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Denise Foley

Columns, How to Be Irish in Philly

How to Be Irish in Philly This Week (And Next!)

Great weekend—and a great two weeks ahead—if you’re trying to be Irish. (We’re hoping many of you are now getting good at that.)

First, on Saturday night, Black 47 is coming to Sellersville. If you’ve never heard Larry Kirwan and his gang, you’re in for what they used to call a rollicking good time. They’re a hard-charging rock band with a Celtic flavor and atty-tude. We love ‘em.

Then, on Saturday, there’s the Guinness Seafood Festival at Tirnanog in Trenton, the great pub owned by the late Irish Billy Briggs. It’s a fundraiser for the Irish Billy Briggs Memorial Scholarship Fund, sponsored by the AOH Joe Cahill Division, to honor Trenton’s beloved publican. In my youth, I spent some good times at Billy Briggs’ pub. He was a great guy. Anyhow, seafood and Guinness. You can’t go wrong.

On Sunday, we understand there are GAA football games on the field at Cardinal Dougherty High School and that you might catch the winning Donegal team that usually plays in New York. Head over to 6301 N. Second Street in Philly around 3 PM.

On Sunday night, hear the incredible harp-guitarist-storyteller John Doan in a multimedia Celtic Pilgrimage at the Temperance House in Newtown, Bucks County. Read our story.

If you’re in Jersey on Sunday, it’s Hibernian Hunger Project Day at Keenan’s Pub in North Wildwood (or, as we like to think of it, Port Richmond, Southern Division). From 3 PM to 7 PM, your $30 will buy you beer, wine, soda, and music–as well as the unending gratitude of the people who are served by this AOH national program that got its start in Philadelphia.

It’s July, sure, but it’s not too early to be thinking about Christmas. On Tuesday, the Waterford Wedgwood Royal Doulton story in Rehobeth Beach, DE, (love that place!) will be hosting Master Artist Vincent Rellis who will sign your Waterford purchases. We almost lost this icon of Irishness this year, but a last-minute save by an investment company has kept this crystal maker in business (though, alas, not the store in nearby Limerick, PA).

On Wednesday, master flute maker and performer Skip Healy and noted bodhran maker and player Albert Alfonso will be offering a workshop on their respective instruments in Lansdale, followed by a session at The Mermaid Inn in Philadelphia. Then they’ll be performing a house concert on Thursday in Lansdale. They’re here thanks to Spring Hill House Concerts, the brand new venue founded by Indiana transplants Bette Conway and Bob Hendren.

Were you a fan of American bandstand? Then you might be interested in Irish Bandstand—actually, a six-week course in jive, quickstep, waltz, and ceili dancing offered by Geraldine Trainor at the Irish Center starting on Wednesday. You don’t need a partner, so if concerns about coming solo is the only thing stopping you, put on your dancing shoes.

Since I’m not going to be around next week, and the last time I went out of town our calendar went into a sulk and crashed, I’m going to tell you how to be Irish next week too. Two for the price of one! (Oh, that’s right, you don’t pay for this. . . .)

On Saturday, July 25, come out to support the MacSwiney Club in Jenkintown, where they’re holding a fund-raising picnic and raffle for their building fund.

In the fundraising mood? Also on Saturday, there’s a benefit concert by six-year-old fiddler Haley Richardson and her brothers to raise money to send Haley to the All-Ireland competitions in Tullamore. She finished first in the under-12s in the Mid-Atlantic Fleadh Cheoil in Pearl River, NY, this year. The event will be at Bain’s Deli/Fuelhouse Coffee in Vineland, NJ. Come out to hear this pint-sized major talent.

Looking ahead: The Young Dubliners are going to kick of the festivities in August at the Sellersville Theatre. There are more football games, radio show benefits (including one at Ambler’s Shanachie Pub on August 2), concerts, and dances coming up too. Then September will arrive with the Philadelphia Ceili Group Music Festival, the Celtic Classic in Bethlehem, the Scottish-Irish Festival in Green Lane, PA, the AOH Irish Weekend in N. Wildwood. There’s also going to be a bus trip from the Irish Center to Gettysburg where you’ll learn about the role the Irish played in the war between the states. That’s why I’m getting out of town. I need to rest up.

July 16, 2009 by
Music

Carberry and Quinn: In Concert at the Irish Center

A few weeks ago, I was listening to a few reels from Martin Quinn and Angelina Carberry’s eponymous CD and felt unusually relaxed. I couldn’t figure out why. I was heading off on vacation and I had a pile of laundry to do the size of Mount Agamenticus. I had a story to turn in virtually the minute we got back from Maine. I hadn’t even gotten the suitcases down from the attic.

It took me a while, but I figured it out: It’s the banjo (her) and the button accordian (him). Those are the instruments the anchor musicians play at my local session at Ambler’s Shanachie Pub. On the Tuesday nights that I’m there, I don’t have a care in the world. And one night, I even saw Angelina Carberry and Martin Quinn sitting in with Fintan Malone and Kevin McGillian.

Carberry and Quinn will be coming to the Irish Center this Friday night, July 10, for a concert sponsored by the Philadelphia Ceili Group.

Born in Manchester, England, Angelina Carberry came to Irish music naturally—her father, Peter, and her grandfather were both musicians. She gravitated to the tenor banjo as a child after a stint on the tin whistle. And Martin wasn’t the first accordian player she teamed with. In 1998, she released a CD called “Memories of the Holla” which she made with her father on accordian and John Blake on guitar. She has since released a solo album (though Quinn, now her husband, can be heard on a few tracks) called , “An Traidisiun Beo.”

Martin Quinn, a native of Armagh, comes from a long line of musicians and story tellers. He’s considered one of the finest exponents of the button box, which he teaches, and has toured Europe with the groups Dorsa and La Lugh.

I talked to Martin Quinn a couple of weeks ago by phone from his home in Longford, Ireland. Here’s what he had to say.

How did you and Angelina get together?
Well, we met in Milltown Malbay at the Willie Clancy Festival.  We were both playing a session at Queally’s Pub, and ended up playing a few tunes together. So yes, the music brought us together and we’re playing together for nine years.

Do you play concerts all year?
Mostly during the summer. We’ll do occasional concerts on weekends during the year, but don’t go away for weeks at a time because Angelina teaches lot of music, and I tune and repair accordions.

What does that entail?
I get them, take them apart and put them back together. Hopefully. [Laughing]

In your bio, your family is described as. . .
Raconteurs, yes. I have uncle  who’s quite a famous storyteller, a real character from Armagh, Michael Quinn, he’s 83 now, and he’s actually performing at the Catskills this year.  He’s a great character, a carrier of old songs and local history.  His father, my grandfather, was the same as well.

How about you?
I can tell the odd lie. But that would not have been my main pursuit.

Where did the music come from?  
My mother plays the accordian. She wouldn’t play in public, but she taught me my first tunes. Both grandfathers played fiddle and melodeon, and both  were singers. My mother can sing too. I have lots of cousins who play music and an auntie of mine plays banjo as well. And my sister plays the accordian too.

You apparently gravitated toward traditional music, but were you ever tempted to play more modern tunes?
When my mother played, it was usually a  hornpipe or a jig. That’s what I learned first.  I played with a few ballad bands when I was in my teens—people will ask you to fill in for somebody. But I always had jigs and reels ringing around inside me head.

One of the things I love about Irish traditional music is how musicians learn tunes not so much from recordings but from each other. I just heard Paddy O’Brien at a house concert and he not only remembers something like 3,000 tunes, but who he learned them from. Is that how you learned?
I probably learn tunes every week from someone. It’s inevitable that you’ll go to a session and hear something you haven’t heard before. Of course, they might have learned it off a CD themselves beforehand. You don’t know. [Laughing.} We moved away from Armagh when I was 12 to live in County Meath and we were quite close to an old fiddle player, Joe Ryan, from West Clare. I used to see him at music sessions every week, playing his unique style. It really inspired me. When he turned up it was very special and I looked forward to it. When I met Angelina I met her father and her uncle. I would sit and listen to them rather than play with them and picked up a lot. I was definitely inspired.

The other thing I really love about traditional music is that even the most famous players will take the time to pass along songs to whoever shows up at the session.
That’s beauty of traditional music.  The most famous musicians will welcome you into their houses and sit down a play a tune with anybody. That’s the way the music is. It’s what we’ve all come from. If it goes any other way, it will be lost.

Carberry and Quinn will play on Friday night, July 10, at the Philadelphia Irish Center, Carpenter and Emlen Streets, starting at 8 PM. Tickets are available at the door or online. 

July 7, 2009 by
News, People

His Friends Come Out for Paul Sheridan

Paul's family: His father, Tommy, daughter, Shauna, and mother, Lily.

Paul's family: His father, Tommy, daughter, Shauna, and mother, Lily.

Paul Sheridan has a lot of friends.

Many of them came out to the Philadelphia Irish Center on Sunday afternoon to help raise money for the Havertown painter/carpenter from County Cavan who is undergoing treatment for lung cancer. 

Check out the photos.

June 25, 2009 by
Columns, How to Be Irish in Philly

How to Be Irish in Philly This Week

A real treat this weekend: On Saturday night at the Springfield Country Club, the Rose of Tralee Selection Gala will see one lovely lass chosen to go to Ireland to compete in the international pageant. And this one isn’t for sissies. “When girls come to us expressing an interest in the pageant, we tell them it’s a really big deal and they have to be serious about it,” says co-organizer Karen Conaghan Race. “It’s televised and it’s a cool experience, but not for everybody.”

But, she says, she never worries about any of the candidates. “They’re really mature girls who ‘get it.’ I know it sounds corny, but every year I think, any one of these girls would be fine. I never worry about which one gets picked. We can’t go wrong.”

Also this weekend, yet another festival: The Celtic Fling and Highland Games in Manheim, home of the Renaissance Faire in Lancaster County. And in Allentown, the Hibernians hurlers face off against a team from Pittsburgh.

On Sunday, head over to Brittingham’s for some great music and food, and contribute to a great cause. Team Ratty Shoes is in the middle of its third campaign to raise money for multiple sclerosis research—and they always have a good time doing it.

Also on Sunday, Bristol Borough is holding its 13th annual Celtic Day in the lovely Bristol Lions Park along the Delaware.

There’s a brand new session on Mondays at Kildare’s in Manayunk, featuring the angel-voiced Terry Kane. Head over, grab a beer, and some of the great food that comes to you by way of our friend, Chef Brian Duffy, and if you play an instrument, bring it along.

June 25, 2009 by
Music

Paddy O’Brien and Pat Egan in Concert

Paddy O'Brien in action.

Paddy O'Brien in action.

If he hadn’t been a musician, Paddy O’Brien might have been a history professor. Well, actually, he is, in a way.

This master of the two-button accordian spent a good part of his County Offaly youth traveling around the countryside, listening and playing  with the old musicians and absorbing the oral tradition that went with the music.

So when he introduces a song, which he did about a dozen times this week at a house concert with his friend, guitarist and singer Pat Egan, in Lansdale, he might talk about drinking with Willie Clancy at a bar, or picking up some tunes from Donegal fiddler John Doherty, or playing with Peter Kilroe, Dan Cleary, and Michael Lynam in the Ballinamere Ceili Band.

Word is—and he confirms it—that he carries about 3,000 songs in his head. He’s produced a set of CDs containing about 500 of them. With Egan and fiddler Patrick Ourceau, he plays some with Chulrua, his latest band. And he played a few of them the other night—not nearly enough, but it was grand anyway.

June 25, 2009 by
News, People

Rosabelle Gifford: Woman of Spirit

When she was looking for the right candidate for the first annual Mary O’Connor Spirit Award to honor a woman from the local Irish-American community,   Karen Conaghan says Rosabelle Gifford came to mind immediately.

“She’s very brassy, but not abrasive. Opinionated, spirited, courageous,” says Conaghan, who, with her sister, Sarah, coordinates the Philadelphia Rose of Tralee pageant, of which the award is now a part. “She’s better dressed than anyone we know. She enjoys life. She’s a total inspiration.”

I met Rosabelle Gifford this week. It’s all true.

Named for the original “Rose of Tralee,” who refused to marry her true love because she knew it would tear him from his disapproving family, the first Mary O’Connor Spirit Award is going to a woman who knows intimately how love can go wrong—and the meaning of courage and self-sacrifice.

She was Rosabelle Blaney of Gortward, Mountcharles, County Donegal, when she married Edward Harvey of Castleogary. The couple moved to post-war London where they went on to have five children, including a set of twins. But the marriage was not to last.

“It was a very bad marriage,” says Giffor. “He was drinking, running around with other women, and a wife-beater. I had to go.”

At a time when there was little help for abused women and families—and there was almost no housing in bombed-out London—Gifford had to plan her own escape. She sent two of her five children back to Ireland to live with her parents and one to Scotland to stay with her sister. “I knew they would be well cared for and I had to do it—I had no place to live,” she recalls.

In the early 1950s, when her oldest son, Ted Harvey, was considering enlisting in the British military, Gifford suggested that he go to America instead. “My two older sisters were living here and I told him that if he went, we would follow.” He did, and in 1958, his mother and his siblings moved into the apartment in Bryn Mawr he had rented and furnished for them.

“I got a job taking care of children. I was good at it,” chuckles Gifford. In fact, some of the children she cared for will be attending the award ceremony on Saturday night, June 27, during the 2009 Philadelphia Rose of Tralee Selection Gala.

While at a New Year’s Eve party at a friend’s house, Rosabelle met Charles Gifford, who worked in the accounting department of a steel company. They fell in love and married. She has been widowed for more than 20 years. “He was a good man. I needed that,” she says wistfully. “He was so good to my children too—so good to them.”

Her son, Ted, died many years ago of brain cancer. Three of her four remaining children, Rosemary McCullough, Kathleen Harshberger, Frank Harvey, and assorted grandchildren and great grandchildren will be attending the event. The fourth, son James Harvey, an educator, will be in China at the invitation of the Chinese government.

You’ve probably noticed that I haven’t mentioned Rosabelle Gifford’s age. That’s because she doesn’t. “I don’t think it’s anyone’s business,” she says. “I think you’re just as old as you feel.”

Indeed.

June 25, 2009 by
News

So You Think You Can Write …

If you got this far, we know you’re interested. We can offer you a totally laughable fee, at least for the summer or until our meager funds run out. What we can offer is some free entertainment. People actually let us in to stuff for nothing! Of course, we have to write about it, photograph it, and lately, video it. But it’s always fun, and you meet the nicest people.

If you want to take a stab at journalism (while it lasts), send a note and some of your work to us at denise.foley@comcast.net. J-students welcome! We used to be J-students too, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

June 14, 2009 by
Columns, How to Be Irish in Philly

How to Be Irish in Philly This Week

If it’s the weekend, you can pretty much count on two things: Irish festivals and rain. I’m happy about the first. The second? Oy.

But let’s focus on the fun stuff. There should be enough breaks in the wetness for you to help out the hungry and enjoy some great Irish music on Saturday at the Second Annual Irish Hunger Fest in Yardley, Bucks County, to benefit the AOH’s Hibernian Hunger Project. The Bogside Rogues, Brimingham Six, and many other great local bands will be there. You should be there too.

Also on Saturday, the Pen-Mar Irish Festival in Glen Rock, PA, will be going on rain or shine. This one benefits Pen-Mar Human Services. If you’re up north, head over to this one. It’s always fun.

And will they notice a little more water at the annual Philadelphia Currach Club Races at the Columbus Club on the Delaware on Saturday? Oh, probably not. If you haven’t seen these Irish boats skimming across the water, here’s your chance.

Is it still Saturday? Yes. Then Luka Bloom will be appearing at World Café Live in Philly.

Please save some energy for Sunday, when a group of his friends—including the local Celtic group Blackthorn–will be raising money for Paul Sheridan, a 40-year-old Cavan man who lives in Havertown. Along with being beset by financial troubles, Paul was recently diagnosed with lung cancer which metastasized to his bones. He’s undergoing treatment at Penn. Paul has a daughter, Shauna, 12, so it’s appropriate that his friends picked Father’s Day for the fundraiser. Come out to Philadelphia’s Irish Center and support him!

While you still have your good-deed-doing hat on, tune in to WTMR 800 AM at 11 AM on Sunday and make your pledge to keep the Irish radio shows on the air for another year. This Sunday, Vince Gallagher and Marianne MacDonald are offering a special treat: Live music in the studio! You can hear some of our favorite local musicians, including Kevin Brennan, Fintan Malone, and Tim Hill, the 15-year-old boy wonder of Irish music. Call 1-866-799-9090 toll-free and make a pledge.

Check out a video of a recent performance by Vince Gallagher, Kevin Brennan, and Patsy Whelan at the Irish Center during a birthday party for Gallagher’s wife, Vera.

On Thursday, join Kathy DeAngelo of You Gotta Have Harp and 20 of her harpers at Burlington Meetinghouse and Conference Center in Burlington, NJ. It’s free.

Also on Thursday, Scythian—those Baltic-Celtic rabble-rousers from DC—will be performing at the Sellersville Theatre.

Friday kicks off the Celtic Fling and Highland Games at the Mount Hope Winery in Manheim (home of the Renaissance Fair) with a concert by Gaelic Storm, “everybody’s favorite Titanic steerage band.” The Scythian guys are planning to show up, so expect a high-octane evening. Hang in for a weekend of fun, frivolity and caber tossing.

Next Saturday, the next Rose of Tralee from Philadelphia will be crowned in Havertown. The winner of this annual pageant will head to Ireland this summer to vie for the international crown in a televised event that breaks TV records every year in Ireland. Not to make you nervous, girls, but this is a big deal.

And on Sunday, Bristol Borough will hold its annual Celtic Day on the waterfront.

June 14, 2009 by