“A Horse can be hear the grass grow”

“…And what about the butterfly? Dyin away too, the butterfly’

‘White Gypsy Boy, Black Gypsy King’ is a radio documentary about a 20th Century Irish traveller known as Black John Mawn. Through conversation with one of its famous characters and his family, we celebrate Ireland’s traveller culture, explore its heyday and ponder its current decline.

 This is the story of a 20th Century ‘King of the Gypsies’ known as ‘Black John’.
It is an epic journey that starts high up on the front seat of a traveller wagon along one of Ireland’s winding roads in the 1930’s and with a little boy sitting by his father’s side. This young boy will come to know these roads as his home and will live a life on the fringes of society and one day become the ‘King of the Gypsies’.
With the space to tell his story in his own way, ‘Black John’,  in his seventies when the recordings were made in 2007, brings us back to his childhood day; his romancing days, his fighting days; to the good days and the bad days.
'White Gypsy Boy, Black Gypsy King’ charts a life precious to a culture soon lost.

Written & Produced by Kevin McCann, Maccana Teoranta Productions. Edited by Sarah Keating. Funded by the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland.