Danny Ellis

by Joy Smith

Last weekend I attended the U.S. premiere of 800 Voices, My Life in an Irish Orphanage, a concert by Asheville resident Danny Ellis. Ellis was born in Dublin and began his life in the poverty that marked so many Irish children in the early 1950s.

He spoke of playing with hundreds of other children under the shadows of gaslights and listening for the grocer’s cart and horse rattling on the cobblestone streets as it delivered vegetables. His “Da,” his father, had gone to America to find work.
He described listening to his Ma singing songs full of emotion, and, during the many times when she was absent (leaving him in charge of his younger brothers), making up his own songs so they wouldn’t cry.

Then, when he was eight, he came home from school to find his brothers and sisters gone. His Ma didn’t make any explanation where they were, but a few days later she took him to the well-known (and dreaded) Catholic orphanage, telling him that she was sick with tuberculosis and would have to stay in the hospital for a while. She promised she would return on Christmas to take him home. He never saw her again.

Danny and his fellow orphans, he recalls, were regularly beaten and starved; they stayed in the orphanage until they were 16, at which time they were on their own. For Danny, salvation came in the guise of the Artane Industrial School band: it played for dignitaries and even kings, and in learning to play trombone with the band he felt love and kindness from people for whom they performed.

The band also gave him knowledge of music to complement the gift he was born with: the soul of a poet. For Ellis is a master storyteller, and his experiences and their emotional toll on him are reflected in his words, as he describes “boys fighting to keep warm” bearing “wounds too deep to bleed.” To escape their surroundings, he writes of their music, “we played louder than the pain.” His voice, with its tremendous range, and the music that is alternately soft and hauntingly beautiful, help soften the sometimes raw pain of the words.

All of us humans undergo painful experiences during our time on earth, and we must overcome them in order to survive. For most of us, that is a private struggle. For a man who has suffered much at the hands of others to turn that suffering into art is both cathartic for him and a great gift to the rest of us; it takes enormous courage, and it gives hope to others for their own lives.

In addition to his concert CD, 800 Voices, Ellis has produced This Tenderness, a collection of romantic ballads and songs that reflect his wanderlust (he has lived all over the world) and are flavored with musical styles from many countries, ranging from jazz and blues to Calypso and Irish and African rhythms.