August 2009

The notion of family is an elastic one for Tommy Sands, the song man from County Down. There are his brothers and sister, Ben and Colum and Anne, with whom he records and tours as The Sands Family. And now there are his children Moya and Fionan, who have recorded his latest CD with him and are currently on tour together. And there is, in a larger sense, the world he has traveled and embraced with his songs of peace and tolerance.

Tommy, Moya and Fionan are making a stop at The Sellersville Theater Saturday, August 22, and will be singing songs from their CD, “Let the Circle Be Wide.” Having his children on tour with him, Tommy told me recently over the phone, “is really wonderful, it’s bringing your own home with you. When they were little, I used to record songs and stories they could listen to while I was away.” Having grown up surrounded by the music, they’ve now become a part of it themselves.

“I was going to India to play over there, and my daughter Moya, who’s also very interested in traveling, she said she’d like to go, and I said ‘You can’t go unless you’re a musician!’ Suddenly I heard the fiddle being practiced very, very strongly in her bedroom. So she came with me. Then Fionan had been traveling with Sinead O’Connor, and he decided to join me too. So we all ended up coming together.”

This coming together on the album features Tommy on vocals and guitar, Moya on fiddle, vocals, bodhran and whistle, and Fionan on mandolin and banjo. The first track, “Young Man’s Dream,” (“Aisling an Oigfhir”) is a reworking of that hallowed Irish ballad, “Danny Boy.” Tommy’s version came after a lot of digging into the origins of the song, and is authentic to the words that may have originally belonged to the melody of “The Londonderry Air.”

“The ‘Danny Boy’ lyrics were written in 1910 by Fred Weatherly. He exchanged the first melody for that of ‘The Londonderry Air.’ His song was written in a style with very high notes; the famous long high note in ‘Danny Boy’ is just a passing grace note in the original.”

The last track on the CD, “Let the Circle Be Wide” shares its title with the album, and is a song that Tommy has sung live to audiences all over the world, but has never recorded until now. It’s a song that embodies the coming together between Tommy and his global audience, a means of giving and taking that leaves both artist and audience with a feeling of hope: “Each place has its own incredible type of audience, with so much to be learned.I realized any audience, they have a story to tell. I traveled around Cuba once with a group of Cuban troubadours. We went out in a bus to hurricane-hit villages, people living in little houses, their hearts were very low. But the music was very encouraging, I didn’t want to leave.” “Playing in Moscow was a bit difficult in the sense. I had a good a idea nobody in the audience would understand anything I was saying, so I wrote a song called ‘Armenia’ and the second chorus they were able to sing it with me. Now it was a wonderful situation! I loved it!”

“India is fascinating, too. Old people are very important there. They’re regarded as having great wisdom, and they have very important insight. There’s also so much I have to learn about the music of India…you know, some people say that the music of India and Ireland is connected. And so it is, as well as the music that comes from other parts of the East. What we have in Ireland is related to that.

I remember I met up with a group of people called The Bauls, in Bengal, they’d welcome anyone into their tribe regardless of religion, provided you could sing a song. And one of them asked me, ‘Do you come from the West? What’s this scale you have, do-do-do?’ I said, ‘You mean do-re-mi?’ And he said ‘Yeah!’ and turned around and said ‘Come here lads!’ and the next thing they were all singing ‘do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-si-do…and they sang this most incredible scale that sounded like a sean nos song from the west of Ireland. It was fascinating.”

A kindred spirit to Tommy, Pete Seeger, recently celebrated his 90th birthday concert in Madison Square Garden, and Tommy was asked to perform at the event honoring his friend. “I felt like I was going to see a hero. There was an atmosphere there that was quite incredible. Pete has always been a big inspiration, not only to me but I think to the rest of the world. I played in Tel Aviv, in Jerusalem, Moscow and Pete Seeger’s songs are sung everywhere.”

I asked Tommy how he knew that he, and his songs, would have such a role to play in bringing peace to Ireland, and he left me with these thoughts: “Growing up, I heard the old songs, with subjects about difficult times. I noticed these songs had been sung which I didn’t know very much about. I didn’t plan to be a political songwriter. I was going to observe what’s going on with my own people as a songwriter, you look a little bit into the future, a little bit into what might happen, so the songs are there to be listened to, to contribute to the understanding, maybe not just as an observational thermometer but as a thermostat to some degree as well.”