“When I am down and, oh my soul, so weary;
When troubles come and my heart burdened be;
Then, I am still and wait here in the silence,
Until you come and sit awhile with me.”
Lyrics by Brendan Graham
“You Raise Me Up,” first recorded by Secret Garden, featuring Brian Kennedy, has become one of the biggest selling songs in the history of popular music, with over three hundred recordings by some of the world’s biggest acts – Josh Groban, Westlife, IL Divo, Paul Potts, Celtic Woman, to name but a few, and has racked up sales of over 80 million copies. It has never been out of the charts somewhere in the world in the past eight years. It has also become one of the most successful songs of all time in sheet music sales, being continuously at No. 1 for the past seven years, in the USA’s Sheet Music Bestseller Charts, in four different categories: Pop, Adult Contemporary, Pop Choral and Downloads and it is the most downloaded song in sheet music format of all time.
All this said, few people in our county realise that the lyrics were written by county Tipperary man, Brendan Graham.
Brendan Graham, born in 1945 here in Nenagh, County Tipperary, was an Industrial Engineer by profession, before becoming a full-time songwriter, after being made redundant in 1993. He was also a former Irish Youth International basketball player, a student priest, a pig-boner in London and a recipient of Western Australia’s Lansing Bagnall State Award for business studies. Mr Graham now resides in County Mayo with his wife and five daughters.
Graham has composed two of Ireland’s winning entries in the Euro-vision Song Contest in the past: “Rock ‘n’ Roll Kids” which won in 1994, and “The Voice” the winner of the 1996 contest.
Brendan Graham, is also an Irish novelist and has published three novels, ‘The Whitest Flower‘ (London, Harper Collins, 1998), an Irish no. 2 best seller, ‘The Element of Fire‘ (Harper Collins, 2001) and ‘The Brightest Day, The Darkest Night‘ (Harper Collins, 2004).
Irish songwriter and founding member of The Irish Music Rights Organisation (IMRO), Brendan Graham is officially included in an exclusive club with the world’s top songwriters, awarded “Million-Air ” status by the American Performing Rights Society, BMI. Only 3900 (0.06%) songs of the 6.5 million works, which BMI represent, have ever been awarded Million-Air certificates.
To be included in this exclusive roster, a song must have been broadcast over one million times on American radio. This definition equals at least 50,000 broadcast hours, or more than 5.7 years of continuous airplay. The songwriter joins previous ‘Million-Air’ recipients like song-writing legends John Lennon, Van Morrison, Enya, Eric Clapton, Elton John, Mick Jagger, Ben E King, Sting, Otis Redding and Roy Orbison.
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