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Lori Lander Murphy

Music, News

The St. Patrick’s Day Challenge

It’s often said that everyone is Irish on St. Patrick’s Day, and if you were in Philadelphia this March 17, you could have been Irish from dawn till midnight. So many ways to celebrate, so little time…here’s just a little sampling from four of the finest events the city had to offer:

Brittingham’s Irish Pub & Restaurant in Lafayette Hill opened the day with songs from County Derry born singer, Oliver McElhone. Favorite tunes like “The Fields of Athenry”and “Dirty Old town” had the folks in the crowded bar and dining room singing and dancing along, and really starting to feel Irish.

Downtown, at The Kimmel Center, the Frank McCourt play “The Irish…and How They Got That Way” was demonstrating through songs and skits that “It isn’t easy being Irish.” Indeed, the five member cast, in the intimate setting of the Innovation Studio, brought the history of the Irish people’s suffering and survival to the stage with enthusiasm and earnestness. Deftly blending traditional songs like “Skibereen” and “Danny Boy” with history lessons (Did you know that the first witch hanged in America was Irish?), and humor (Did you know that the English conquered the world to escape their own cooking?), this is an entertaining way to pass an afternoon or evening. It’s playing through March 29th, and tickets can be purchased by calling 215-893-1999.

In the midst of all the revelry, the fallen police officers of the city were not forgotten; at popular downtown pub & restaurant Tir na Nog, the local Irish band BarleyJuice donated their amazing musical talents to the cause. All money raised at the door went to a fund for families of Philadelphia’s fallen officers. This is a group that knows how to kick it up for the cause; check out video clips of their rousing version of “Monto,” and a medley that includes “Ring of Fire” and “Whiskey in the Jar.”

Finally, there is no finer way to round out a St. Patrick’s Day than with a performance from Irish-American supergroup Solas at the World Café. Their set list included songs from their latest cd, “For Love and Laughter” as well as a lovely tribute to the late John Martyn with his “Spencer the Rover.” But Seamus Egan, Mick McAuley, Eamon McElholm, Chico Huff, phiddle phenom Winifred Horan, and singer Mairead Phelan enthralled a crowd beyond just the one gathered tableside in Philly. The band didn’t know it at the time, but from the audience, a United States airman was Skyping the show to a deployed unit overseas, and when Mairead Phelan sang “Mollai na Gcuach ni Chuilleanain,” a Gaelic-speaking military captain stationed somewhere in a more dangerous part of the world, cried. It was as it should be on March 17, everyone the world over got to share in the Irish spirit. Make sure you watch the video of  “Spencer the Rover.”

March 27, 2009 by
Music

A Real Hand-Clapping, Foot-Stomping Time

Slide at the Irish Center.

Slide at the Irish Center.

Slide didn’t slide. They played slides, but they played them with an aerobic fervor that pleased and delighted the crowd at The Irish Center in Philadelphia on Saturday, February 28. For those lucky enough to fill the audience in The Fireside Room, the four lads of Slide (Daire Bracken, Eamonn de Barra, Aogan Lynch and Mick Broderick), along with the ethereal-voiced Eithne Ni Chathain, performed for almost three hours.

Traditional tunes, like “Poor Liza Jane” and “Dance Boatman Dance” shared the bill with those penned by the group, like “Tredudon” which was written while they were on a holiday in the idyllic Brittany region of France. All three tracks are among those featured on Slide’s latest cd release, “Overneath.” Eithne, who recently released her own solo self-titled cd, joined in on the fiddle and keyboard, as well as singing several songs including her own composition, “What’s in the Bag Love.”

With Eamonn playing the keyboard and the flute, Aogan on the concertina and Mick on the bouzouki, the group achieved their “harmonic motion.” Throw in Daire’s kinetic fiddle playing, and things really heated up. It was a small stage, but that didn’t deter Daire, who made bountiful use of the space to perform his stringed wizardry.

Captivating onstage, and gracious off, Slide is just beginning their three-week American tour that will bring them back this way before it ends. So, peruse the photos here, and watch the videos, and then be sure to catch them when they stop at The Grand Opera House in Wilmington, DE, on Thursday, March 19, or Chickory House in Wilkes-Barre, PA, on Friday, March 20. You won’t want to miss them twice, but you will want to see them again.

March 5, 2009 by
Music

Eight Kids, a Job, and She’s Also a Singer-Songwriter

Linda Welby

Linda Welby

Linda Welby is raising eight children, manages holiday cottages, and runs bus tours in her native Connemara (she’s a licensed bus driver!). But don’t hate her because she’s beautiful and makes the Energizer Bunny look like a shirker.

In fact, if you listen to her much-acclaimed debut CD, “A Story to Tell” – yes, she’s a singer-songwriter too—you’re probably going to love her. Just read the lyrics to “The Galway Fiddler,” the first release off the CD, a spirited tribute to buskers.

“He said he had learnt from the birds in the sky
Their songs each morn he’d play till he die
He learnt to listen to the breeze
through the heather
And play to it’s whistling
in all types of weather.”

“I love to stop and listen to them entertain people and it’s many times they have brightened my day,” Linda told me recently. Though she admits she “never expected for a split second that it would take off or that it would even get airplay,” its infectious country sound has even inspired new dance steps In Ireland.

The CD is infused with personal meaning. Her songs are the consummation of a lifetime of writing poems that Linda discovered she had the gift for turning into music “The lyrics come to me first, and my feelings for the words would follow with music,” she says. “When I was working on my album, only then did I discover that I could compose reels, jigs, and hornpipes.”

Music has been a part of Linda’s life since she was born and her dad, Paddy Doorhy, “brought me out to his gigs and showed me to the world. I would sit on his knee while he played the drums and he would use my two hands to drum for him.”

The eldest of five children, and the only one who has taken up music full-time, Linda grew up surrounded by the heritage of rich musical tradition: her grandfather, also Paddy Doorhy, was in the Ballinakill ceili band, the Leitrim ceili band and many others. He was “an amazing fiddle player who could make it talk to you. Very strict when it came to how a tune was played and wouldn’t at all go with the trad ways of playing today. His style of playing would be slower, more relaxed and savored better. He taught me the fiddle–nails had to be short and no nail varnish. I did query the nail varnish…he said he just didn’t like the look of it.”

Linda has performed with the band Cois Tine for 14 years, initially playing the drums, but along the way learning the banjo, tin whistle, accordion, mandolin and the keyboards. In 2003, the group released a CD called “Memories.” Over the years, their musical style changed from the trad sound they started with—as Linda’s vision for the music she wanted to make expanded: “I’m a great lover of the Glen Miller ballroom era and to touch on what I really loved I had to leave the drums behind. We are still Cois Tine, we play three to four nights every week all year round, we do the social dances to the very small pubs…I do the odd concert and guest appearance apart from the band and to see a few hundred people wanting your autograph and queueing to talk to you is a so, so different scene. I have a fight with myself from time to time over where I should be.”

Family continues to be at the core of Linda’s music. “What keeps me passionate is my Dad to make proud which I know he is already,” she says. “My dad is my hero and a huge inspiration to me and I get emotional even saying that. When I wrote the song ‘Dear Dad’ he was so proud of his song, he never stopped playing it and telling everyone ‘that’s my daughter and she wrote that for me.’ My mum was proud of it too, so I felt she had to have a song too and I penned ‘We Love You Mum.’ The jig ‘Port Cait Dan’ is named after my mother Kathleen, Cait being the Irish of Kathleen; Dan is her father. People who’ve grown up in the native Irish-speaking areas were called by their dad’s name after their own to identify the family, ‘port’ is the Irish word for ‘jig’ (‘purt’).”

And she’d never be able to do everything she does without a supportive family. Her husband, she says, always tells her, “you’re better than you think you are.” Her kids, who range from 7-20, are equally helpful. “I have come home on many occasions from a gig to get into a bus and pick up people for tours and be home in time for breakfast and school runs. It can be difficult at the best of times to keep a balance but I’m lucky in the sense that my work is so flexible and it’s all about compromise. I have never had to turn down a gig yet because of my family.”

After listening to Linda’s CD, which can be sampled and purchased at her website, it’s difficult to believe that it wasn’t that long ago, she confesses, that she “couldn’t listen to myself singing at all and I never classed myself as a singer.” She recalls when one recording engineer at the music studio “started to panic when I wouldn’t sing because he was looking at me.”

On the brink of fame, she and her music are still focused on what’s important in life. “I love life,” she says, “and it’s the simplest things I get happiness from like giving or holding the door open for someone that’s strugglin’ with it, and to sit down at dawn and listen to the quietness. I’d give up every material thing I have to hold onto those little things.”

February 21, 2009 by