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A Cinderella Story

If his mother hadn’t been visiting from Ireland and sitting right there right next to me, sipping tea at Starbucks in Chestnut Hill, I’m not sure I would have believed Enda Keegan’s Cinderella story.

“Oh it’s true,” Mavis Keegan assured me.

And it starts like this: Once upon a time, a young high school dropout who picked cabbage on a farm during the day and played music in bars at night was asked by his mother’s employers to come to their home and perform for their American guests. “My mother was a chef at Castleton House, a private house in Kilkenny, where I worked as a waiter sometimes from the time I was 12 or 13,” explains Keegan, a contemporary folksinger and songwriter who recently moved from New York to Philadelphia. Mavis nods.

He was 17 at the time. The guests, James Vankennen and his wife, Gloria Ozbourne, were in their 70s. Everyone was having a brilliant time when Vankennen suddenly asked the young man if he’d like to go to college in the States. “I said ‘sure, send me a ticket,’” recalls Keegan with a grin. He’d thought it was just an offhand comment, made in the cheer of the moment.

But the next morning, Vankennen reiterated the offer. Keegan would be the second total stranger that the Vankennens would send to college. But there was a hitch. Keegan hadn’t finished high school—to the consternation of his parents—so he assumed no college would have him. A few months passed, then 10 days after Christmas, Keegan got a letter from the Shenandoah Conservatory of Music in Virginia. He was to report to classes the following Monday.

“So I was literally working on a farm picking cabbages on a Thursday and going to college on Monday,” says Keegan. “It changed my life overnight.” Today, Keegan, who performs regularly in New York, is working on a second CD to follow his first, The Bridge, a polished mix of contemporary folk-rock tunes he composed and traditional tunes including “The Water is Wide” and “Mary and the Soldier.” He moved to Philadelphia in November so his wife, Anitra, didn’t have to commute so far to her job—she’s a dancer with BalletX which performs at the Wilma Theater in Center City.

Keegan’s life had started to change when he was 10. His father, Peter, a fine baritone singer, bought him a guitar and the young Enda, the youngest of six children, taught himself to play. By the time he reached his teens, he was playing regularly in pubs and performing with the Carrick on Suir Operatic Society. But school. . .well, that was another matter.

His mother takes over the telling of that story. “I blame the Christian Brothers,” she tells me. And no, it’s not what you think. “They wouldn’t put him in the music class,” she says. “I think he would have studied everything else if he had been allowed to take music. They had a talent show for the students and guess who won it?” She nods toward her son, who appears a little alarmed at what she might say next. “He won 20 pounds, but I went back to the brother and told him to keep it. Why would they give him money for his music when they wouldn’t allow him in the class?”

“You did that?” asks Enda, clearly surprised.

“I did,” she says with a nod.

It all worked out in the end, with the help of Keegan’s fairy godparents. Of course, there were some detours. His first job out of college, where he earned a bachelor of fine arts and studied musical theater, was as a Christmas elf at Macy’s in New York City. He followed that with a stint as a “spray boy”—cologne terrorist, if you will—for Ralph Lauren. Then he worked for BMG Records in the department “on those annoying ads, ‘buy one CD, get 700 free’,” he says. (The young woman trying to work at the next table at Starbucks is shaking her head. “I’m never going to get anything done because you’re making me laugh,” she tells him.)

Eventually, he became lead singer of a group called SurreyLane, which toured the US, had a top 100 hit on the adult contemporary charts and got airplay for a 9/11 tribute song, “Love Must Grow.” In 2005, Keegan left the group to go solo. “If you’re going to be a performer, and it’s not always easy, you gotta love it, and I wasn’t loving it,” he explains.
He’s still commuting to New York to perform several nights a week at three different venues. A couple of years ago, he was hired by “American Idol” to play during the coast-to-coast audition tour during which they winnow out the thousands of hopefuls not talented or terrible enough to make the cut. Last year, he opened for Finbar Furey at O’Hurley’s in New York and produced a benefit for the NYPD Widows and Children fund featuring the Bagatelles, the Irish band headed by Liam Reilly that influenced Keegan and that other Irish singer, Bono, and whose tunes, like “Summer in Dublin” and “Second Violin,” fill the play lists of most Irish groups even 30 years after they debuted.

Keegan would like to become that established in his new city too. “I love the challenge of taking it on,” he says.

He’s gotten some help from John Byrne, a Dublin native and former helmsman of the popular local Celtic-folk group, Patrick’s Head, with whom he performed at Fergie’s Pub in the city. He’ll be fronting when Byrne, now lead singer for the John Byrne Group, holds his CD release party at World Café Live next month. “John’s an extremely talented musician and he’s been very good to me,” says Keegan. In fact, he owes next Wednesday’s gig at Slainte at 30th and Market to Byrne, who anchors the session there.

Keegan’s also working on his second CD with LA music producer Peter Stengaard, who has produced and worked with artists as varied as Ashanti, Billy Ray Cyrus, Peabo Bryson, and Joss Stone as well as songwriters Diane Warren and Carol Bayer Sager. About Keegan, Stengaard says, “Enda is a rare talent, one of those unpolished diamonds you quickly realize you need not polish because it’s already shining.”

You can hear how he shines at his website. And you can see him in person on Wednesday, starting at 9 PM, at Slainte, at 30th and Market, across the street from 30th Street Station.

January 22, 2010 by
Music

Cherish The Ladies’ Newest Lady: County Cork Singer Michelle Burke

Cherish the Ladies' Michelle Burke.

Cherish the Ladies' Michelle Burke.

Ahhh, timing…in the words attributed to that mighty poet of ancient Greece, Hesiod, “Observe due measure, for right timing is in all things the most important factor.”

Believe it, because Michelle Burke is living proof of the power of good timing.

I first stumbled across Michelle Burke quite by accident, while surfing MySpace about a year and a half ago. I stopped to listen to the tracks she had put up on her page, and stayed to replay her hauntingly haunting version of the traditional ballad “Molly Bawn.” And, so while I was sitting around waiting for what seemed an eternity for her debut solo CD, “Pulling Threads,” to be released, Michelle was keeping quite busy being the new girl singer with the Irish-American group, Cherish the Ladies.

“In early 2008, around the same time I was recording my CD, I heard that Cherish the Ladies was looking for a new singer. I knew Kathleen Boyle (the group’s piano player), and so I decided to submit some tracks. I sent [group leader] Joannie Madden ‘Where Are You Tonight?’ and ‘I Shall Be Released.'” The next thing were some trial concerts, and then the word that the job was hers.

Growing up in rural County Cork (the nearest village was 4 miles away), Michelle was surrounded by music. “My father, Michael, played weddings and dinner dances and I would go with him. I remember I sang in my first competition when I was 7. I sang the song ‘Foggy Dew’ and I was wearing a blue dress,” Michelle laughed. “The local secondary school I went to just happened to be a great one for music; it was just a coincidence. There was a big choir there, and it was great experience.”

From there, Michelle decided to go on to the music program at University College Cork, initially with the intent of studying piano. “I didn’t know what else I could do, besides music. My mother thought I was stone mad! I switched over to singing, and did everything from medieval singing to classical to sean-nos[old-time singing]. I realized that singing the classical music wasn’t for me, but then I was lucky to be able to study the sean nos tradition with Iarla Ó Lionaird and Eilis Ni Shuilleabhain. UCC has a big emphasis on traditional music, and I began to appreciate that I could focus on singing the type of songs that I enjoyed.”

Michelle followed that up with a year at The University of Limerick doing a new course on traditional music. She returned to Cork and started teaching music to young students. After a few years, the sense of “What am I doing?” hit, and Michelle decided to join some friends in a move to Edinburgh.

“There’s a big music scene there, but I still wasn’t sure what direction I was going to go. I became involved in community projects, working at drop-in centers with teens who might not have the opportunity to study music otherwise. There would be 10 weeks of workshops, and then they’d record a demo CD.”

Meanwhile, there were singing gigs, opportunities for Michelle to find her style and develop her voice. “I didn’t have a lot of confidence before that, so it became a big achievement personally. Singing became something I got a lot of satisfaction out of.”

And then the time was right to record that CD. The mix of songs showcases her diverse tastes and talents. From Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released” to Tom Waits “Broken Bicycles.” From Sandy Wright’s “Hey Mama” to Chris Stuart’s “Springhill Mine.”

“I decided to record songs that I wanted to sing…I went for it. I knew I had to sing ‘I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen.’ It’s a song my granny used to sing to my Aunt Kathleen, and my granny passed away two years ago; she used to go to all the gigs. We recorded it in one take…I couldn’t stop crying.”

“I included the song ‘I Will be Stronger than That;” it’s been recorded by Faith Hill and Maura O’Connell. Maura has been one of my biggest influences.As a teenager I used to listen to her all the time. It was such an honor to actually get to sing with her…she’s such a great storyteller and, she’s just fantastic.”

So, back to this timing thing: In addition to having “Pulling Threads” out, Cherish the Ladies has just released its latest CD, “A Star in the East,” an album of Christmas songs. It’s Michelle’s debut recording with the group. They’re finishing up their latest tour on December 23, but it will pick up again in January. And come, March 4, 2010, they’ll be back in the area to play The Grand Opera House in Wilmington, DE.

December 17, 2009 by
Music

Michael Londra: Late Bloomer, Rising Star

Michael Londra

Michael Londra

Michael Londra never really had a chance. He grew up in Wexford, home of the Wexford Opera Festival and the Wexford Opera House. Singing was going to be his life whether he liked it or not.

“I kind of grew up singing,” says the tenor, who is bringing his Christmas show, “Celtic Yuletide,” along with his new holiday CD, “Beyond the Star,” to the Sellersville Theatre on December 15. “Wexford is such a big opera town that there’s now a culture of singing and I come from one of the singing families. I always sang, whether I wanted to or not. It was forced upon me.”

But he didn’t become a professional singer until he was 31, “after my friends staged an intervention,” he jokes, as we chat on the phone. “I never believed I could earn a living as a singer. Irish people tend not to believe in themselves so I needed the encouragement.”

His first career: a behavioral therapist, working with teens in trouble. He concedes that it might have been good training for show business. “Though you’re dealing with different types of behavior, equally socially unacceptable.”

Once you’ve heard him sing, you’ll wonder, as his friends likely did, why he was hiding that particular light; it shines so bright. One reviewer called him “one of the top Irish singers of our time.” Another, referring to counter-tenor Londra’s ability to hit notes so high he’d leave some mezzo-sopranos in the dust, wrote: “When he hits the high notes on ‘The Wexford Carol,’ make sure your good holiday champagne glasses don’t shatter, as he puts castrati to further shame.”

When “Riverdance” composer Bill Whelan heard Londra in a musical about John F. Kennedy (he played RFK and claims to do a more than passing “full-on posh” Boston accent), he offered him the lead role in the Broadway production of the “Riverdance,” the high-profile play that turned Irish music and dance into a modern-day phenomenon.

In 2005, Londra recorded his first CD, “Celt,” a five-star favorite on www.amazon.com. The first track—“Danny Boy”—was another of those things he had to be talked into. “I really didn’t want to record it,” he says. “It’s been done to death, murdered by bad cabaret singers all over the world. But it came out very nice.”

So nice that the Irish Emigrant newspaper called it “one of the best recordings of Danny Boy in history,” and two million people have listened to it on YouTube.

Like “Celt,” Londra’s Christmas recording combines old and traditional tunes with more contemporary and some original songs, like the eponymous “Beyond the Star.” It wasn’t something that had to be forced on him. “I love singing the old Christmas songs, though I recorded it in New York over the summer. You can’t imaging what it’s like singing Christmas carols in 100 degree weather in July,” he says laughing.

His producer is Steve Skinner, who co-produced the Grammy-nominated soundtrack for “Rent,” and works with Celine Dion and Bette Midler. “I’ve been very blessed to be able to work with him,” Londra says. “In 2001, I knocked on his door and said, ‘I’d like to work with you,’ and he laughed at me and told me to get in line. But I was persistent. He heard me sing and finally said, ‘OK.’ I sang at his wedding so I’m a part of the family whether he likes it or not.”

When you get Michael Londra you also get what he calls “the core of my being,” the Irish charity “Concern Worldwide.” Part of the proceeds from his Christmas album will go to helping the people of La Gonave, a small island off the coast of Haiti and an hour and a half away from Miami, where there is little vegetation, no electricity or clean water, and 100,000 people living in abject poverty. He’s been there five times and with the Christmas CD, there’s a DVD of one of his visits.

“I’m not Bono. I’m not going to raise millions,” he says. “But I have to do something. This is our next door neighbor, and it makes me so angry.”

When he says “our,” he’s referring to the US, where he now lives (in Chicago “which I absolutely love—when I’m there.”) It’s rare, he says, for Wexford people to emigrate. “I’m the only one of my family and school friends who has,” he notes. “I was talking to Larry Kirwan of Black 47 [a New York-based Irish hard rock band] who is also from Wexford and we decided we were the only two people from Wexford living in the States.”

Though they’re friendly, don’t expect Londra to be performing with Black 47 any time soon. You can imagine his blue eyes twinkling as he observes that it would be like “AC/DC and Clay Aiken singing together.”

You’d be better off catching Londra with the group of Irish musicians and dancers he’s bringing to the state in Sellersville on Tuesday, December 15. The show starts at 8 PM and tickets are $35 which you can order by calling 215-257-5808 or on the theater website.

And if you sign up for our weekly newsletter, Mick Mail, or pass your latest issue on to someone else, you’ll be entered in a contest to win two free tickets to Michael’s show.

You next chance to hear him is on Christmas Day on Fox 29–he’s heading down there on Monday to appear on a show called “Christmas Glee.”

December 10, 2009 by
Music

Five Questions for Seamus Begley

Perhaps the first thing you should know about Kerry accordion player Seamus Begley, featured performer in the Irish Christmas in America show coming to Penn’s Annenberg Center, is that he was never a truck driver in Chicago. It’s all a load of bull, he says. He’s not sure where the false factoid got its start, but it is often repeated and reprinted, and it’s always wrong.

Yes, he was in Chicago in 1976, but he played music with the likes of Liz Carroll and never once got behind the wheel of a semi.

Many other things about Begley are true. He’s one of the most acclaimed box players on the planet, he’s a well-known story teller, he grew up in West Kerry. He’s been a frequent musical collaborator with the likes of Aussie guitarist Stephen Cooney and West Cork guitarist Jim Murray.

His latest collaboration is with the lads of the great Irish traditional group Teada, currently touring the United States with the Christmas show. (Karan Casey and Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh previously were featured performers in memorable shows at the Philadelphia Irish Center.)

This year, Irish Christmas in America touches down at Annenberg Friday, December 11, at 8 p.m. (Click here for tickets.) With Begley at center stage, you’re bound to get your Christmas season off to a merry start. We caught up with Begley a few days ago, for a few minutes of rushed conversation over a terrible connection (like someone crunching corn flakes next to your ear) before the show was about to open in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Here’s what he had to say.

Q. Is this your first tour with Teada?

A. It’s my first tour with this gang, yeah. I never played a serious gig like this before.

Q. You’ve done a lot of collaborating. Is it something you like to do, or is it the nature of the beast that a single instrumentalist must seek out collaborators?

A. I like doing different things, playing with different talent. It’s different from playing the good old Kerry slide, you know. I like learning new songs and new ways to do things.

Q. Did you need to add to your repertoire much for this show? Christmas tunes?

A. Most of the things I already knew. We’ll be playing reels, jigs, slides, all of them, all these tunes we know. A lot of them are Christmas titles.

Q. Why did you take up accordion? With your father a player, it seems like you perhaps had no choice, or that it was somehow preordained.

A. Everyone in the house had to learn accordion and play for the ceilis. We loved it anyway, there was nothing else to do. It was probably pissing down rain outside.

Q. You’re from Dingle, West Kerry. How does being from there influence the way you play? More polkas and slides? How else?

A. I learned to play for dancers. Most of my music would be for dancing. It’s a bit odd for me to be playing for people who are sitting down. It’s easier for me to play for dancers. It’s simple music played by simple people.

Editor’s happy little note: We have two pairs of tickets to give away. Want to try to win them? Do one of two things by midnight on Friday: Sign up to receive Irish Philly Mickmail or forward Mickmail to a friend. Good luck!

December 3, 2009 by
Music

Guitar Hero

It’s been said that John Doyle is the busiest man in Irish music. Given that he’s just come off a tour with Joan Baez, we’ll have to amend that description and just say he might be the busiest man in music of any kind—period.

Watch Doyle when he’s playing his guitar—even when he’s sitting down—and what you see is a man incapable of inertia, his head and shoulders rocking like a metronome needle.

Doyle rocketed to fame as one of the founders of the super group Solas, and his driving rhythms and helped give the band its signature sound.

Since Solas, Doyle has formed many artistic alliances, including his brilliant pairing with Liz Carroll. He’s much in demand as producer as well, his influence felt on Heidi Talbot’s “Distant Future,” Michael Black’s brilliant eponymous debut recording and many others. (He also produced his father Sean Doyle’s CD, “The Light and the Half Light.”) He’s become everybody’s first string.

That very busy and talented man is about to visit the Philadelphia area, performing in a special Christmas show with headliner Mick Moloney and fiddler Athena Tergis at the Shanachie Pub, 111 E. Butler Ave. in Ambler, Thursday, December 4. The show starts at 9 p.m.

When I caught up with him—or maybe he caught up with me—he was on his cell phone in an airport bookstore somewhere in America, with minutes to go before boarding. I was in my car in Center City and running late for the curly wig-a-thon that is the Mid-Atlantic Oireachtas. I pulled over on Spring Garden Street, yanked out the laptop and discovered that I had just 22 minutes left on the battery. We’d been playing phone and e-mail tag for a few days. It was now or never. With traffic whizzing by me and John occasionally stopping to chat with the bookstore clerk, we squeezed in a few questions.

Q. Tell us first about the performance. I believe it’s being recorded. How did this particular gig, and the three of you, come together?

A. Mick and I have been playing together since ‘91 or ‘92. He’s been a force [in Irish music] for years. Mick and Athena have played together for four or five years. We wanted to do a kind of small gig for a different kind of a kind of feel. These actual particular gigs are Christmas gigs—we’re doing a whole weekend of them in New York and one in Philly. Of course, well be doing some Christmas stuff, like “The Wexford Carol” and “The Holly and The Ivy.” I’ve got a few tunes I wrote. We’ll do [John McCutcheon ‘s] “Christmas in the Trenches” and “The Bushes of Jerusalem” by Tommy Sands.

But it’ll be a mix between Christmas, my songs and Mick’s—a bunch of Mick’s songs from an earlier tradition, when he was still in London—and Athena’s. It’ll include some tunes that he and I and Athena have written over the last couple of years.

Q. Why is this one being recorded?
A. We’re going to try and make a CD out of this. Were just doing it to see how it works.

Q. You’ve played with both before, including “Absolutely Irish.” On the CD, it seemed like that booming bass line was on every track. Not everyone played nearly as much. Why was that?

A. Every person on that concert and I had played with together. I knew everyone’s material. [Laughs.] So it was kind of a no-brainer at the time.

Q. Talk to me about your playing style. You seem to have found that sweet spot between the rhythmic and the melodic. How did it develop?

A. You can’t learn in a vacuum. [I was influenced by] Arty McGlynn, Daithi Sproule, Paul Brady and others. All of these great players affected me. They have a kind of half-melody half-rhythmic feel to their songs. But the rhythm is the most important thing at the end of the day.

Q. A lot of kids, if you gave them a guitar, would have wanted to be Eric Clapton. You went with Irish, Why?

A. All my family on one side or the other were involved in traditional music, it just seems like the thing to do I was drawn in that direction, my father and grandfather played accordion.

Q. I like what [the Philadelphia bass player] Chico Huff as said about you, that you never play the same thing twice through. I’m just curious as to why that is.

A. You have to make it interesting, not only for other people, but for yourself. If you don’t challenge yourself all the time, you’re going to get in a rut. [Also,] there’s a tone and a mood in tunes. If you’re playing the tunes, you want to do variations in them. And if someone does a variation, you should do a variation with them. You should emphasize emotions rather than just going with the flow.”

Q. You went the route of super groups for several years with Solas. Now, aside from your gig with Liz Carroll, it seems like you’ve accompanied everyone. What do you get out of that that you don’t being in a big group like Solas?

A. Well, I love playing with the bands and it’s really fun. I miss that sometimes. [But, when playing with others] you can be more interesting, and you can do more variations, you don’t have to be hooked up to a particular arrangement. It’s also easier to travel with.

With Liz, she’s one of the best players and writers in the world so it’s really easy to come up with stuff.

Q. And you’ve produced a lot as well. What does that do for you?

A. A lot of it is to give back to people your experience over the years; how you would do things. As a person in a band you can get bogged down in your own stuff. You need someone to weed out what’s unnecessary and to get to the core of the stuff. It’s all of that stuff together. I love it.

November 29, 2009 by
People

Five Questions for a Woman of a Thousand (Or So) Voices

Hollis Payer in her other job--teaching Irish fiddle.

Hollis Payer in her other job--teaching Irish fiddle.

Whether it’s a straightforward, sunny commercial for Lifetime television or a local radio ad for Philly Phlash, the next voice you hear might be that of Hollis Payer.

Hollis is a well-known voiceover artist from the Philadelphia area, lending her well-toned vocal chords to many commercial enterprises.

But you’re also just as likely to hear another signature Hollis Payer sound—that of her Irish fiddle playing. Drop around the Philadelphia Irish Center on some nights, and you might hear the strains of Hollis’ fiddle music emanating from one of the Center’s side rooms.

We chatted with Hollis about both of her amazing talents.

1. You seem to be able to interpret the spoken characteristics of a lot of character types. I imagine you’ve been doing this kind of work for a while to be as accomplished as you are. Do you hear voices?

Do I hear voices? Not since the medication kicked in! The truth is: Yes! I hear voices, I hear music, I’m tuned into and pick up on all sorts of sounds. I’ve always loved language, poetry, words. As a child, I thought I was going to be a crack journalist, like yourself, but then I went to the University of Chicago and studied linguistics. And left there to work as an actor.

2. How did you get into voiceover work?

It was a different world when I first started on this path. I’d never really heard of voice work, but a friend who worked as a producer told me I should look into it. My initial response: “They pay people to do that?” The only person doing v-o’s in Philadelphia at that time was Scott Sanders… he still is, by the way, and is legend in this business… so I called him up and asked him for advice! Get a good demo and start shopping it around was what he said. So I did. I found an entree in the pharmaceutical world, which is very media intensive and requires attention to pronunciation. With my Catholic high school Latin, I was a natural!

3. The serious authoritative voice or the dotty grandma—which one do you prefer to do?

Serious sounding authority—especially when you suspect no one’s listening to you anyway—can get a bit tedious, don’t you think? I like making up character voices. I got to “voice” (yes, it’s become a verb now) a series of animated shows where I played a smart-alecky “science boy,” and recently was heard as a “prissy dog” for an animated commercial. My most favorite job was creating voices for several characters in a DVD series of fairy tales—that were packaged along with a wrist watch and sold at Walmart.

4. How long have you been playing Irish fiddle and how’d you get into it? (I know … sneaky two questions.)

My grandfather gave me a violin when I was 8 years old and I did the standard school orchestra instruction for several years, switching to the cello in high school just because they needed someone to do that! I didn’t really pick up the fiddle to play traditional Irish music until I heard the Chieftains in 1980. Boil the Breakfast Early had just come out and I’d never heard anything like it. It was an epiphany—I had to “get” that noise. I went to Ireland for the first time a few months later, hitching around with my fiddle and hanging out at sessions, pestering people to teach me tunes. I settled back in the states in Portland, Oregon and pestered Kevin Burke to teach me more, and thus began my pestering fiddle career.

5. How do your voiceover talents and your fiddle playing go together? What is there about you that wants to do both?

Both voice work and fiddle playing have been like gifts dropped into my lap. I thought I had talent, but I never imagined it would take either of these surprising forms. Deep listening is at the heart of both. As I said in response to your first question, I’ve always been acutely aware of the sounds of this world, am profoundly moved by words and music and have the crazy need to express all of this in some way.

October 23, 2009 by
Arts

Look Out! Irish Comedy Tour Heading This Way

Comic Pat Godwin was the song parody guy on the old Morning Zoo radio show in Philadelphia. (Not a mug shot.)

Comic Pat Godwin was the song parody guy on the old Morning Zoo radio show in Philadelphia. (Not a mug shot.)

Did you ever sit around with your Irish-American friends, cracking each other up with stories from your childhood? The crazy relatives. The wise-cracking relatives. The relatives who never met a mixed drink they didn’t like.

Pat Godwin and Derek Richards did, and even though they grew up in different Irish Catholic neighborhoods—Godwin in Wilkes-Barre, Richards in Detroit—they found they lived on common ground. “We all realized we had relatives with drinking problems—I know, go figure, who saw that coming?” quips Richards. “The funniest thing though was when we all realized we had mug shots. We’d all been arrested at some point. It was not like we’d ever hijacked an armored car, but we’d all been in the situation where we’d had too much booze with the wrong people.”

Then, they took this conversation on the road.

Godwin (you may remember him as the song parodist from the John DeBella Morning Zoo and later the Howard Stern radio shows) and Richards, along with Jim Paquette and Mike McCarthy are the comics that make up The Irish Comedy Tour (‘they’re Irish, they’re American, and they’re not holding back”). Godwin, Richards, and Paquette will be bringing it to the Sellersville Theatre on Sunday, October 25.

The four met on the comedy circuit, and one thing led to another. Listen to Richards and see if any of this sounds familiar:

“We were sharing stories over some Jameson and some beer and we started noticing a common thread in personal backgrounds. And I thought, can we take what we talk and joke about here and bring it to stage?”

They could. The Irish Comedy Tour started in 2005 as a one-off St, Paddy’s Day thing. This year, it’s taking its nose-bashing, (you have to check out their website to get that one) Irish-pubby sense of humor from Michigan to Key West. “It’s kind of like an Irish pub and comedy show that you put in a food processor,” says Richards, who was a semi-finalist in Comedy Central’s Open Mic Fight.

Paquette and Godwin are both musicians as well, so there are some tunes in that comedy Cuisinart too. “Pat does a hilarious song about the lack of birth control in the Irish community called ’13 Kids and Counting.’ He also does a version of ‘Black Velvet Band,’ with a comedic twist,” Richards says. (Few songs deserve it more.)

If you saw “Last Comic Standing,” you saw judge and “Cheers” alumn John Ratzenberger nearly swallow his mustache when contestant Godwin started singing that pre-K favorite, “Bingo (was His Name-O)” as Bono (“this is for all the dogs in shelters!”). “That was funny,” Ratzenberger said as Godwin left the stage.

In fact, Godwin started as a musician before he turned to stand-up and acting. “I was playing down at Smokey Joe’s at Penn and it was pretty clear what they wanted was cover songs and things they could sing to. But I was talking in between the songs, satirizing rock and roll stars and singing funny stuff, and that turned into my act. [Philadelphia comedian] Todd Glass saw me and suggested I do an open mike and that’s how I was hired to do the DeBella show.”

When the Morning Zoo was shuttered, Godwin turned to the guy who was to blame, Howard Stern, who hired him to churn out topical song parodies for his pre-satellite radio morning show. “I left there and moved to LA,” Godwin says. “I didn’t do any more songs. I had a few failed pilots, knocked around LA with my girlfriend at the time, wasn’t successful at much of anything. I failed in LA once as an actor at 18, then as a songwriter at 26, then again as a comedian. It’s LA 3, Pat Godwin, zero.”

But now he’s on the Irish Comedy Tour, and things couldn’t be better. Both he and Richards say this is the most fun they have all year. They get to reach deep back into their childhoods and bring up the funniest bits, even the ones that weren’t funny at the time.

“For me,” says Richards, “a lot of it is the sense of humor I grew up with. My grandfather was my biggest comedy influence. Growing up, down in the basement in my mother and father’s house, myself and my brother would listen to Dad and Grandpa trade the most wrong jokes ever. (Even though it’s an adult show, we won’t be doing any of those.) As long as we never told our mother and grandmother, we could stay down there and listen.”

Godwin, who is a descendant of the writer Mary Shelley (“Frankenstein”), grew up with “the drinking thing.”

“I mind my Ps and Qs with alcohol, because I’ve seen a lot of smart, creative people ruin their lives,” he says. “On the road I drive for those two wackos so they can tear it up after the show.” But he’s found a way to give it a comic spin. “I wrote a song called, ‘Switch to Beer,’ about the way some Irish people handle their drinking problems—putting down the whiskey and switching to beer. It came from seeing the Irish actor Richard Harris in the Bahamas, completely bombed, after he’d been on the Letterman show a week before talking about how he’d solved his hard drinking problem. I went up to him at the roulette table where he was completely trashed and I asked him about it. He said he stopped drinking the hard stuff. He switched to beer.”

So, by now you’ve figured out that the Irish Comedy Tour isn’t the place to take the kiddies. “This sense of humor is part of our upbringing, which might be a little off-color and politically incorrect, but it’s not dirty,” says Richards. “It’s all in good taste.”

And, he says, it might remind you of sitting around with your pals at a pub, sharing a frosty one and some memories. “People come up to us after the show, even people right from Ireland, and tell us this is everything they talk about,” he says. “It’s a fun party atmosphere. It’s a party—that’s the best way to describe it.”

October 13, 2009 by
Music

Five Questions for Jimmy Crowley

Máirtín and Jimmy in the middle.

Máirtín and Jimmy in the middle.

If there’s a distinguishing musical form in Irish folk tunes, it’s probably this: The ballad.

Of course, there are balladeers, and then there are balladeers. Some are more equal than others.

Enter Máirtín de Cógáin and Jimmy Crowley, two inspired Corkmen who truly know their way around a ballad. Máirtín, a founding member of The Fuchsia Band, is a highly regarded teller of tales; Jimmy has been described as “an icon in Irish music.”

Happily for Philadelphia music audiences, the two of them are together in the form of Captain Mackey’s Goatskin & Stringband. They’ll be appearing Thursday, October 8, at 8 p.m., at the Philadelphia Irish Center, in a concert sponsored by Rambling House Productions.

We chatted with Jimmy recently about the band, its music and what Philly audiences can expect to hear.

Q. How long has Captain Mackey’s been together?

A. “It’s only just been a year. We started the band in the States. We did a couple of major festivals: We did Milwaukee and we did Muskegon, and also Monroe, La., and Jackson, Miss., among others.

Q. Who was Captain Mackey?

A. He was a very mysterious figure. He was an Irish-American Fenian of the 19th century. He belonged to a very early version of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. He had connections with Cork. He inspired many a good song. Mackey was a code name for him, a secret name.

Q. The band also takes its name from a Cork folk band from the ‘sixties, Paddy’s Goatskin & Stringband. Why them? How did they inspire you?

A. I heard Paddy’s Goatskin & Stringband, actually, at Captain Mackey’s Folk Club—so you see, Captain Mackey’s always been in my life. They were just an amazing band. They had an amazing span of music. They played Jacobite songs and English working songs and American folks songs. They were very eclectic. I became great friends with those fellows. They had an effect on me. They had a lovely sound.

Q. What kinds of tunes is the Philadelphia Irish Center audience going to hear?

A. What were doing mostly is championing the songs we like. We sometimes think of Irish music as being highjacked by dancers. It’s lovely music, of course. But we play mostly ballads, historic ballads. We don’t do anything you’d recognize. (He laughs.) We do songs that are unique and forgotten. We do a lot of songs about soldiers—the First World War, the Spanish civil war.

Q. You’re known for pushing the envelope, creatively—which is a good thing for an artist. Your band Stokers Lodge is fondly remembered. What inspires you?

A. I just like the element of surprise on every album. I keep doing interesting projects. I think you need to challenge yourself and not follow the code. If you’re going to be a creator, you have to challenge things, you know. We’re not interested in the next trend. We don’t want to be boring.

October 4, 2009 by