Down the Crooked Road: My Autobiography

The moving autobiography of the international star and Ireland’s best-loved singer, Mary Black.
For the last 25 years, singer Mary Black has been a dominant presence on the Irish music scene and has achieved international acclaim in Europe and the USA. She has shared stages, television shows and recording studios with some of the most revered performers -- from Van Morrison and Joan Baez, to Emmylou Harris and Mary Chapin Carpenter, and has played a frontline role in bringing Irish music, past and present, to an increasingly appreciative and ever-growing global audience.
Now, in her moving memoir, Mary takes us back to her early days, to the roots of her musical heritage. As she recounts her childhood memories and tells how music played an important role in the Black family home, we see how the young girl from Dublin went on to tour the world, sell millions of albums -- including No Frontiers, a triple platinum album -- and, with her beautiful singing voice, captured the hearts of millions around the world.

MARY BLACK was born into a musical family. Her father was a fiddler, her mother a singer, her brothers had their own musical group called The Black Brothers, and her younger sister Frances would go on to achieve great success as a singer in the 1990s. From this musical background, Mary began singing traditional Irish songs at the age of eight. As she grew older, she began to perform with her siblings (Shay, Michael and Martin Black) in small clubs around Dublin, finally achieving great success in her own right as a recording artist. She has released several award-winning albums, and a documentary tracing her progress, Still Believing, was released in 2002. Mary continues to travel the world, attracting huge audiences in Europe, the US and Australia/New Zealand. She now lives in Dublin with her husband Joe.