of Willie Nelson’.
Not sure if Stephen Randall Hall has run it past the other one of the same name; if he hasn’t, he oughter.
Not only a crafter of superb songs himself the contemporary Willie Nelson is known as a generous lender of an ear to the shaper of other songs himself.Not to mention a tongue. It was, after all, a super bowl of a song by another tunesmith rather than one of his own major league efforts which really knocked Old Willie out of the ball park and into superstardom.
Today, it is not too fanciful to say he is the Old Bald Eagle of Americana. Despite his flowing locks which even the best efforts of his bandana cannot contain.
Who today knows that Fred Rose was the songwriter of that elemental hymn to sadness ‘Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain’?
Certainly, the gracious Southern lady who held the fort at the office of the Mount Olivet Cemetery in Nashville, Tn. the day one moseyed on out over there. Not only that, she had never even heard of him as a songwriter, much less of his status as perhaps the single greatest influence in transforming the city of his adoption into Music City, USA.
Music, it was said, poured out of every pore of Fred Rose.
It is not a widely acknowledged fact either than Fred Rose was the ‘song doctor’ who nursed most of his protoge Hank Williams’s songs to full health and made them listenable to. The reason being Fred Rose was a pathological self-effacing dude and believed in the old Gaelic adage: ‘Molann an saothar an saothrai’. Even if only on a subconscious level: ‘the work praises the worker’ (and vice versa, of course).
It all probability, the song doctor Fred Rose succumbed as much to that self-effacement as any other cause, at the age of 54.. Though it did not indicate that fact on his tombstone. It was a resplendent stroll,heavy with the scent of dogwood, magnolia and the gothic, to his diffident gravefar, far from the gateway to the most sheepish corner of this panoramic graveyard. It dying ever goes out of fashion it would make one dinky golf course.
Willie Nelson did his great song justice, as I’m sure he’d do the best of Stephen Randall Hall’s.
Another name, incidentally, with a Norneverland timbre which registered with one during one’s sojourn in Nashville, Tn was that of Owen Bradley. The legendary record producer both enhanced and blotted his copybook: by championing on the one hand, Gentleman Jim Reeves while banishing Buddy Holly back to Lubbock, Tx on the other.
Come to think of it his near contemporary namesake is another mercurial genius who knows the cacophany of conflict in his inner ear.
That would be Eoin Bradly of the Derry Gaelic Football Team and Glenavon FC.