Frank was one of God's own great characters: part artist, part scholar and part barroom kibitzer. He could be a terrible tease but he doted on women, virtually all women of virtually any age.   

I bought his first two Topic LPs at Dobell's or Collet's or the Folk Shop at Cecil Sharp House just when they came out. I first was introduced to Frank by Paul Brady at the 10th anniversary of the Tradition Club in Dublin and I sat across the room from him that night. For whatever reason, he was holding someone else's concertina case and I thought for a few years afterwards that he played the instrument.

We met in Mick Moloney's backyard sometime in the late 70s and we spent the next day marching around Philadelphia looking for an exotic computer part in 95F weather with about the same figure on the humidity index. Our mutual ordeal made us fast friends.

Frank's first or second gig in the U.S. was at The Eagle Tavern in NYC about 25 years ago. He was really unknown here then so we decided to try a new format without sound system in which he and I would do a few songs and then members of the audience would do a few songs and then pass the ball would pass back to Frank. I remember he found it very amusing that the audience would be paying to hear themselves sing.   

Anytime I was looking for a "different" song for a recording, Frank was quick to help and he never suggested crappy songs. In fact, he later recorded three of the songs he gave me himself including "The Nightingale." As we know, Frank gave songs to many well known singers but he also gave many songs to many unknown singers and I very much doubt that he spent any less time with the latter than with the former.

It was Frank who first took me to the Goilin and who harped at me to go up to Inishowen. That first year, he spent just about the whole weekend with me and introduced me to virtually everyone there. When I think of the great friendships that have resulted from those two connections, I realize the great debt I owe him.

Like all the people who truly love folk songs and take the time to seek them out, Frank heard thousands of songs in his life. Possessor of an exceptional memory, a large number of the songs he heard stuck with him. He had great taste too.

I am not fully able to comprehend that he's dead yet, that I will never again hear him take the opposite side of an argument just to have a bit of fun, that he will never look at me again with a devilish eye before singing a song he knew I could never have heard before, that I will never again return home to find my phone answering machine clogged with messages from him, that I will never again feel his elbow in my side as he strode past me to fuss over my wife, that I will never again hear him sing the ballad about the gates that swung open by themselves.