From Belfast to Blackthorn

Blackthorn is a band that almost wasn't.

It's the summer of '84, and the Detroit Tigers are in the midst of the pennant race, on their way to win the World Series, when 34-year-old high school teacher Richard McMullan got the call-up. But it wasn't Sparky Anderson on the other end of the line, rather it was bar owner John Brady, who had just fired his band and found himself in desperate need. For Irish music in 1980s Detroit, and baseball bars in general, the Shillelagh was the Big Leagues. McMullan, an occasional cover band drummer from Belfast, hadn't ever taken an at-bat as a guitar player, let alone bandleader. But then he swung hard and connected on the sweet spot with his hastily thrown-together combo.

More than 25 years into it — with hair that's gray, or on its way there, and a humble discography — the harmony hounds of Blackthorn continue to book between two and six shows a month, often playing back-to-back concerts no further than a half-hour's drive apart, and to audiences of 100 or more. And predictably, around St. Patrick's Day, the band is in heavy pub rotation.

But what if ...

What if the Tigers weren't headed for the World Series that year? What if that other band hadn't been fired? What if McMullan hadn't picked up his guitar and hollered out the songs of his youth for booze-fueled fanatics?

What if McMullan had stayed in Belfast?

Born in Belfast, in 1950, Richard was the first son of Eileen and Richard McMullan. His mother, until more sons came along, worked as a stitcher in a factory that made overalls and dungarees, while his father did his hard work on oil tankers as a merchant marine. The McMullans were as working-class as working-class gets.

As a young lad, the McMullans lived on Shore Road, near the Belfast Loch. "My address was 152 Donview Bungalows, which might sound kind of fancy, but they were actually prefabricated houses that everyone called the prefabs," McMullan remembers. "But at least it was a mixed neighborhood." "Mixed" as in the community was home to both Catholics and Protestants — mostly Protestants. The Catholic-born McMullan knew his family was different than most who lived in the prefabs, but, at least in those early years, no big deal was made out of it.

Living in Northern Ireland, many if not the majority of McMullan's friends, early on, were Protestants. There was just one episode from his youth when Ireland's socio-religious civil conflict literally hit home. "It was 1958, and Robert Booth was my next door neighbor. His family was Protestant, and his mother was from Ballymena, a Scottish stronghold in the north. But we were friends," McMullan says. "One day, Booth and I got in this fight; we're rolling around on the ground; he's punching me. I remember his mother comes out of the house and she yells, 'Kill that Fenian bastard!'" The derogatory term for Catholics was what we might call an F-bomb today.

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