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McKeown and McPartlan: Two Great Irish Voices In Harmony

Singer Mary McPartlan

Singer Mary McPartlan

It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes you meet someone who makes you suspect you were separated at birth. You laugh at the same things, love the same music, have so much in common that it’s a little like meeting. . .yourself.

That’s how Grammy-winning vocalist Susan McKeown felt when she met trad singer Mary McPartlan last summer in a café in Miltown Malbay, where they were both attending Willie Week, the annual Willie Clancy Summer School music festival.

“We only chatted a few minutes but we talked so much we planned out our next five years,” laughs McKeown, who was born in Dublin but now lives in New York. “We had so much in common.”

One of those plans was to work together someday, and they are. The women, considered two of the finest Irish traditional singers today, will be appearing for the first time together at the The Irish Center in Philadelphia on Saturday night.

Although McKeown won her Grammy for her work with The Klezmatics—singing Klezmer music, the Yiddish version of Irish trad—she and McPartlan are both steeped in Celtic folk. In their brief encounter, they also discovered that they both love the music of Mali, the western African nation, and have a penchant for weaving the music of other lands with the tunes of their roots. They both also have a theatrical background. McKeown graduated from the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York, and for the last dozen years McPartlan has been a producer and director of numerous music and theatre projects, many for TG4, Irish language television.

They also learned that they loved each other’s music. “There is something deep and honest about Mary’s voice that appeals to me,” says McKeown. “When I first heard her, she reminded me of [singer] Dolores Keane. She has very soulful voice that seems to tap into the past.”

McPartlan—whom I caught up with by phone as she was cooking supper for her family in Galway—has heard that comparison before and was pleased to hear McKeown thought so. “I love Dolores Keane,” she says. “She’s been a massive inspiration.”

McPartlan is a relative late-bloomer in Irish music. Though she began singing in the 1970s, she didn’t decide to make music a career until 2003. “My life was totally taken up with my job—working in the arts–and rearing my kids (she has four, two in their 20s and two teenagers),” she explains. “It was a very demanding time and I pulled back from solo performance. The fact that I’m a professional producer of the arts and especially music kept me spending a lot of time in the company of musicians and being involved in making music programs kept me going.”

While in the midst of a time-consuming project that kept her away from home for weeks, she says, “I made a tape of my songs for a lift.” She gave the tape to her good friend, piper Paddy Keenan, and asked him what he thought. “He said, ‘Mary, quick, go get a producer,’ which I did and I’ve never looked back.”

Her first CD was “The Holland Handkerchief,” which debuted to critical acclaim in January 2004. But her burgeoning new career was almost derailed: That same year, McPartlan was diagnosed with breast cancer. “I struggled with the breast cancer treatments and went on stage whenever I could,” she says. “But I never gave up. I think that music healed me faster than anything ever could.”

At the same time, she was also studying for her master’s degree. While it sounds like the perfect storm for stress, her performances and studies provided a welcome distraction from doctor’s visits and radiation treatments, she says. Four years after her diagnosis, McPartlan released her second CD, “Petticoat Loose,” which contains some interesting collaborations between McPartlan and a variety of musicians, including a Romanian string quartet.

Like her new friend, McKeown is musically adventurous. Her Grammy came for “Wonder Wheel,” a collection of Yiddish music (with lyrics by American folk musician Woody Guthrie) she performed with the Klezmatics. “Now you might think that Yiddish and Irish songs had nothing in common, but it’s not such a great leap as you might think,” she says “The tunes are so vibrant and exuberant, as they are in the Irish tradition, and they also tap into the same great sadness and depth of emotions.” They are, after all, songs born of love—and pining–for a homeland.

McKeown was born in Dublin, the fifth of five children. “The story is told that my parents had four children, none having a talent for music, so they had a fifth child, me. My aunts told me this. My mother was an organist and an entertainer at social events, and I always sang with her. So she was struck lucky the fifth time. We used to go around in the car together singing, doing harmonies, singing everything—religious music, popular music, the Beatles—whatever was on the radio.”

Her passion for singing was fueled by “winning medals in competitions—I liked that,” she laughs. “I was always asked to sing at religious events in school and I always got parts in the school musicals.” She went to college in New York with a scholarship and toured Europe with a group of Irish musicians with whom she released a cassette called “The Chanting House.” While in New York, she collaborated with musicians like Seamus Egan (Solas) and Eileen Ivers. The release in 1995 of “Bones,’ which features McKeown’s take on traditional Irish keening (caoineadh)—the poetic, emotional crying over the dead—led to her solo career. Like McPartlan, she is entrenched in traditional Celtic music, but she also writes her own tunes and employs musical elements of other cultures in her work.

“I’ve worked with a number of Malian musicians, quite frequently the kora player Mamadou Diabate,” she says. The kora, she explains, the is African version of the harp, a stick plunged into a gourd with 21 strings, sounding remarkably like the Irish harp. “I worked with the Malian Ensemble Tartit, me sitting on the ground with 12 of them, men and women, playing instruments, clapping, singing.” The music was remarkable, but McKeown also remembers it as a moment of motherhood magic. “I had my daughter, Roisin, with me. She was a baby and still nursing Another Mali singer, Mah Damba, got a big piece of cloth and tied it on me like those baby snugglers they sell, and she was asleep in a few minutes.”

Both McKeown and McPartlan expect some magic moments on Saturday night. “We’ll probably be doing the set list as we come down in the van,” McKeown jokes. “And it will be the first time we’ve ever heard each other live. Sure, and we only just met for five minutes!”

Those five minutes make McPartlan believe the magic will last. “I really think Philadelphia will be the nucleus f what I hope will be great, exciting, creative things to come.”

Susan McKeown and Mary McParlan will be performing at the Irish Center, Carpenter and Emlen Streets in the Mt. Airy section of Philadelphia, on Saturday, January 10, at 8 PM.

January 9, 2009 by
Music

A Little Bit of Holiday Cheer

Sean nos dancer Brian Cunningham has flying feet.

Sean nos dancer Brian Cunningham has flying feet.

A couple of weeks ago, ticket sales were as sluggish as the Stock Market for Teada’s “Irish Christmas in America” show, a Philadelphia Ceili Group production scheduled for December 9 at Philadelphia’s Irish Center. But by that evening, there was a rally, and hundreds of people filled the vast ballroom for a little taste of Celtic Christmas–a full house to hear traditional Irish tunes and learn a little about Celtic traditions.

Karan Casey, a founding member of the group, Solas, was the featured soloist, and she wowed the crowd with everything from Irish carols to her paean to Barack Obama, the Nina Simone tune, “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to be Free.” “Barack Obama,” she explained, “was like an early Christmas gift to the world.”

Also on the bill: uillean piper Tommy Martin, harper Grainne Hambley, and the remarkable, 23-year-old sean nos (old style) dancer, Brian Cunningham. And, of course, Teada itself: founder and the show’s producer, Oisin Mac Diarmada, an All-Ireland fiddler from Sligo; Damien Stenson, also a Sligo native, who plays flute; guitarist Sean McIElwain, and Dublin’s own Tristan Rosenstock, who plays bodhran and was the night’s narrator and stand-up comic.

If you couldn’t be there and would love to hear some of the performance, Marianne MacDonald will be playing some cuts from the “Irish Christmas in America” CD on her radio show on Sunday, December 14, at noon. Tune in to WTMR-800 AM, right after the Vince Gallagher Irish Radio Show. You can hear it on the web at www.wtmrradio.com.

December 12, 2008 by
Music

Christmas Comes Early to the Shanachie

Guitarist John Doyle in a pensive moment.

Guitarist John Doyle in a pensive moment.

It was billed as a Christmas show. Think of it as a Christmas present.

Mick Moloney, with fiddler Athena Tergis and guitar great John Doyle, headlined at the Shanachie Pub in Ambler Thursday night. They were joined onstage, from time to time, by special guests, local fiddler Caitlin Finley and old-timey fiddle whiz Rafe Stefanini.  

There were just enough Christmas tunes along the lines of “The Holly and the Ivy,” to satisfy those who were looking for an early dose of holiday merriment. Mixed in were some of the vintage tunes Mick Moloney typically champions—including a great little song about some fairly lethal Christmas cake—and, between Tergis and Doyle, there were enough musical pyrotechnics to rouse the denizens of the jammed dining room and bar.

We’ve posted some photos from this wonderful concert, which Shanachie co-owner Gerry Timlin suggested might become a tradition.

Check them out.

December 5, 2008 by
Music

Still Roving After All These Years

By the time you read this, the Irish Rovers will be doing what they have done, for over 40 years: Roving.

You’ll have a chance to hear and see them yourself Friday, December 5, at the Keswick Theatre in Glenside, as the Rovers present their Christmas show. (The show starts at 8.)

Just before the tour began, we caught up with the Rovers’ George Millar by phone from his home on Vancouver Island, a scenic outpost off Canada’s Pacific coast, about 75 north of Seattle. Millar had lived there for over 15 years.

It’s a short tour, thankfully. After 40-plus years in the business, touring is an exhausting business.

“It’s 12 cities in all,” he says, “starting with three in Canada, ending up in Florida on the 14th of December.” You wouldn’t think there’d be much call for winter holiday songs in Florida, but, Millar says, you’d think wrong. “Isn’t it crazy?” he says. “And yet we do it every year and they all show up with their red and their green on and it’s about 130 degrees out.”

The Christmas tour has proved a popular way for fans to get their annual dose of Irish Rover music. And, Millar says, the boys aim to please.

The Christmas show was the brainchild of the band’s agent, Millar says, perhaps in part due to the popularity of their version of “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer,” originally recorded by an obscure duo, Elmo and Patsy. Of course, the Rovers are about so much more than holiday ditties, so fans will be treated to a crowd-pleasing mix of Christmas and traditional Irish music.

“The trouble with us and doing a Christmas show is we really can’t do the traditional Rudolph and things like that,” says Millar. “So we have to look for the more obscure English-y, Irish-y songs, or we wrote similar type songs. We always have to do “The Unicorn,” “The Black Velvet Band,” and of course “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer.” That’s a must—you have to do that whether you like it or not.

“To keep the tours fresh, we have to keep changing songs. You have to keep so many of them (standards) in, of course. We’ll do the songs they expect to hear, that’s what they pay for. But we keep coming up with new songs to keep ourselves fresh and keep ourselves interested. We just keep it fast paced, and before you know it the two hours is up and we’re off having a Guinness somewhere.”

For the Rovers, there seems to be no slowing down. If it all seems a bit formulaic, well, maybe it is. But it’s a good formula, and one that fans truly appreciate, as they have done since the beginning.

Millar recalls how the Rovers started, by accident, at a weekend show in Toronto.

“It was like a charity show,” he says “At least twice a month in Toronto, where we had immigrated (from Ballymena, near Belfast) there was a big Scottish-English-Irish community, and they would put on these shows about twice a month. They were just like an amateur show. People would come and pay their two dollars and they would drink their rye and ginger ale, and their beer. My sister was quite the singer, and I was playing guitar behind her. I was about 14 or 15 when this all started.

“Well, one night, this fellow (Jimmy Ferguson) gets up and starts singing Lonnie Donegan songs. In those days, Lonnie Donegan was a huge British star. He was as big as the Beatles in his day. He used to sing folks songs, but to electric guitar. So Jimmy was playing this kind of song. Well, one time I went into the toilet to tune the guitar. We were just about to go on and it was so noisy in the place. And I’m sitting on the floor tuning my guitar and humming to my self the song, “The Irish Rover.” And this fella Jimmy comes into the bathroom and he starts singing it along with me. And we sort of looked at each other and I said, ‘Oh, I didn’t know you knew that song.’ He said, ‘Well I’m from Belfast, so of course I do. I learned it in school.’ Just then, the fella who was running the show comes in and overheard us singing “The Irish Rover,” and he says, “Somebody didn’t show up tonight. Can you do it in the show?”

At that point, the two weren’t sure they knew all the words but they tried it out—still in the bathroom. And, Millar recalls, the concert promoter said to them, “It’s perfect.”

“After I sang with my sister and Jimmy did his little bit, we did this one song together, we got up and sang it and the audience loved it. That’s all there was to it.” That’s how they got together, started learning songs and formed the core of what would grow to become the Irish Rovers.

Making a living in music as opposed to any old factory job seemed like a wise choice. In time, they found themselves touring, and they turned up with a gig at the legendary Purple Onion in San Francisco in the late ‘60s. They rubbed shoulders with some young performers, like Linda Ronstadt and Steve Martin, who would themselves go on to fame and fortune. For the Rovers, though, fame came in the form of a Shel Silverstein tune called “The Unicorn,” in 1968.

Two more hits—recorded under the shortened name, ”The Rovers,”—came in later years, including the Tom Paxton tune, “Wasn’t That a Party.” By all accounts, the Rovers’ parties were memorable indeed, and this was Paxton’s paean. A little while later came “Grandma,” a tune that reinvigorated the Rovers’ career, even as it rubbed some audiences the wrong way.

The Rovers acquired the Elmo and Patsy tune, which had been a regional hit, when they were looking for songs to fill a Christmas album.

“We re-recorded it about 30 years after they did it, and it became an underground hit,” says Millar. “You either like the song or you hate it. There’s no happy in between on that one. It’s just a comical, funny song. Even my own mother, before she passed on, said to me: ‘Shave your beard, cut your hair and don’t ever sing that horrible Grandma song again.’”

Of course, sons often do go their own way—and many fans are grateful that the Rovers have.

The fact is, Rovers fans are diehards. Long after “The Unicorn,” they keep on coming. Millar isn’t sure they’re about to stop.

“We’re never going to get retired at this point,” he says. “We’re blessed that we still have a built-in audience of people that wants to see us. When people ask us about retirement, I say, well … why? I can now see why George Burns kept going until he was almost 100 years old. It’s not like rock and roll. We don’t have to weigh 105 pounds and wear Spandex … luckily. With Celtic music, the hair can recede and the stomach can come out a wee bit, and it seems to fit the image.”

November 28, 2008 by
Music

Another Year of Joyful Noise

Athena Tergis and Billy McComiskey

Athena Tergis and Billy McComiskey

No one can recall quite when Mick Moloney started playing his annual benefit for St. Malachy School, the most recent of which was held a couple of Sundays ago in the church on North 11th Street.

The parish’s retired pastor Father John McNamee figures it’s at least 22 years since he bumped into Moloney at a presentation on ethnic music at the Balsch Institute. The two struck up an immediate friendship, and Moloney soon suggested a fund-raiser for the little school a few blocks from Temple University in North Philadelphia.

Since then, Moloney’s annual gathering of musical friends has become, McNamee says, “the longest and most successful benefit we have all year” for a school the American Ireland Fund has called “a preeminent symbol of ecumenism and outreach to poor and disadvantaged youth and their families.”

Without this concert and other fund-raisers, Father Mac told his audience, “We’d have closed down 15 years ago.” And he added: “I can’t imagine this neighborhood without this school.”

Neither can we.

Thanks to Moloney and a few of his fellow musicians—Athena Tergis, Brendan Dolan, Billy McComiskey, Brendan Callahan and Caitlin Finley—we won’t have to.

Here are a few photographic remembrances of the day.

November 26, 2008 by
Music, People

An (Irish) Traditional Marriage

Kathy, Emma and Dennis harmonize at a recent Christmas Wren party.

Kathy, Emma and Dennis harmonize at a recent Christmas Wren party.

You’ll have a hard time finding two busier traditional Irish musicians than Kathy DeAngelo and Dennis Gormley.

Together, they perform as the trad duo McDermott’s Handy (named after the County Leitrim, and later Monmouth County, N.J., fiddler Ed McDermott). And they preside over a popular traditional Irish music session Thursday nights at Three Beans Coffeehouse in Haddonfield, N.J. With Mermaid Inn session leader Chris Brennan Hagy, they also moderate the Next Generation youth Irish music group.

With bodhran in hand, I’ve accompanied them in a few performances and a few more sessions. Turnabout being fair play, Dennis accompanied me on flute when I took a shot at Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann’s Mid-Atlantic Fleadh Cheoil a couple of years back. I also took whistle lessons from Dennis—none of which quite “took,” through no fault of Dennis’s. (Apparently, you have to practice.)

Both talented multi-instrumentalists, Kathy and Dennis have been part of the Delaware Valley Irish music scene for decades. They’re as generous with their time and knowledge as they are talented.

As well as I think I know them, there’s still lots more I don’t know, So I posed a few questions.

Q. How did you two get together, personally and musically? And how big a role did the music play?

Kathy: We met at the Rutgers Saturday Folk Festival in July 1973 when Dennis was playing bass with Saul Broudy, and practically every other performer. I managed to “persuade,” in my own charming fashion, the festival organizer to let me perform with my band in a brief slot that afternoon using the argument that he didn’t have one single woman performing that day. Trouble was, the bass player in my band hadn’t lugged his bass to the student center, whereas all the guys had brought their guitars. So I very boldly approached Dennis and asked if we could borrow his bass. He was too nice, and I was too cute, for him to tell me to buzz off—and I’ll let him get a word in edgewise here.

Dennis: “Cute” is an understatement. I was stunned by her heart-stopping beauty and amazing talent. She could have asked me sign over all my worldly assets and I would would have used my own pen.

Anyway, I was up playing bass for Philadelphia folk music icon Saul Broudy. Saul was working in D.C. at the Smithsonian
Folk Life Festival and traveling up to New Brunswick by train. I drove up early to catch the music at the festival. Little did I know …

Kathy: So we started off playing everything but Irish music at the beginning. We played country music, bluegrass, swing, old-time and good old American folk songs. I was playing Irish music with Ed McDermott, my mentor, but that was a separate world.

Q. You both play multiple instruments First of all, thanks for making me realize just how much I have to learn, but, second, can you tell me how and when you learned those instruments, and how gravitated toward Irish traditional music?

Kathy: I started playing guitar in the 7th grade after being allowed to give up the accordion. My father thought every Italian girl should learn the accordion but in 1965 no right-minded teenager wanted to play the accordion. Everybody in my family played or sang. I just played chords and followed charts on pop music sheet music my brother bought. I got into folk music and by the time I got to college I opened the Mine Street coffeehouse in New Brunswick and got in with a whole crowd of people who played all kinds of music and went to folk festivals. The guys in my band thought I would look good playing a banjo so they gave me one for my birthday. My dad gave me his old mandolin. Other instruments followed and I had the time to learn them.

Two of the instruments I’m most associated with now, harp and fiddle, I didn’t take up till relatively late in life. I started teaching myself fiddle after Ed McDermott died in 1977—and I regret I didn’t take it up while he was living. I played guitar with him for years and he was the one that got me started down the path of the Irish dance music. Besides backing him up, I was flat-picking the tunes. When I moved to this area after Ed died I only knew two people down here and Dennis was one of them. I had a few Irish gigs and I asked him to play with me. He said “I don’t know anything about Irish music.” He insisted on coming over to learn a few tunes before this gig and I was amazed that he’d sit there and write the tunes down while I played them. Well, you know how one thing leads to another. Skip ahead to 1979 and Dennis and I get married. In 1984 I came home from work and Dennis had bought me a harp, which were hard to come by in those days. He had already worked out how to play “If I Only Had a Brain” so I figured I had to get to work to put some Irish music on it!

Dennis: The writing tunes down bit was always a way for me to learn and memorize the tunes.To this day, I’ll write down a tune I’m want to learn (see http://www.hslc.org/~gormley/tunes/giftunes.html), then very rarely refer back to the manuscript.

I started the obligitory piano lessons at about age 6 or 7. My father had rescued a piano from a bar; I remember it had the cartoon character Snuffy Smith on it. But once we learned to read, it got a new coat of paint; apparently, Snuffy was saying some rude things! One day, my parents heard mepicking out the melody for the “William Tell Overture” (you would know it as the theme from the Lone Ranger), and decided to send me for lessons. I never got as good as I probably could have, because I always wanted to learn by ear, and the teachers had this annoying habit of wanting me to read the music.

Anyway, my father Joe Gormley played the guitar as well, in a Freddie Green Big Band style of guitar. Apparently in his younger days he was a touring musician for a short while, which probably led to his advice, “Music is the best part-time job in the world.” My mother told a story of having to wire him money one time so he could get home, but I was never able to get any other details out of them. Up until the time he passed away, he was performing on a regular basis.

So when 1964 came around, there was already an electric guitar around the house. Of course, when I started playing it, I got a nylon-string classical guitar as a birthday present. I think there were thoughts of a classical guitarist in the family, but I immediately recognized it as the same sound heard on the Beatles “And I Love Her.”

I took up string bass in high school, coupling that with bass guitar in high school rock groups. Again, my father counseled, “There are thousands of guitar players, but not many good bass players.” Inspired by my high school band and orchestra director, James Maxwell, I went to Glassboro State College as a music education major and was exposed to all the instruments typically found in a school music program; for the purposes of this narrative, this is pretty much where I first picked up a violin and flute.

Fast forward to the early ‘70s and the folk music of the social activists. I missed the Kingston Trio folk music boom, but Peter Paul and Mary, Buffy St. Marie, Arlo Guthrie, and others were heard in my home. I was playing acoustic guitar and string bass, and working teaching folk music at the now-defunct Haddonfield Music House, giving lessons on guitar, bass, dulcimer, mandolin; they pretty much pushed any student wanting to learn folk music to me, whether I knew the instrument or not!

I started attending meetings of the Philadelphia Folk Song Society, where I met up with several musicians whom I performed with over the years, including Caryl P. Weiss and Saul Broudy. Through Saul, I got the opportunity to perform with many revivalist performers such as Winnie Winston, Steve Goodman, Vasser Clements, and John Prine.

So, toward the mid- and late ‘70s I was playing and performing folk music and traveling to venues throughout the Northeast and up into Canada. Attending and performing at folk festivals, I heard a great deal of Irish music, notably at the Philadelphia Folk Festival, where Kenny Goldstein regularly programmed and hosted a “Celtic Ceilidh” (Sunday afternoon at the Tank Stage). It was “hip” in the circles I traveled and performed in to deride the “diddly diddly,” but I was always drawn to it. Even though there was no Irish music played in my house, perhaps it was a sort of racial memory calling to me.

When I first started performing with Kathy, a short time after the death of Ed McDermott, I figured the mandolin, tuned like a fiddle, would be the most appropriate instrument I had to play the dance tunes. But I never really had the technical expertise to play tunes up to speed. Casting around, I picked up a tin whistle and worked on that, then much later (after a single but memorable lesson with Seamus Egan when he told me he was moving to New York to work with this new group), got a simple system wooden flute and started working on it. Still can’t get the notes for “Nights in White Satin” on it, though.

Like Kathy, I often wonder what it would have been like to be playing flute when Ed McDermott was still alive.

Q. How long have you been anchoring Three Beans?

Kathy: We started doing the session at the Three Beans not long after it opened in 1995, but the session actually started in a back room at the former Katie O’Brien’s, a restaurant in Haddon Township in 1992, I think. When the Three Beans expanded into the shop next door, there was room for us.

Dennis: My sister Lorraine Gormley had met a guitarist and singer from Kerry named Richard Browne, who told her of a session he was running at Katie O’Brien’s. With (daughter) Emma being an infant, it was easy to put her to bed and then get out to the session. (Oh, did I mention my mother was living with us then? Get of my back, DYFSS!) So we started going out. Eventually, having the session at Katie’s became untenable, with a trad session being low on their list of priorities. Harp and Dulcimer maker Dave Field was living in Haddonfield at the time, and he found the Three Bean location.

Q. How did McDermott’s Handy develop?

Kathy: I was the first music director at the New Jersey Folk Festival and Ed McDermott was one of our featured performers at the first festival in 1975, and then again in 1976. Everybody loved him. Here was this 80-year old fiddler who played with incredible energy with the college students who came to learn from him.

He died on New Years Day, 1977, and the festival asked me to put together a tribute to him for the 1977 festival. I asked a whole bunch of players from around the state who had learned tunes from Ed for years to come and play. It was a great night. I used the name McDermott’s Handy, after a track from Gordon Bok’s record of tunes he learned from Ed. So I just decided to keep it going. After that, it was mostly Dennis and me with an ever-changing roster of other musicians until 1984, when it was just the two of us. Now our daughter Emma, who plays fiddle and also sings, sits in with us occasionally.

Dennis: Aside from recordings and touring groups, Ed McDermott was the first practitioner of Irish music that I had met. His dedication to the music and patience in teaching what he had to a gaggle of young musicians with scant background in the music, was an inspiration. The opportunity to commemorate his contribution to Irish music is a continuation honor.

Q. I understand some fella named Seamus Egan once opened for McDermott’s Handy. When and where was that, about how old was he, and did you have an inkling of what a dynamic musical force he was going to turn out to be?

Kathy: Actually, it was the Egan family that opened for us at the old Perimeter coffeehouse in Collingswood, maybe that was in 1985 or so—Seamus and his sisters Siobhan and Rory. They were pretty young—not old enough to drive themselves there, I don’t think. There was lots of talent in them and passion for the music. They were awesome players even then. In fact, I arranged for them to play at the New Brunswick coffeehouse and have photos of all three of them on that stage.

Q. Your daughter Emma plays fiddle with you. Lots of kids might go off in a different direction–say, sports, or, musically, playing anything but the same music mom and dad play. How did that happen, and how did she get to be so good? (And to be such a sweet kid?)

Kathy: Emma has been listening to this music since before she was born. She was only 6 weeks old in the carriage parked stage left when we played at Bethlehem Musikfest in 1987. I’d practice the harp with this little baby laying on the floor at the foot of the harp so I could keep an eye on her. She loves it. She was about 2 years old when she started sing-songing melodies, in pitch. When it was feasible, we brought her to a lot of our concerts so it was not surprising to us that, when she was offered a chance to learn a musical instrument at school, she chose the violin. She’s got an encyclopedic knowledge of tunes. And she’s a big part of the reason why Dennis and I wanted to get those young musician sessions going.

Dennis: During one performance St. Patrick’s Day in 1987, Kathy was playing the bodhran; in utero, Emma started kicking back. So you could say she’s been PLAYING before she was born. Even today, when she goes up to her room, you can hear Irish songs and tunes wafting down from her CD player.

Q. What is there about this music that keeps you coming? You’re obviously both very passionate about what you do.

Kathy: I just love the infinite variety of this music, it’s simple and yet complex at the same time. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think of the influence of that one man, Ed McDermott, and how knowing him shaped the course of my life. It’s a good part of what motivates me as a teacher to help pass this music along. I’m blessed to be able to sit down with wonderful players, like Dennis, all the time who keep that fire lit for me.

Dennis: I see all of us who play this wonderful music as links in a chain, that stretch back a long way. I was explaining to ZB Cummins, a 13-year-old whistle student: Kathy and I learned our first tunes from Ed McDermott, who came to this country in 1915, and was born at the end of the 19th century. He first got his music from his father, who would have been born in the mid-1800s. Now, there are people who get their first tunes from me or Kathy, and who will hopefully will pass them on as well.

November 20, 2008 by
Music

All About The Morrigan

It’s a band named after the Celtic goddess of war, strife and fertility. (Or war, fate and death—your pick. Except for the fertility bit, she’s not a cheery chick, in any case.)

Of course, there’s so much more to The Morrigan, a circle of Irish musical friends, now anchoring the Molly Maguires traditional music session in Phoenixville. How about passion—and maybe throw in a bit of fun and occasional mischief?

Members include fiddler Mary Malone; uilleann piper, flutist and whistle whiz Den Vykopal; John LaValley on guitar, mandolin and concertina; bouzouki and button accordion player Bud Burroughs. They’re all Philly-area traditional Irish music session veterans.

Like many traditional Irish musicians, they came to the music sometimes by circuitous routes—but somehow or other, they came just the same.

We asked them to tell us a bit about themselves. Here’s what they had to say.

Q. You all seem to have come to Irish music by different routes. One or two of you have family ties. As for the rest, it seems a happy accident that you somehow found Irish music and were hooked. It also looks like, for some of you with musical inclinations, you were acquainted with some other form of music first. What drew you to Irish music? What keeps you?

Mary: I played mostly classical music until my friend and fellow Philadelphia Ceili Group member Susan Cavanaugh, a fine Irish dancer, persuaded me to take ceili, then set dancing classes. I was (am) a miserable dancer, but I loved the music, and, coming from a classical background where you learn tunes by reading music, I was intrigued when I would see the musicians in the sessions playing for hours at a time—and with no music. How do they do that???

I was advised to start going to the sessions at The Mermaid Inn (Chestnut Hill) where I met a lot of people from the Philly Irish community who helped me make the transition from classical violin to traditional Irish fiddle – Chris Brennan-Hagy, Kitty Kelly and Johnny Brennan got me started, then I started being coached by Den Vykopal—in the unique way that only a Slavic-Germanic, Irish-trad purist, musical savant can coach you.  And I became immersed in the music. My son Dave Palan, who is a professional musician often, hints that I am obsessed, and should diversify.

I stay, in part because it is great music, I am obsessed (there is always another tune to learn) and because of the people and the community—that extends around the world. No matter where you are there is likely to be a session, and you have instant friends. I was traveling on my job in Oslo, Norway, and happened upon The Oslo Irish Festival and the sessions there. It also happened to occur during the week of 9/11/2001 when I watched the planes fly into the world trade center from a European cable TV lab I was working in at the time. The musicians I met in the session there kept me sane during that crazy time when I was away from my family and friends and country. They saved seats at the concerts for me, played tunes with me, and they loved me—as I was part of the community of Irish trad musicians. And the Irish traditional music community is even better when you are at home with the people you have been playing tunes with for years. My mood can be off for an entire week if I don’t get out to play a tune with Kevin McGillian (what a great human being) at The Shanachie, for example.

Bud: I got into Irish music gradually. I heard a lot of bluegrass as a kid, then had classical piano and organ training, and then became a rock guitarist. A lot of the music I liked was influenced by Irish and English folk music (Jethro Tull, Fairport Convention, etc.). Sometime in my late 20s, I decided to get a mandolin, just to have something different to play. I started poking around on the internet for tunes to play and discovered that there were thousands of Irish tunes available, and they made a great learning resource. Eventually, I met Mary at work and she introduced me to Irish sessions. I started going, and learning more tunes, and eventually moved on to playing bouzouki and button accordion, and never stopped learning more tunes.

John: My musical memory came from my Irish and Irish-American parents and grandparents, some of them immigrants, coal miners, outlaws, policemen or the less savory sort who enjoyed the stories in country music and the romanticism embodied in popular and classical music. It reminded them of who they were.

I moved away from enjoying rock music in the early ‘70s and began to be drawn toward folk music—first the blues, then bluegrass, and finally Celtic music, which provided for me that same sense of cultural connection.

Q. Den, it seems like you came the longest, most roundabout route to Irish music. But given your background with Czech bagpipes, maybe it was not so much of a stretch. Was it? And I’m really curious to know how you first made that connection.
 
Den: Actually it wasn’t my piping that took me to Irish music. It was my flute playing. People forget that I was “just” a flute player not too long ago. I started on the pipes only about nine years ago.

As a classical flute player I was a huge fan of James Galway whom I consider the greatest soloist who ever lived. I never heard Paganini in person but I’d bet anyone Galway far surpassed him. The man is simply incredible. And since James Galway did two stints with the Chieftains I got to know Matt Molloy’s playing and I got hooked on the simple system wooden flute.

To me, playing Irish music is like playing anything. You have to have musical heart, ear and rhythm. In my life I played all kinds of music on the sax, flute, clarinet and guitar. I played on Norwegian cruise liners and in German clubs around Philly and the last fifteen years I’ve mostly frequented Irish bars where Irish trad is played. I’ll keep playing Irish and Celtic trad because I’ve become addicted to it.

Q. How did you decide to get together as a group? I know that you’ve all played together for some time.

Mary: We met playing at The Mermaid Inn. I gravitated towards John and Den and their playing. They had been playing together at the session for a couple of years by the time I met them, and they had such a great sound. John played guitar almost exclusively back then (1997) and it was before Den picked up the pipes, so he was playing flute mostly and sometimes whistle.

Den would give me transcriptions for tunes, and I would come back the next week and play the tunes with them. He gave me a Jerry Holland set of tunes to learn, and somehow, I ended up playing them at the Celtic Classic Fiddle Competition in Bethlehem with John accompanying me. And soon after that we started playing tunes at Den’s house.

Around the same time, I had recently started working with Bud Burroughs, and invited him to come to the session at The Mermaid – and it turned out that Buddy is a musical savant, then he started playing with Den, John and I.

Over the next year or so, I met Dave Hanson, another extremely talented musician, when he started coming out to the sessions with his kids—and his bodhran. Wow! And I asked Dave to join us—whenever we have a paying gig, he is the first guy we call.

Over the years we have played with various people—life gets crazy and people get pulled in different directions—but even if only sporadically, we have continued to play together. And other people have joined us, most recently, Judy Brennan.

Bud: Playing together happened gradually. All of us played at The Mermaid Inn and other sessions around the area and started getting together socially and to play music. Eventually, I think it was Mary who found us a gig somewhere, and we realized that people liked what we were playing, so we kept doing it!

Q. And why? Was there a sense that you could play things together as a group that you wouldn’t ordinarily be able to do as musicians in an Irish music session?

John: When you play in a session with like-minded friends, you always feel as thiough you are part of something greater, not playing music so much as participating in intangible emotions. That is the “mystic” that Van Morrison might cite if he were here. (He’s not!)

Mary: When you play in a band, especially if you are really proficient, it is much more satisfying in that you can choose what to play, get really good at some tunes and sets, arrange sets, play more difficult and challenging tunes—and you can also control the level of playing by the level of talent.

In a session, you don’t necessarily have to be proficient on an instrument in order to play. A lot of people come to learn, not just tunes, but instruments—because part of keeping the tradition alive is to have new people learn the tradition, the tunes and the traditional instruments. So as long as you know “Out on the Ocean,” and can scratch it out on your fiddle, and keep the beat—then you are in.

And I need to do it, because, as Den likes to point out (with respect, I might add) that I have my standards. (Hey, if Den gives you a compliment, you take it.)

Bud: By playing together as a group, we get to experiment with arrangements, and approaching things in a more disciplined way than the typical session free-for-all. Playing in a session and performing for an audience are both fun, but are completely different experiences.

Q. Does playing the session at Molly Maguires in Phoenixville seem like a good way for you guys to stay sharp as a group? Or to work on material? Or is that really a different kind of musical outlet for you?

Mary: Playing at Molly Maguire’s together once a month is about the only way we are able to keep playing together at this time in our lives—and my playing is at its very, very best when I am playing with these guys. Bud is playing with Boris Garcia and touring and doing gigs like the Philly Folk Fest and Sellersville Theatre on November 28, where they are releasing a phenomenally arranged and produced CD. (Den plays on it too.) Den and I both have new jobs that are taking up a lot of our time. And we love having Judy play with us, and the piano backup provides Bud and John the opportunity to both play melody instruments (concertina, pipes, button accordion, and banjo.)

Bud: Molly Maguires gives us a good excuse to get together and play on a regular basis. We can work on new tunes and practice the stuff we’ve played for years. Plus, it’s a lot of fun!

October 30, 2008 by
Music

Martin Family Rocks the House at CCC Celt Concert

The Martin family at play. (Photo by Bill O’Neal)

The Martin family at play. (Photo by Bill O’Neal)

By Tom Slattery

On October 11, Bucks County Community College and CCC Celt presented their 16th annual concert. This year’s featured performers were the Martin Family Band, a family group that brought down the house.

From Berks County, the four-year old group featured the fiddling and Irish dance talents of the three Martin sisters, Emily (17), Melissa (15) and Christy (10), who were accompanied by brother Brian (12) on drums, as well as father Nelson on guitar and mother Elaine on bass. Every so often 7-year old Zach would add his fiddle to the mix.

One of their two CDs is entitled “Emily’s Dream.” Emily is the one who met Eileen Ivers several years ago and had the dream of having her family play the Irish fiddle. Their Web site is http://www.martinfamilyband.net/

Although the music was primarily Irish traditional, the talented group also added a little Appalachian bluegrass and a few French-Canadian reels. They had the enthusiastic audience clapping away on several numbers.

Having been the emcee and entertainment selector for this event over the past umpteen years, I was amazed at the overwhelmingly positive reaction to the group. What was amazing was the number of people who have attended several of these concerts, exclaiming, “the best act yet.” In fact, the reaction was so positive that we signed them on the spot for nest year’s concert which will be on October 10, 2009.

In addition to the fiddles, guitar and drums, the group also played bagpipes, mandolin, concertina, whistles, and the bones.
The show was emceed by Tom Slattery, who also turned storyteller to open each half.

After the show, and included in the price, there was a reception which included Celtic baked goods, and coffee, tea and cider, as well as the opportunity to visit with the entertainers and to view parts of the Celtic Collection which were on display.

Luckily we have cornered the market on top shelf bakers with Grace and Ellen making Irish soda bread, Bill doing Welsh cookies, and Jinny baking Cornish cookies. We would like to get someone who bakes Scottish rock buns to fill out the Celtic theme. Any volunteers?

October 22, 2008 by