Even Hannah couldn’t hold it back. Rain and wind put a damper on the festivities Saturday, but judging by the crowds (and the cars backed up onto 29), they made up for lost time on Sunday in a big way.
Here are some of the highlights.
Browsing Tag
Festivals
Singers Terry Kane and Rosaleen McGill are on the bill for the 34th annual Philadelphia Ceili Group music festival.
Tony DeMarco.
As far as I’m concerned, you don’t get much more Irish than that. Sure, his Dad was Italian, but the part-Irish DeMarco (his mom’s a Dempsey) is one of the finest practitioners of the so-called Sligo style of fiddling. It’s bouncy, intricate (musicians call it ornamentation), and you can’t keep your foot still for love nor money.
DeMarco, who recently produced his first CD, will be challenging you to stay in your seat on Friday night , September 12, when he performs during the 34th Annual Philadelphia Ceili Group Irish Music and Dance Festival, held at the Irish Center in Mt. Airy. The three-day event is a musical must-see for anyone interested in traditional Irish music and dance–in fact, for anyone with an interest in real folk music.
It kicks off with one of the best additions in recent years—Thursday’s Irish Circle of Song, featuring local singers Rosaleen McGill, Matt Ward, Kathy DeAngelo, Eugenia Brennan, and Terry Kane. Also joining them on stage will be Brian Hart, the only American ever to win an All-Ireland title for singing at the Irish Fleadh Cheoil, and Canadian sean nos (old time) singer Catherine Crowe, who also usually brings her handmade jewelry to sell.
If you really, truly can’t keep your feet still during Tony DeMarco’s performance on Friday, or it gives you a case of the restless legs, head into the Irish Center’s Big Ballroom where you can kick up your heels to Danny Flynn’s The Bog Wanderers, a topnotch ceili band from Maryland. The Washington Post called their first CD “consistently enjoyable.”
On Saturday, the doors open at noon to one jam-packed day, tailor-made for the multi-tasker. There are workshops in fiddle, accordian, bodhran pipes, sean nos singing, and step-dancing from noon to 2 PM in the Ballroom. There’s a tin whistle workshop followed by a pipes, flutes and whistles concert so everyone can show off what they learned.
In the Ballroom, what’s billed as a “continuous killer ceili” will keep you moving and grooving from 2 to 10 PM , followed, if you have the energy or are still living, by a traditional Irish House Party (a dance so called because it was traditionally held in someone’s home, with the furniture pushed against the walls to create a dance floor) with set and figure dancing to live music.
On the Fireside and John Kelly Stages, there will be concurrent performances, from 2 PM to 10 PM, by a variety of performers. They include the father-son team of Kevin and Jimmy McGillian, brother and sisters John, Judy, and Eugenia Brennan, Brendan Callahan, Sean McComiskey, Fintan Malone of Blarney, Tom O’Malley, Caitlin Finley, Dennis Gormley, Kathy DeAngelo, Tony DeMarco, Danny Flynn,The Bog Wanderers, Brian Hart, Jeremy Bingamen, Mary Malone, Paddy O’Neill, Matt Ward, Matt Heaton, Brendan Mulvihill, Kieran Jordan, Tim Britton, McDermott’s Handy, Catherine Crowe, Rosaleen McGill, Terry Kane, Tim Hill, and more. All are welcome to stay for the Open Music and Song Jam Session (seisiún in Irish) until the wee hours!
But if your bent is more the spoken word, at 6 PM there will be a presentation by, well,you, if you want to read or recite a piece of poetry and prose. Festival director Frank Malley says he’ll “tell a story to start it off, then call on one, then another and another for about an hour to recite, read poetry, or tell stories.”
Local Irishspeaker, Tom Cahill, will recite in Irish, then translate into English.
All-festival tickets are $35. Individual tickets cost $12 for Thursday’s Irish Circle of Song, $15 for Friday’s Tony DeMarco Concert and The Bog Wanderers; and $20 for Saturday’s musical extravaganza.
Check out some of last year’s photos here.
Here’s where you can buy tickets.
And here’s why I love Tony DeMarco’s music so much. Listen to tracks from his new CD here.
This is why I can’t get enough of Terry Kane’s angelic voice. Listen to clips from her CD here.
By Michael Bradley
The 10th Annual Philadelphia Irish Festival @ Penn’s Landing was held on Sunday June 22nd. We had huge crowds in attendance as we attempted to revive this sleeping giant of an event. We had great weather, great crowds, and quite a bit of fun, dancing, singing, and plenty of music. And of course, Penn’s Landing is such a great venues to hold an event like this.
The music was headlined by Blackthorn. Others performing were:
Paddy’s Well, Round Tower Band, and new this year, Traditional Music by the musicians from the Irish Center.
The singing was ably performed by my old buddy Timmy Kelly.
The Irish Dance groups who performed were:
Celtic Flame, Cara, Coyle, Cummins, Rince Ri, Timoney, McDade, and McHugh School’s of Irish Dance.
A few nights after the festival I had the great opportunity and pleasure of going out to dinner with the Grand Lady of Irish Dance, Rose Marie Timoney. I spent the entire evening picking Rose Marie’s brain to learn everything I can about the Dance schools from an instructors perspective. I can tell you from my meeting with her, I know I can do a better job not only with the Festival and Phillies Irish Night, but most importantly with the Philadelphia St. Patrick’s Day Parade. It is always critical to get expert advice from someone when you are not too familiar with all their problems and expectations, and to get advice from the very best, is invaluable to me. Thanks Rose Marie !!
Sponsors were Penn’s Landing, Blue Cross, PECO, and for the first time this year Tom Breinich from Guinness. John Dougherty and Local 98 sponsored the kid’s zone which was non-stop action. How can we ever thank Marty Farrell of Muller Beverage and Miller Lite for their unwavering support of Irish Events in Philadelphia?
I was honored to present awards for Man and Woman of the year to 2 individuals who have done outstanding volunteer work in the Irish Community: Seamus Boyle currently running for National AOH President, and CBS3 Anchor, Susan Barnett.
I had the opportunity to chat quite a while with PA Attorney General Tom Corbett about the Parade and the needs of the Irish Community and was quite happy with the results of our conversation. Tom told me that although he is from the wrong end of the State in Pittsburgh, he was born here in Philadelphia and originally from Overbrook and Lady of Lourdes Parish. I introduced Tom to the crowd and he said how happy he was that he stopped by and pledged support to our community if re-elected in November.
I’d like to thank Mike Driscoll for his guidance and advice. Also Susan Canavan from Finnigan’s Wake did a fantastic job with all the venders. I’d also like to thank the wonderful people of Penn’s Landing Corporation for all their help. They are an absolute pleasure to work with.
I hope we can all pull together next year to make this the best Irish festival ever!
Thanks again for the support, enjoy your summer!
Paul Moore pours it on.
Exactly how Irish are you?
In North Wildwood, it came down to a true test of loyalty.
On stage in the main music tent at the annual Cape May County AOH Irish Fall Festival, Paul Moore and Paddy’s Well were pounding out all the standards. As usual, they sounded pretty wonderful.
At the same time, the Eagles game was playing on a big screen off in a corner. You know, the thrilling blowout in which the Birds smacked the Lions around and sent them mewling like cowed little kittens back to Detroit?
Paddy’s Well or the Eagles? Irish music or football? Hmmmmmmmmm ….
Seriously? It was no contest. I won’t pretend that some people weren’t paying attention to the on-field heroics of Donovan McNabb and company. (And what was with those nightmarish uniforms? They looked like Mr. Blackwell’s LSD nightmare.) But it was way too hard to resist Moore’s bunch. So hardly anyone bothered. Instead, they crowded ‘round the stage, slurped their beers, sang along, and danced. I seem to remember a lot of unrestrained smiling, too.
Sunday was also the day of the big festival parade, this year with young singer Timmy Kelly as the grand marshal, along with a visit by those imposing feathery-hooved Budweiser Clydesales. With temps in the mid-80s, a cool offshore breeze and a brilliant blue sky, it was pretty much perfect parade-watching weather. So Surf Avenue was lined with kids and grannies, all decked out in their neon green fuzzy hats and shamrock-shaped sunglasses, and all of them obviously enjoying the pipe bands, the multiple leprechauns, and one of the last, best days at the shore.
Weren’t there? (Watching the game??? What kind of Mick are you?)
Check out our photos.
Lunasa's Kevin Crawford gets crazy with his bodhran.
At one point on Saturday night, Dennis Gormley, fiddling with the mike on the Fireside Stage at Philly’s Irish Center, leaned over and expressed his thanks to the Philadelphia Ceili Group and its Irish Music Festival director Frank Malley for “throwing this great party.”
“And inviting all our friends,” added his wife, Kathy DeAngelo, from behind her harp.
The duo, who have been performing as McDermott’s Handy for nearly three decades, could look out at the audience and see rows of familiar faces. But even if you didn’t know a soul, you would have thought you were among your closest friends at an intimate little party for hundreds. That’s the atmosphere of the Philadelphia Ceili Group’s annual Irish Festival, which ran for five days from September5-9.
You could have mingled with legends.
If you had stayed late on Friday night, for example, after the performance by the incredible Irish group, Lunasa, you could have shared a pizza with the band and piper Tim Britton, a former Delaware Valley resident, who opened for them.
On Saturday, you might have been in the food line behind the towering form of Breanndan Begley, the Kerryman who had just mesmerized the crowd with his emotional singing. Or struck up a conversation with Sligo-born Kevin Henry, a venerable flutist and piper, now of Chicago, who wasn’t going to have a bite until he found “herself”–his wife, who was somewhere in the crowd.
If you hadn’t brought your own dance partner for Irish radio personality Marianne MacDonald’s House Party on Saturday night, you didn’t have to worry about being a wallflower. Someone could be convinced to dance a set or two with you–or even teach you the steps in the hall. It might have been Ed Reavy, son of the legendary fiddler, who, with his wife, Mary, are the Fred and Ginger of Irish set dancing.
And you could have seen four-time all Ireland fiddler Brendan Callahan perform superhumanly, fiddling for the Irish dancers, playing with a trio, sitting in on sessions. . .admitting only once on Saturday night that he might be “a little tired.”
The 31st festival opened on Wednesday night with an evening of poetry and prose, read by local Irish literary lights including Father John McNamee, pastor of St. Malachy’s Parish in North Philadelphia and the author of four books, and his friend, Father Michael Doyle of Sacred Heart Parish in Camden, NJ, author of the book, “It’s a Terrible Day, Thanks Be to God.” On Thursday, local singers including Terry Kane, Rosaleen McGill, Eugenia Brennan, Sharon Sachs, and John Winward, joined Canadian sean nos singer Catherine Crow and, from the Midwest, Brian Hart, the 28-year-old singer and dancer who is the only American ever to win an All-Ireland title for singing at the Irish Fleadh Cheoil for the Circle of Song.
The festival ended with a set dance event on Sunday.
We were there for mostly everything, as these photos will prove. If you couldn’t make it this year, mark it on your calendar for next year. It’s a party, and everyone is invited.
Relive the festivities here:
Genna Gillespie of Burning Bridget Cleary
There was Nessie, or an apparently benign and far less camera-shy version of the legendary Loch Ness Monster, afloat on the appropriately greenish Green Lane Reservoir. In a grove just off the lake, Highland dancers and Irish dancers took turns on a makeshift stage. In a nearby field, kilt-clad athletes risked sunstroke and hernias as they attempted to toss the caber—something like a telephone pole. And from across the reservoir rose the sound of the pipes and, farther off, fiddles. (Oh yes, and the heavy, oily tang of frying fish and chips.)
This was the last day of the Green Lane Scottish-Irish Festival, a perfect sun-drenched finish to three days of Celtic merry-making in Upper Montgomery County. It’s hard to imagine a better end to the annual gathering of the area’s many clans.
If you missed it, no worries. We’ve got the photos:
Members of the Cass Township AOH take Finnegan to his final resting place.
By Tom Slattery
If you’re like many Philadelphians, your forefathers came from the coal regions of Schuylkill County to escape the mines. If you’re a descendant of a miner–or a Molly Maguire–I may have seen you a few weeks ago in Heckshersville for the 20th annual Clover Fire Company Irish Festival. Every year at the end of July, descendants of Irish coal miners from the five-county Philly area come to this remote valley (where cell phones are useless unless they have an extendable antenna) to celebrate their heritage.
Heckshersville is a town so small (how small is it?) that it doesn’t have a post office and the name on the highway sign is spelled one way entering from the east and another if you’re coming in from the west. Remote, yes. Small, yes. But one of the friendliest places to spend a weekend, whether camping out or staying in one of the nearby (10-15 miles) motels ($50 including continental breakfast).
The festival starts Friday night with a concert and runs from 1 PM both Saturday and Sunday. No matter who else is performing, you can always count on seeing the Irish Balladeers and the Irish Lads, local groups that have been playing Irish traditional music for over 25 years (actually the Balladeers are closing in on 40 years). This year, the Balladeers played to an overflow crowd, lounging in beach chairs under a huge canopy, and they kept it going from 1PM to 6PM on Saturday with breaks featuring Irish dancers, awards ceremonies, and a Finnegan’s Wake put on by the Cass Township AOH. What an afternoon! Hearing “The Sons of Molly Maguire” sung by the group that wrote it was worth the price of admission ($4).
Then there was the Wake! Jaysus, you never heard so much keenin’ and yowling in your life, and such accolades heaped on the well-dressed figure in the coffin. Actually he looked much better than he did in his life, bum that he was. All this and they were only able to collect $1.81 to help defray the funeral expenses, an amount so small that the “priest” pocketed it himself.
Birnam Wood, a Celtic Rock group from New Jersey, closed out the evening. There was plenty of “picnic” food available – hot dogs, hamburgers, French fries, colcannon, bleenies – water, sodas, a lots of sudsy stuff at $1.25 a glass and $6 a pitcher. A man has got to be very careful, ‘cause for less than $10 them mountain roads can become mighty curvy. They’re that way even before you imbibe. Best to have a designated driver, a position well respected in this remote area.
On Sunday they serve an Irish breakfast from 7AM and then around 11AM there is a parade to the old St. Kiernan’s Church for an Irish Mass. Charlie Zahm, one of the Philadelphia area’s best known Celtic singers, entertained the crowd from 1PM until 4PM. Then another Wake! Somebody shoot the keeners, please.
Then, as they have since the Festival started 20 years ago, the Irish Lads closed out the entertainment. They were scheduled from 4 to 8, but about 5:15 the mighty rumbles started, and the weather Heckshersille had escaped all weekend announced its arrival in no uncertain terms – boom ditty boom boom. Of course, the Irish Lads said there was nothing to worry about, that is, until the third time lightning took out the sound system.
I just managed to load my car as the rains started. I pondered having a few with some friends. However, the idea of a fully loaded down Lincoln Town Car getting stuck in what quickly would become a swamp, unpondered me quickly, and wasn’t I but two miles down the road when the torrents started. Boy, somebody must have really ticked Him off, because He must have had the whole holy crowd throwing down bucketsful. Ah, but I will be back there next year on the last weekend in July – back to one of the friendliest festivals around, listening to great music, eating food guaranteed to keep you from blowing away and hearing the stories of life in the mines.
Reilly Ann and Poppy
The first person I ran into at the Ancient Order of Hibernians Irish Festival along in St. Michael Park in Mont Clare was an old friend, Verne Leedom, former pipe major for Irish Thunder Pipes and Drums.
Possibly the very next person I ran into was Verne’s granddaughter Reilly Ann.
Not long after that, I bumped into Sean Leedom, Verne’s son, near the horseshoe pits.
I was beginning to think that everybody at the festival on Saturday was a member of the Leedom family.
Not true, though. A hundred or so sun-shy Celts hunkered down in the shade of the picnic pavilion or browsed for Irish jewelry, hats, bumper stickers and other Hibernian tchochkes in the vendors’ tents. Most of the festival-goers, it turned out, actually belonged to other families.
That was the coolest part of an otherwise sweltering day—that so many families turned out for a day along the banks of the Schuylkill, just across the river from Phoenixville. From where I sat—at a picnic table, munching a sausage-and-pepper sandwich on a crusty Conshohocken roll and sipping an ice-cold Coke—it looked like they were having a great time.
Earlier in the day, Irish Thunder Pipes and Drums had performed, and Oliver McElhone as well. By the time I arrived, at mid-afternoon, Fisher and Maher were tearing up the place with a performance of Irish traditional music that was as hot as the day.
Emma Hanson Not long after they left the stage, Burning Bridget Cleary—two fiddlers and a guitarist from the Lehigh Valley—jacked up the energy level even more. (They’d confessed to having consumed large cups of iced coffee before arriving on the Festival grounds. But I heard them at the Valley Forge Scottish-Irish Festival in February. If that performance was any indication, coffee has nothing to do with it. They chug along just fine on their own inexhaustible energy source.)
A little later on, a bevy of Coyle school dancers also entertained the crowd with some high stepping to match their spirits.
For those who weren’t up for high-octane Irish music or dance, there was plenty of lazy summertime slacking off to do. The horseshoe pit, for example, was a pretty popular destination. So were the picnic tables nestled among a nearby stand of trees, where people nursed icy beers and quietly chatted.
Irish weather? No. But still, a great start to the summer for Philadelphia’s Irish.