thomas mccarthy traveller singer

Traveller music series features Cork singer

MUSIC TRADITION: Songlines presenter Thomas McCarthy with 16-year-old Rosie McCarthy in Macroom

IN recent years, the immense contribution of Irish Travellers to Ireland’s music tradition has begun to be realised.

For centuries, they carried tunes and songs from town to town, made and repaired instruments, and transmitted their unique musical style, adding a distinctly recognisable layer to the nation’s musical and cultural heritage.

Many of the songs that are now standards of the folk singing tradition have been kept alive by the Travelling community.

We get an insight into this in the new series Songlines on RTÉ1 on Monday at 10.15pm, and the first episode includes a trip to Cork.

The series journeys with traditional Traveller singer Thomas McCarthy as we meet an eclectic collection of his ilk throughout Ireland - charismatic performers and carriers of tradition but rarely seen or heard outside the Travelling community.

McCarthy appeared in a 2022 RTÉ documentary called Songs Of The Open Road, and embarked on a project with the Irish Traditional Music Archive, about Traveller music.

His new series begins in Paris, where Thomas has been performing for the previous six months in the show Cabaret de l’dxil, Irish Travellers, an international theatre show telling the story of Irish Travellers. Thomas is a lynchpin in the production, which went on to attract an audience of over 60,000 people in its six-month run.

From Paris, we travel to meet Rosie McCarthy at home in Macroom. Although just 16, she’s already a powerful and expressive singer who loves singing the old songs.

Thomas then travels to meet Kitty Cassidy in Waterford, now 84, but still a powerful performer. She sings and talks about her parents Johnny and Julia Cassidy who were themselves storytellers and singers.

Later, we catch up with Kitty again the Irish Traditional Music Archive where she tells Thomas where she learned her songs and sings extracts of three songs: Please Mr Conductor, Lovely Willie, and Mother Malone.

In the course of the film, we also meet cousins Stephen McDonagh and Ned McCarthy in Tullamore, who are related to the famous pipers, Felix and Johnny Doran.

We also see the Keenan sisters, Kathleen and Mary, in Ennis and in Ballymun, we meet Ellie Stokes daughter of Traveller singer Mary Kate McDonagh, who was recorded by the great collector Tom Munnelly singing The Tri-Colour House.

In Drogheda, Thomas hears the songs False Lankum and Smuggling the Tin.

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Thomas McCarthy, Singer & Storyteller

The Romani Cultural and Arts Company 14th profile will be of Thomas McCarthy

Thomas McCarthy was born in the town of Birr, County Offaly, in the Irish midlands into a well respected Irish Traveller family. His grandfather was known as a “seanachie” which is an Irish term for someone with a profound orally derived knowledge of the history and families of Ireland.

Thomas learnt his crafts of singing and storytelling from his mother, aunts and uncles.

His extended family has a long history of musicianship and includes the well-recognised and respected Doran Brothers and their grandfather “Big John Cash”, who all played the Irish uillean (elbow) pipes.

At age ten Thomas moved to London but continued to travel with his family back and forth and around Ireland and England.

He was recognised by his own family as a gifted singer from a young age, but was “discovered” in 2008 by the wider public after a “tip off” from a barman at a family wedding. This led him to Cecil Sharp House in Camden Town, London. Here he joined singers at a folk song club, who were amazed and enchanted by his powerful yet subtle, ancient and authentic Irish Traveller style of singing and by the rare songs that he brought with him.

Thomas has since been employed singing in clubs and at festivals throughout the UK and Ireland as well as in Europe and the US. He has been described as “the most exciting thing to come out of Ireland in the last fifty years” by Joe Power who runs the folk song club in Dungarven, Ireland.

In addition to this he has proved to be an engaging storyteller for children in the UK and the US, working in schools and at festivals and drawing on old stories and a “fireside” style of storytelling learnt from his family. He never fails to enchant, educate and engage the children, who come from all walks of life.

He has now recorded three CDs: “The Round Top Wagon”, “Herself and Myself” and the third in conjunction with the Cornish Romani Traveller Viv Legg. In reference to the two Travelling traditions, this CD is named “Jauling the Green Tober”. (“Jauling” being a Romani word for walking and “tober” an Irish Traveller word for the road.)

Thomas is also an activist on behalf of his people. This can range from a positive education about his people during performances, talks and storytelling to confronting racism and racist language against Travellers when he comes across it. He has contributed to a number of educative equality and diversity events and conferences, where he has communicated useful information and understanding to professionals wishing to work constructively with the Traveller community.

To purchase CDs go to www.thomasmccarthyfolk.com for “Jauling the Green Tober” and “Herself and Myself” or for copies of “Round Top Wagon” go to travellergypsystory.org

The Romani Cultural and Arts Company is not responsible for the content of external Internet sites.

Thomas McCarthy

Thomas McCarthy is an Irish Traveller, Singer and Storyteller from Birr in County Offaly. Named as Traditional Singer of the Year in the Gradam Ceoil Awards in 2019, Thomas comes from a long line of old traditional singers and musicians who kept the tradition of singing strong.

Thomas McCarthy – Scottish Tour

I rish Traveller singer Thomas McCarthy can be found more often these days in West London rather than his home town of Birr in County Offaly, Ireland. He comes from a long line of traditional singers who are related to the Dorans, one of Ireland’s most famous musician families which included John and Felix Doran, pipers who travelled by horse drawn caravan to fairs and events where they performed.

Thomas has been building a big reputation himself, having released his second album ‘ Herself and Myself ‘ he was recently filmed singing for the BBC Series ‘Call the Midwife’ this year and has been appearing at folk clubs and festivals across the UK.

He will be performing three dates in Scotland including Aberdeen Folk Club, Edinburgh Tradfest and The Glad Cafe in Glasgow, details and links below. Here he is performing Michael Was Hearty .

Scottish Tour Dates

May 6th: Aberdeen Folk Club – Link

May 7th: Edinburgh Tradfest (at Scottish Storytelling Centre) – Link

May 8th: Glasgow Glad Cafe – Link

www.thomasmccarthyfolk.com

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Evelyn Thomas dies at 70

Ellen Lucille "Evelyn" Thomas (August 22, 1953 – July 21, 2024) was an American singer from Chicago, Illinois, best known for the hi-NRG dance hits "High Energy", "Masquerade", "Standing at the Crossroads", "Reflections", and "Weak Spot".

High Energy was a classic.

Great song RIP

BBC write-up here

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Thomas McCarthy

Irish traveller, singer, storyteller.

•         - My Family
•         - Travellers
•         - Reviews
•         - Lyrics

REVIEWS OF HERSELF & MYSELF

“The actual quality of Thomas’s own voice, too, stops you in your tracks rather and holds you spellbound thereafter.” David Kidman  in Living Tradition, December 2014

“Listening to this album is rather like looking at a precious multi-faceted jewel.” Vic Smith in the EFDSS English Dance & Song magazine,   Click here to read , November 2014

“One can see exactly what it is that makes him such an interesting singer” Rod Stradling in Musical Traditions magazine , August 2014

“A warm and engaging character, he is a fine though modest ambassador for his Community and Country.” Hector Gilchrist in his Sidmouth Festival Roundup, August 2014

REVIEWS OF ROUND TOP WAGON

CD review: Round Top Wagon, published in  Musical Traditions magazine . June 2011

INTERVIEWS WITH THOMAS

Interview with the Siobhan Long in the Irish Times : “I was working with 14 or 15 young gypsy girls in Wales, and it was wonderful. All of them were aged between nine and 15 years. It was quite comical because you’d think they’d be more interested in Lady Gaga.”, November 2018

Thomas talking to the BBC about Traveller culture: “Our people were the media, up until the 1970s.  Our ancient history has been totally ignored.” July 2016.

Thomas talking about his culture – and his grandfather – in Travellers Times:  “ My grandfather hated the house, but he had no choice with eight little children by himself. ” November 2014

“Our culture is slowly dying.  The music and the songs were our backbone.” Sidmouth Festival interview with Bev Harris on Brooklands Radio’s Mainly Folk , September 2014

Music that moves: Thomas McCarthy’s Irish Traveller songs in  The Guardian newspaper , March 2011.

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Evelyn Thomas, ‘High Energy’ Singer and Influential Disco Figure, Dies at 70

The disco figure was best known for singing '70s and '80s hits like "High Energy," "Weak Spot" and "Doomsday"

Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty 

Evelyn Thomas, the influential disco singer best known for her international hit song “High Energy,” has died. She was 70 years old.

The powerhouse vocalist died on Sunday, July 21, according to a Facebook post shared on X by her longtime producer and mentor Ian Levine. “It is hard for me to accept that my lifelong protege really has left us,” he wrote of Thomas, who’s largely credited for elevating the 1980s hi-NRG dance music scene. “Her music will outlive all of us.” No cause of death for the singer was disclosed.

Levine did not immediately respond to PEOPLE's request for comment.

Thomas, born in Chicago on Aug. 22, 1953, first made noise in the music scene with her Top 40 U.K. hit “Weak Spot,” per her Apple Music bio , just before the commercial craze of disco took off. The 1976 track, as well as another called “Doomsday,” was recorded by Levine, who, according to his social media post, Thomas had met and signed to the year prior.

That marked the start of the duo’s years-long working relationship, which continued in 1978 with Thomas’ debut album, I Wanna Make It On My Own . A few years later, the singer's career would explode thanks to her world-renowned hit song “High Energy” — co-written and produced by Levine and Fiachra Trench — which was lauded by Rolling Stone for giving life to the staple Hi-NRG genre (an uptempo offshoot of disco music) that ruled gay clubs in the mid-’80s.

“‘High Energy’ was written uniquely and specifically for her,” Levine wrote of Thomas in his post, adding, “Nobody else in the world could have ever sung it.”

The definitive 1984 recording topped the Billboard Dance Club Songs chart for one week in its heyday and reached No. 85 on the Billboard Hot 100. It also “sold seven million records worldwide,” per Levine.

Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty

Thomas went on to record more albums like 1984’s High Energy and 1987’s Standing at the Crossroads , both in collaboration with musical partner Levine. However, the producer said the pair took a 20-plus-year break before reuniting in 2009 to record three more songs. They were estranged for 15 more years before reconnecting just months before Thomas’ death.

“Knowing that she was dying, she reached out to me in love,” wrote Levine, noting that he and Trench “dropped everything” to record one last track for the singer, “a wonderful uplifting song called ‘Inspirational.’”

According to the producer’s post, “She loved it and she really wanted to sing it, but her health deteriorated far too fast and she simply could not do it.”

In her memory, Thomas’ daughter Kimberly (who goes by the stage name YaYa Diamond) — who appeared in the 1984 music video for “High Energy” — intends to record the unreleased song as a tribute to her life and legacy.

Kimberly did not immediately respond to PEOPLE's request for comment.

Following the news of Thomas’ death, the singer penned a heartfelt tribute to her mother on Facebook , writing, “They called me and I wasn’t available so they called my husband and they gave him the news. she’s gone. The legacy that my mother left me is beyond words and the memories are undeniably beyond any monetary value.”

“I want to thank everyone for their prayers and kind words,” Kimberly added alongside photos of her and Thomas. “Now it’s time to heal and to plan. Evelyn Thomas is already missed. RIP mommy.”

Related Articles

John Hinckley Jr. and the Madness of American Political Violence

Forty-three years ago, he shot the president in a delusional bid for attention — one in a long line of disturbed young men who have bent the arc of the nation’s history.

Credit... Stefan Ruiz for The New York Times

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By Mark O’Connell

Mark O’Connell is a writer from Dublin. He spoke with John Hinckley Jr. over the course of three days in Williamsburg, Virginia, as well as over the phone.

• July 25, 2024 Updated 3:54 p.m. ET

In September 2016, three and a half decades after he shot President Ronald Reagan in a deranged bid to impress the actress Jodie Foster — a crime for which he was found not guilty by reason of insanity — John W. Hinckley Jr. was released from St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C. From there, he moved to Williamsburg, Va., where he lived for some years with his elderly mother, Jo Ann, in a large house overlooking the 13th hole of a golf course. The federal court that granted his release did so on certain conditions. One of these was that he must not speak to the media. Another was that Hinckley, who was a songwriter for some years before the failed assassination attempt, and who continued to play music as part of his psychiatric treatment, must not release for public consumption, even anonymously, any of his work, without the specific approval of the treatment team entrusted with his care.

After his arrest, Hinckley was diagnosed with, among other conditions, atypical psychosis and severe narcissistic personality disorder; his extravagantly strange and violent actions had been bound up in a toxic fascination with celebrity and an egomaniacal glee at the fame those actions brought him. Although Hinckley’s treatment was successful, and the judge was satisfied that he presented a very low risk of reoffending, the restrictions were intended to ensure that he neither courted nor was courted by the media and that his mental stability would not be threatened in the immediate aftermath of his release by widespread attention.

In 2022, not long after his mother died, the last of those restrictions were lifted. More than four decades after shooting Ronald Reagan — along with a Secret Service agent named Timothy McCarthy, a police officer named Thomas Delahanty and Reagan’s press secretary, James Brady, who was left permanently disabled — he was, at 67 years of age, truly free. Hinckley had by then opened a Twitter account and amassed thousands of followers. On June 15, 2022, the day the restrictions were lifted, he posted the following: “After 41 years 2 months and 15 days, FREEDOM AT LAST!!!” His following grew, and he quickly began to use his platform to release music and promote upcoming gigs. He announced a total of a dozen performances. Unsurprisingly, these shows got a lot of attention and began to sell out. But every single one of them was canceled before he could play, as a result of backlash, including anonymous threatening emails, received by the venues.

This made Hinckley a figure of prurient interest on social media. When he posted about his excitement for an upcoming show, for instance, along with a selfie in which he stared directly at the camera with a glazed and entirely affectless expression, the replies were a chorus of ironic quips and jokes. Someone replied with a GIF of Travis Bickle clapping — a reference to Hinckley’s infamous inspiration for his crime, an obsession with “Taxi Driver” and with Jodie Foster, who played the teenage prostitute Iris in the film. “Haven’t heard his new stuff but I like his earlier work,” read another. (Jokes about Hinckley’s “early work” follow him everywhere online.) For a majority of people who encountered his internet presence, Hinckley was an absurd and quintessentially American aberration: a guy who shot, and very nearly killed, the president and was somehow still alive to sing his songs about peace and love and redemption.

Then, 43 years after that near assassination, in Butler, Pa., a 20-year-old loner named Thomas Matthew Crooks took several shots at Donald Trump with a semiautomatic rifle, wounding the former president’s right ear and plunging an already dark and chaotic world even deeper into darkness and chaos. Hinckley now became the focus of a different kind of interest. After the shooting, he posted the following message on the platform now known as X: “Violence is not the way to go. Give peace a chance.” He was quoting his old hero John Lennon, who was himself murdered by a strange and sick and lonely young man with a gun. The tweet provoked a by-now predictable response. There were GIFs of Jodie Foster looking haunted (“Hope she sees this bro”) and of Travis Bickle talking to himself in the mirror. There was an article in The Guardian headlined “Man Who Tried to Assassinate Reagan Says ‘Violence Is Not the Way to Go.’ ” Mostly, people seemed to be able to respond to the message only as evidence of the further derangement of things.

Hinckley might agree, in a sense. He had long held the belief that the country was too divided and there were too many guns. “The political climate here in America is just so volatile,” he told me when I got him on the phone. I asked him how he felt about the whole thing. There was a long silence, and eventually I heard him sigh. He is a slow talker, who often pauses at length between thoughts, and in the short time I had known him, I learned to ride out the silences, to let him continue at his own pace.

“Well,” he said then, in a tone of stoic resignation, “I wish it hadn’t happened.”

It was a couple of days after the shooting; late at night in Dublin, where I live, and early evening in Williamsburg. He was getting a lot of media requests, he said, but had so far turned them all down. He was an object once again of intense curiosity, as though, having shot at a president and lived, he was somehow a proxy for Crooks, who was killed just seconds after his attempt on Trump’s life. It’s possible, after all, that we will never know what led Crooks to try to kill the former president. But in Hinckley, we are presented with a kind of living antecedent, through whose former delusions we might begin to understand the currents of violence and culture-wide madness that seem to act so strongly on certain solitary and obsessive men who continue to cause such turbulence in the flow of American history.

I had, by then, been talking to Hinckley for three and a half months — since a New York Post story about the cancellation of his shows, in which he had called himself “a victim of cancel culture,” had gained widespread attention online. This exact pattern — Hinckley announces a concert; online commenters make jokes about his “early work”; the venue receives backlash and cancels the show — had played out a dozen or so times since Hinckley’s restrictions were lifted. It struck me as both farcical and poignant, the way that he kept being thwarted in his efforts to share his music with the world.

In mid-May, I went to Virginia to spend time with him. We talked about his music and about his strange and terrible past and about his effort, at age 69, to move on from it. I talked to people who collaborated with him on getting his music out to the world — a promoter, a guitar teacher, a graphic designer who worked on his records and merchandise, a woman whom he referred to as his assistant. When I thought about the disturbing things he did in 1981, there was a distinct sense of cognitive dissonance. I found it hard to square that 25-year-old madman with the quiet and melancholy older fellow who just wanted to put out what he called his “message of peace.” They were different men, but they were also very much not.

I had initially worried that it would be hard to write about Hinckley in a way that wasn’t exploitative or otherwise morally compromising. What if he was still in some way mentally unstable? What if he was so heavily medicated, or so badly damaged by his own past, that it would be impossible to conduct the sort of conversations I needed to have with him in order to write about him?

Over the conversations I had with Hinckley, these doubts fell away. I eventually came to think of him as a sort of Rip Van Winkle figure, who had been confined for almost the entirety of the era of modern telecommunications and had not directly experienced the seismic shifts that had taken place in the culture he was emerging back into. And that culture is one where Hinckley’s particular derangements — obsessive identification with fictional characters and celebrities, delusions of grandeur, the conjuring of rich alternative realities — have become strangely normalized, at least on the platforms where Hinckley now interacts with his fans; platforms where, it must be said, a sufficiently committed loner can become infamous overnight without firing a single shot. And the more I considered him, the more strangely serene Hinckley seemed to me against the context of everything else that was going on, not least the inscrutable political violence of which he himself was such a highly charged symbol.

I come from Ireland, a country with a long and complicated history of political violence. For most of this history, which stretches back through centuries of colonial dispossession, such violence arose in one way or another out of a struggle for national self-determination. When what are now called nonstate actors committed deeds of terror and violence, they did so by and large within the context of a coherent political project. Say what you like, for instance, about the I.R.A.’s failed attempt, in 1984, to assassinate Margaret Thatcher by blowing up a hotel in Brighton, but you can’t say it was totally inexplicable. You didn’t have to agree, morally, with the aims or the methodologies of violence to understand them.

The tradition of political violence in the United States is of an entirely different order, and it seems to me to arise out of the conjoined American traditions of entrepreneurial individualism and gun ownership. The presiding archetype of such violence in American life is not a revolutionary in a balaclava, backed by a paramilitary organization, but a lonely oddball with a firearm fixation and a complex of conspiratorial grievances, whose relationship to the political dynamics of his country is often highly inscrutable or, in any case, disconnected from any organized political project. This is a confused and confusing figure. Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, Sirhan Sirhan: those nonentities who seized for themselves a place in history, even a kind of perverse greatness, by murdering great men.

John Hinckley Jr. was both an extreme and an imperfect example of this archetype, not least because he failed. On a psychological level, he had less in common with practitioners of political murder from other cultures and times — the unknown assassin of the revolutionary leader Michael Collins during the Irish civil war, say, or Gavrilo Princip, the Serbian nationalist who sparked the First World War by killing Archduke Franz Ferdinand — than he did with that other major avatar of American carnage, the mass shooter. He was a lonely and tormented boy whose mental illness absorbed and intensified many of the dark energies of American culture: the interplay between cinematic and actual violence, the devotional relationship with fame and the conviction that heroic self-definition can be achieved through an act of violence. His motives were not exactly obscure, but his politics were incoherent and largely irrelevant to his deed.

The same can’t confidently be said of Thomas Matthew Crooks, who came within inches of assassinating a former (and perhaps future) president. Not yet, at least, for the simple reason that almost nothing can be confidently said of him. Reporters have sketched a broad outline of his life: Crooks was from a middle-class suburb of Pittsburgh, and high school classmates described him as intelligent, geeky and a bit of a loner; he liked playing video games and shooting guns. We know that he was a registered Republican, but we also know that he donated $15 to a nonprofit dedicated to increasing voter turnout for Democrats. Having unlocked his phone, the F.B.I. found that he searched for the date of both Trump’s rally in Butler and the Democratic National Convention and for pictures of Biden and Trump, as well as high-level federal appointees in the Biden administration. Maybe there’s a version of this story, yet to be told, in which Crooks and his actions do make sense. Maybe investigators find some detail buried deep in the data hoard, some glimmering shard left behind in the digital recesses, that somehow illuminates it all. But also maybe not. Maybe unimaginable chaos was nearly unleashed on the United States for no better reason than that Butler was a little over an hour’s drive from his parents’ house. And maybe Crooks remains legible, if at all, only as a late and sad entry into the canon of the lonely American man who takes a shot at a president — an archetype of which John Hinckley Jr. was, until very recently, the most vivid contemporary example.

I don’t know where exactly, if anywhere, it would make sense for Hinckley to be living in freedom, 43 years after shooting Ronald Reagan. But Williamsburg — the former capital of the Virginia colony, with its restored 18th-century buildings and its tourist economy — feels like a particularly strange outcome. The town, whose historical center bills itself as “the world’s largest living history museum,” amounts to a sort of immersive infotainment experience on the theme of America’s colonial period. During my visit there in May, I saw many men in period garb — waistcoats, breeches, tricorn hats — addressing clusters of tourists, in stentorian fashion, about Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. There are frequent outdoor performances by fife-and-drum outfits. There are, I would guess, more gift shops per capita than any American town other than Orlando. As I walked the broad promenades of the historical center, the only traffic on which was horse-drawn carts full of tourists, I encountered several groups of small boys fighting pitched battles with wooden swords and toy muskets.

When I first met Hinckley in person, I commented to him that Williamsburg was an interesting place for him to have wound up. He liked it, he told me, because people basically left him alone. But its lack of a music scene was becoming an issue for him, he said, and he had started to think of relocating to somewhere closer to the action — Nashville, Los Angeles, maybe even New York.

“I’m basically a struggling musician,” he said, speaking softly and with a slow Texan drawl. “I’ve had a lot of people say to me, ‘John, you’re like so many other struggling musicians.’ And it’s true. I am.” Hinckley, a heavyset and balding man whose slightly somnolent air belies a clarity of thought and an obvious intelligence, was sitting in a booth at a sports bar just outside the colonial center of the town, addressing himself with intermittent zeal to a large and succulent hamburger and a Diet Dr Pepper.

He didn’t elaborate on the ways in which he was like so many other struggling musicians, but perhaps he didn’t need to. Hinckley did not strike me, in any case, as much of an elaborator. He spoke in a plain and straightforward manner, and it was not his custom to digress or add unnecessary detail. He conceived of his music in explicitly redemptive terms. Despite the fact that he was never convicted of a criminal offense, he spoke frequently of what he called “my crime” — by which he meant both the shots he fired outside the Washington Hilton on March 30, 1981, and the long years of obsession and stalking that led him there. These deeds, as Hinckley now understood them, unleashed a great deal of pain and darkness into the world. He terrorized a young woman, and he very nearly succeeded in killing the American president in the belief that it would gain her favor. He put a bullet in the head of James Brady, who from that day on lived with cognitive damage and used a wheelchair, and whose death, many years later, was deemed a direct result of his injuries.

“People have different definitions of redemption,” Hinckley told me. “My definition of redemption is to make amends for all the negativity that I created in 1981. I’m trying to redeem myself through positive music, through a thing that people really like — as opposed to the things they really hated about me, in 1981.”

On my first exposure to Hinckley’s songs, I found them difficult to listen to. Not because they were bad — they’re pretty catchy and have a melancholy charm to them — but because to listen to them with any degree of attention is to confront the pain and vulnerability of a man whose mental illness had caused so much suffering, to himself and many others. You might be able to look at a painting by Caravaggio without constantly thinking of the fact that he killed a man in a duel, and you might be able to listen to the Sex Pistols without thinking about Nancy Spungen’s awful death, but Hinckley remains uniquely impervious to any and all attempts to separate art from artist. This has partly to do with the sheer extremity and strangeness of his deeds and partly to do with the fact that those deeds were committed in service of a hunger for fame and notoriety.

For all that, I found the honesty and directness of the songs unexpectedly moving and piercingly sad. I also found it impossible to detach the thin, somewhat faltering voice that sang these songs from that of the much younger man who described his shooting of Reagan as “the greatest love offering in the history of the world.” And one reason I found the songs at first difficult, and even painful, to listen to is that they seem haunted by the ghost of another possible life. To come to know Hinckley even just a little, as I did in writing about him, is to see that the act that now defines his life was not predestined but like so many things in history entirely contingent, the outcome of complex dynamics of chance and madness.

Hinckley grew up around Dallas, loving the Beatles, and he idolized John Lennon in particular. He wanted to be a singer. He wanted to be a star. But he was a quiet kid and one who had a hard time finding his way. His older brother, Scott, went into the family oil business; their father wanted John to follow suit, and he was frustrated and unnerved by his younger son’s vague artistic ambitions. John enrolled in various college courses, but nothing really took, and he kept dropping out of one thing after another. Eventually he sold his car, an old red Camaro, and used the money to get himself to Los Angeles, where he rented a room a couple of blocks from Sunset Boulevard. The plan was that he would finally make a go of his music, but he was too depressed and listless and lost to make anything happen.

“I would just walk all the time,” he told me. “Up and down Sunset. Up and down Hollywood Boulevard.”

He was trying to walk himself into the dream of Hollywood, as though through sheer physical proximity to the symbolic heart of American entertainment he might be absorbed directly into its bloodstream.

“I was so naïve,” he said. “I sat in my room and made a tape of my songs. I walked into the lobby of the Capitol Records building and just handed it to the receptionist and asked if she could give it to the A.&R. guy.”

Telling me all this, he laughed and shook his head. “And for some reason I still didn’t make it,” he said.

That was 1976, the year he turned 21. He spent the day of his birthday walking up and down Sunset, alone and immersed in his own increasingly tormented reveries. It was also the year that “Taxi Driver” came out.

He saw it for the first time that summer at Grauman’s Egyptian Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. Then he went back to see it again. He watched it, by his reckoning, 15 times. Something about it spoke to him in a way he couldn’t account for. He connected, at a deep limbic level, with its violent poetry of male rage, loneliness and inarticulate longing.

By that point he had run out of the money he took with him to Los Angeles and was no longer able to afford rent. He had been out of touch with his parents for weeks. He lost his room and wound up homeless. He spent his days walking the streets, his nights in a sleeping bag on the flat roof of a building off Sunset. The longer he spent on the streets, the deeper his identification with Travis Bickle became.

And it was out of that identification that his obsession with Jodie Foster arose. He seems to have wanted to be the protagonist of “Taxi Driver,” and so perhaps the logic of his illness, with its blurring of the boundary between real and imagined worlds, dictated that he would desire a person, a character, who was close to that protagonist. In the same way that he bought himself a military jacket and a pair of boots just like Bickle’s and started drinking the same peach brandy, he came to believe himself to be in love with Jodie Foster.

This was only one strand in a garish fabric of deranged mimesis he wove around himself in the years that followed. Like so many lonely and frustrated white American men before and after him, he began to fixate on racial minorities as the source of his personal failures and those of his country. He made desultory and futile efforts to find work in Los Angeles. “It’s a miracle I still have my sanity,” he wrote to his parents, “after putting up with screaming kids and endless lines of Blacks, Mexicans, Chinese and God knows what else.” He apparently wrote the letter before seeing “Taxi Driver,” which is striking because it reads now as almost a pastiche of Bickle’s voice-over, as though Hinckley were anticipating, in a letter to his own mother and father, some version of Bickle’s reactionary nihilism: “All the animals come out at night: Whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal.”

After he returned to Texas, he became briefly involved in the American Nazi party in Dallas. The following year, he founded something called the American Front, a right-wing extremist faction of which, according to Lincoln Caplan’s 1984 trial report in The New Yorker , he was director, sole newsletter contributor and indeed sole member. Hinckley now thoroughly disavows this turn toward white supremacism, as thoroughly as he disavows everything else he did in those years of madness, inchoate rage and desire. But it remains noteworthy, because it was as though he had read between the lines of Bickle’s fury and contempt and decoded, without sensitivity to the film’s complexities, the racial animosity that lay within it. In Paul Schrader’s original screenplay, Iris’s pimp was in fact a Black man, and the men Travis kills in the end were all Black. And perhaps in reading between the lines of “Taxi Driver,” Hinckley was in fact reading between the lines of his country, its history and its present.

He was receiving signals from many sources, and they were all pointing in one direction. At Rocky’s Pawn Shop in Dallas, in September 1980, he bought a Röhm RG-14 .22-caliber revolver, the weapon he would use to finally make something of himself.

By that point , he was spending a lot of time on the firing range. The year before, he went to see a doctor about dizzy spells, fatigue and heart palpitations. The doctor, noting Hinckley’s “flat affect,” prescribed him an antidepressant, which didn’t do much other than make him drowsy. In a letter to his sister, he wrote: “My nervous system is about shot. … By the end of the summer I should be a bonafide basket case.” Another visit to the doctor scored him a Valium prescription. Later, his parents sent him to see a psychiatrist who had done some work with Jack’s oil company. The psychiatrist didn’t see much wrong with him that wouldn’t be set to rights by a little tough love. What was needed here, he said, was for this 25-year-old to be given a push to stand on his own two feet.

Hinckley told his parents about a creative-writing class he wanted to attend at Yale University, and they gave him some money and sent him on his way to New Haven. There was, in fact, no creative-writing class, and Hinckley had no reason to be in New Haven other than that he read in a magazine that Jodie Foster had enrolled at Yale. He got the phone number of the house where she was living on campus and called a couple of times. She was polite and noncommittally pleasant, in the manner of a famous young woman who had presumably become very used to unwanted male attention. In the written notes he left for her, he was more intense, less shy. “I LOVE YOU SIX TRILLION TIMES. DON’T YOU MAYBE LIKE ME JUST A LITTLE BIT? (YOU MUST ADMIT I AM DIFFERENT).”

As the weeks went on, he became more and more frustrated, more and more deranged, in his attempts to gain her attention. He wrote an anonymous letter to the F.B.I., informing them of a plot to abduct the actress Jodie Foster “FOR ROMANTIC REASONS.” And he began to think about shooting the president to force Foster to pay attention. This was 1980, and Jimmy Carter was still in the White House. Hinckley followed him for a time on the campaign trail, and at a rally in Dayton, Ohio — in a strange restaging of the scene in “Taxi Driver” in which Travis comes close to assassinating a senator — got within arm’s reach of him, close enough to get a clear shot. In footage taken at the Dayton rally, amid a scrum of happy supporters surrounding Carter, a pale and fair-haired young man can be seen staring with unsmiling intensity at the president. It is unquestionably Hinckley.

Hinckley, however, was unarmed, having left his bag with his guns in a locker at the bus station. He was treating this rally as a dry run, to prove to himself that he was capable of doing this thing. Carter lost the election, and in the new year of 1981, there was a new president, a Republican. It didn’t matter either way to Hinckley. One president was as good as another.

Hinckley wrote strange and acrid poetry, which he showed to no one and did nothing with. One, called “Guns Are Fun!” contained these lines:

This gun gives me pornographic power. If I wish, the President will fall and the world will look at me in disbelief, All because I own an inexpensive gun.

In early March 1981 he spent another short and aimless period in Hollywood. He was severely depressed and had for some time been contemplating suicide. Then, drifting on a listless tide toward some act of as-yet-undefined violence, he got on a cross-country bus to Washington, and he checked into a hotel close to the White House. He barely slept that night. On the morning of March 30, he glanced at a local paper and saw the new president’s itinerary for the day. Reagan was giving a speech at the Washington Hilton. He knew then what his great gesture would be. In his stalking of Foster and his targeting of the most powerful man on the planet, he was imposing a coherence on his loneliness and confusion, arranging it all into a system of which he himself was the center.

He wrote a final letter to Foster: “Jodie, I would abandon this idea of getting Reagan in a second if I could only win your heart and live out the rest of my life with you, whether it be in total obscurity or whatever.” He put the letter in an envelope and left it in his hotel room, pocketed his revolver and got a taxi to the Hilton. He waited there in a large crowd for the president to come through a side entrance of the hotel. At 2:27 that afternoon, Reagan emerged, surrounded by a cluster of Secret Service agents, handlers and police officers. Hinckley pulled out his Röhm and fired off all six bullets. The first hit Reagan’s press secretary, entering his forehead right over his left eye. The second hit Delahanty, the police officer. The third shot went directly over Reagan’s head. The fourth hit McCarthy, the Secret Service agent, who was, by that point, shielding the president. The fifth and sixth bullets ricocheted off the limo’s armored surface. One came to rest in the president’s right lung, perilously close to his heart: less than an inch, in fact, from rewriting the plot of history.

After he was arrested, Hinckley was held at the Federal Correctional Institution in Butner, N.C. There he basked in the glow of his new celebrity, which made him if not the equal of Jodie Foster certainly likewise a person of note. At Butner, he wrote every day in a journal that he labeled “The Diary of a Person We All Know” — a strangely inspired title, you have to admit. A man who shoots the American president, successfully or otherwise, is a person we all have no choice but to know.

The terms in which Hinckley viewed himself and his deed were self-consciously mythic, and this conflation of fiction and reality is among the most haunting aspects of his years of madness. Hinckley was inspired by a movie to shoot the president; Paul Schrader had based “Taxi Driver” partly on the diaries of Arthur Bremer, who shot George Wallace, the Alabama governor, while he campaigned for president in 1972. And in those diaries, Bremer wrote that he was inspired to assassinate Wallace while watching Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange,” one of the great cinematic explorations of brutality and of violent media and its effects on the mind. A film inspires an attempted political assassination, which in turn inspires a film, which in turn inspires an attempted assassination: a feedback loop of real and imagined violence.

There is, in other words, something vertiginously postmodern about what Hinckley called his “historical deed” and the madness in which it was cultivated. He was channeling John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, Mark David Chapman, Travis Bickle: the great loser-antagonists of American history and cinema. And his target, however incidentally, was himself an actor who learned his trade in westerns before going on to distinguish himself in the role of a folksy, reassuringly paternalistic politician.

And if Hinckley’s intended victim was the Hollywood president, then Crooks’s intended victim was the reality-television and Twitter president, a man who mastered two of our most sophisticated contemporary mediums of self-creation. Crooks was born in 2003. He was just 4 months old when Facebook first went online and 13 when Trump became president. The advanced dissolution of boundaries of which Trump is such a potent symbol — between politics and entertainment, and between personal and political identity — and to which so many of us are still struggling to accommodate ourselves, was the only reality Crooks ever knew.

Then again, we don’t know much else about Crooks’s world. We know he played video games and that he had an account on Discord, a social platform popular with gamers. That leaves little doubt that he was familiar with the concept of NPCs, or “nonplayer characters”: the figures in video games who are programmed into the background of the virtual world, controlled by no one but their code. It has become a popular insult online in recent years, and an unsettling and dehumanizing one, revealing a dangerously solipsistic worldview, in which everyone around you is essentially fake and only you are fully real. It’s hard not to see it as a direct byproduct of social media, where this is literally true from any individual user’s point of view. And as with so many insults and accusations, it’s a kind of projection: The people who use it most vociferously do so out of a fear that they themselves are NPCs. In a nation underpinned by the ideology of individualism, there is no fate worse; in a culture so driven by the dynamics of consumer capitalism, there is nothing easier to become.

There’s a meme that is sometimes used online to illustrate the NPC, a simplistic cartoon of a gray and expressionless face entirely devoid of character, and in Crooks’s placid features, I could not help seeing its crude lineaments. And perhaps we might interpret his last act as an abject bid for agency: an effort to become the main character by grabbing a semiautomatic rifle and defeating the final boss, the very personification of fame and power for his entire adolescence. Was this seemingly political act in fact entirely nihilistic and self-interested? If so, he had at least this much in common with Hinckley.

Hinckley finds it difficult now to identify with the person he was in 1981. He was out of his mind, driven by strange delusions toward increasingly extreme ends. He remembers it clearly, all of it, but in the way that a person might remember a vivid and violent dream. He can tell you what he did, but not why he did it. “I had no judgment,” as he put it to me at one point. “I was so sick.”

Over dinner on my last evening in Williamsburg, I asked him what he remembered about his brief encounters with Jodie Foster. He was silent for a long moment.

“I did meet her once,” he said. “I mean, I spoke to her, just very briefly.”

He found out that her real name was Alicia and figured she would be registered under that name, so he called the accommodation office at Yale and said he was looking to visit his friend Alicia Foster, and they gave him her address. It was a Sunday morning when he saw her. She was in front of her dormitory building, exercising and doing stretches.

“I walked up to her,” he said. “I didn’t really know what to say. I said, ‘Do you know where the library is?’ And she pointed me toward it. And I left.” (Jodie Foster did not respond to a request for comment.)

He laughed a little and shook his head.

“That’s something I totally regret,” he said.

I asked him why, and he said that it was just a stupid thing to say. Given everything he went on to do, it seemed strange to me that this fleeting encounter would embarrass him to think of even now. It was possible, I supposed, that this signaled an unsettling continuity with the person he was back then. But it was equally possible that it indicated the extent to which he had been cured of his mania and obsession. Who among us, after all, is not haunted by some random stupid thing said many years ago?

Despite the shame he feels about his past actions, Hinckley’s strange status as a failed presidential assassin means, perversely, that he has little choice but to live in the public eye. It wouldn’t quite be true to say that he’s capitalizing on his infamy, but he’s not exactly going out of his way to avoid it either. The attention his music gets is unquestionably on a different level from what it would be getting if he had not shot Reagan. He sells paintings of his orange tabby, Theo, on eBay. I don’t know how many, but it’s surely more than he would have sold if he was just some guy. His small run of “John Hinckley for President” T-shirts and bumper stickers sold out, and I suspect it wasn’t just because people thought the typeface was cool.

And those T-shirts and stickers are an indication of the liminal register of his current fame. Quite a lot of his fans, unsurprisingly, are hardline internet ironists, whose engagement with his music and his various social media posts mostly amount to compliments and encouragements of dubious sincerity. “Presidents hate this man,” reads one fairly typical YouTube comment. “Thank you for literally everything you’ve ever done,” reads another. But many of his new fans seem to be entirely in good faith. They seem, that is, to admire his songwriting talent, his resilience and his desire, in the face of his traumatic past and his current infamy, to write his songs and sing them for the world. They see in him and in his post-release career, such as it is, the potential for a redemptive narrative arc. Even the most damaged and dangerous of people can — given time and the right kind of care — change the stories of their lives and strive for some kind of ending that is, if not quite happy, then not exactly terrible either.

Such an outcome was never anything close to a given for Hinckley. His trial remains among the most famous uses of the insanity defense in legal history. The psychiatrist William T. Carpenter, who examined Hinckley, testified that the defendant’s unstable sense of his own reality led him to construct an identity from fictional characters. He was incapable of understanding the moral weight of his actions. The jury’s decision, not guilty by reason of insanity for each of the 13 charges against him, and the judge’s ruling that Hinckley should be sent to a psychiatric facility, were extremely controversial. In an ABC News poll conducted after the verdict, 83 percent of respondents said they felt that justice was not done. The public outcry led to restrictions, put in place by Congress, and by most states, on the use of the insanity defense.

Hinckley seems to me to have been treated with uncommon benevolence by the American criminal-justice system. It helped, no doubt, that his parents were well off and were able to pay for capable lawyers. He received effective and humane treatment in his time at St. Elizabeths. Music and music therapy were a small but significant part of this. “When I was in the hospital,” he told me, “the one thing they let me have, all the way through, was my guitar.” I don’t know that it could ever make sense to describe a person who had been so seriously ill as “cured,” but Hinckley was manifestly no longer dangerous or sick in the way he had once been.

Only on one occasion did I glimpse a brief flickering of what might be considered the old self-referential narcissism. It was the morning of my last day in Williamsburg; we had just been talking at the small, windowless office he rents, about a 15-minute drive from the town, for the purpose of managing his somewhat incidental-seeming business affairs — selling vinyl records and first-edition books, along with the various administrative chores around getting his music and his paintings and his merch out into the world. When we finished our conversation, he asked me how I was getting back to my hotel, and I told him I would gladly accept a lift from him if he was going that way. He said he wasn’t but would run me out there anyway. As he was pulling his old, shapeless, sand-colored Toyota minivan out of the parking lot, he turned to me with a humorous glint in his eye.

“I bet you never thought you’d find yourself getting a ride back to your hotel from John Hinckley Jr.,” he said.

I laughed at the time, because it was a funny thing to say. I still think it was a funny thing to say. In one sense it seemed obviously a little grandiose and arguably in poor taste. If you squinted at it hard enough, you could probably see it as evidence that he was still indulging some of the same tendencies that led to him shooting the president. But I do think you would have to squint a little too hard for comfort. For all his strangeness, and all the terrible darkness of his past, I could not help liking him. As odd as it might sound to say, John Hinckley Jr. seemed to me to be not a bad man, but a man who had once been very sick and now was not.

Later that day, after he dropped me to my hotel, we met again, and I noted that he had invoked God frequently in our conversations. I asked him about his religious faith. He was raised Episcopalian, he told me. This was the church his parents had belonged to, and although he had not attended a service in many years, he still considered himself a Christian. He had prayed to God every day in the hospital, and he continued to do so now that he was out.

I asked him then whether he believed in heaven, and he seemed politely taken aback, as though I had asked him whether he believed in the existence of Delaware.

“Sure I do,” he said. “I hope I can get there. I’m gonna have to do a lot of explaining at the gate, but I hope I can sneak in. I’ll say: ‘St. Peter? I got a story for you. Just give me a little time to tell it.’”

Mark O’Connell is a writer from Dublin, and the author, most recently, of “A Thread of Violence: A Story of Truth, Invention, and Murder,” which publishes in paperback this September. Stefan Ruiz is a photographer in New York who previously taught art at San Quentin State Prison and was the creative director for Colors Magazine. He will be included in a portrait show opening at the end of August at the MARCO in Monterrey, Mexico.

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the store where John Hinckley Jr. purchased the gun used in his assassination attempt. It was Rocky’s Pawn Shop, not Randy’s Pawn Shop.

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Our Coverage of the Trump Rally Shooting

The Investigation : F.B.I. officials told Congress that the 20-year-old gunman who tried to kill Donald Trump used his cellphone and other devices to search for images of Trump and President Biden .

Congress Forms Task Force : The top Republican and Democrat in the House have struck a deal to form a bipartisan task force  to lead congressional investigations into the attempted assassination.

Security Blind Spots : Even as investigators continue to examine what happened at the Trump rally, it is already clear that there were multiple missed opportunities to stop the gunman  before the situation turned deadly.

The Gunman : In interviews, former classmates of the suspect described him as intelligent but solitary , someone who tried to avoid teasing by fellow students.

Secret Service Director : Kimberly Cheatle  returned in 2022 to lead the agency she had served for nearly 30 years. Before her resignation, she faced grueling questions from lawmakers  about the adequacy of her agency’s preparation .

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