Crowdfunding campaign to keep Rory Gallagher’s guitar in Cork already up to over €6,000

Sheena has a special link to the guitar, being the daughter of the late Mick Crowley, who first sold the instrument to a teenage Gallagher for £100 back in 1963. 

“I heard about it first thing Monday morning, and I just thought, well, we can’t let that go,” says Sheena. “We have to make sure it stays in Cork, no matter what. The thing was to act first, and then figure out all the logistics of it. The thing was to get up the GoFundMe page up quickly, because there’s an awful lot to raise in a very short time.”

Currently sitting just under €6,500 of donations from the shop’s current community. Crowley has set an ambitious upper ceiling of a million euro on the fundraising effort.

The campaign has people talking – and isn’t the only crowdfunding bid for an auction warchest – but given Gallagher’s connection to the city, a musical and cultural legacy that pervades to this day, it’s likely to pull down support from many corners of Leeside society.

“There’s been a huge response to it. Everybody’s talking about it, and almost everybody, is positive about it. Some people think it should go to Dublin, and maybe people in Ballyshannon [Co Donegal, Gallagher’s birthplace] feel it should be there, but everybody is positive, they understand that this is coming from a good place, and it’s an idea to make sure it happens.

“There’s a few people that might say something like, ‘how do we know where the money is going?’, and all that, but GoFundMe is a legitimate site, with donation protection. I don’t get any of the money, until the campaign is finished. So if it doesn’t work out, the pledges are returned automatically. There’s no fear of it, but it is a huge sum of money.

“Rory Gallagher has millions of fans, worldwide, and if everybody just gives 20 euro or 50 euro, or whatever they can afford, then it’s going to happen.”

Crowley is also reaching out to businesspeople in Cork to retain what many feel is a hugely important item in the city’s cultural heritage.  

“We’re  meeting up with businesspeople locally that will put a plan in place, a robust plan to try and secure it, and cover all aspects of marketing and legal and financial. They need help from me, we need help from them, and they will need us to plug on with what we’re doing.”

The Crowley family’s historic relationship with the rock legend is inextricable from the story of his body of work. After he progressed from local showbands to beat-group Taste, he eventually struck out solo, winning over a generation of plaid-clad fans – especially on Leeside, where his City Hall gigs are still discussed in reverential tones.

“Down through the years, we were always related to that story, and we probably got our name mentioned in places that it otherwise would never have been,” says Crowley. “In a sense, I feel like there’s gratitude, and an obligation to make sure it stays here, because for 30 years, that would have been a heavy financial cost [for the Gallagher family] to store, secure and insure it. 

“My dad had a relationship with Rory, they were friends, and they were very alike in manner and character and there was a deep respect for each other. My father felt attached to that Strat and was delighted it got to be in the hands of Rory Gallagher, and so for me, personally, I just think there’s great love there for him, and for [Rory’s brother and guitar custodian] Donal and family.”

For Sheena, this campaign to keep the guitar in Cork is an important cultural campaign, and one she envisages being the centrepiece of a proposed local music-history centre, if successful. But as much as any of that, it’s about honouring a family friend.

“I used to see him in the shop when I was younger. I’d have been 20 years younger than him, maybe more, so he’d see me as a kid, but he was very, very nice to me, and I always thought he was a lovely, lovely man. He’d go to try out something on the shop floor there, when we were closed in the evenings, and you could tell straight away, like man, he was a genius with whatever instrument he picked up, whether it was a banjo or a mandolin, and he’d also be telling Mick about stuff he saw when he was out on his travels.

“It’s a love and passion for music in every regard, the instrument as well. So for me, it’s honouring that, really, I suppose. Cork has been put on the map as much as Crowleys was put on the map, down to Rory Gallagher, in a huge way.”

• For more information and to make a donation to Crowley’s campaign, visit GoFundMe.