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Philadelphia Irish Center

Music

Songbirds: Nostalgic Music from Ireland’s Fil Campbell

Fil Campbell, photo by Khara Pringle

Fil Campbell, photo by Khara Pringle

Even through pints of amniotic fluid and layers of mom, an unborn baby hears music. Studies show that a year after they’re born, babies recognize and prefer the music they were exposed to in the womb.

That may explain why Irish singer-songwriter Fil Campbell was so drawn to the songs of Delia Murphy, who died while Campbell was still a child in Beleek, County Fermanagh. “Delia Murphy’s was the music I grew up with,” says Campbell, who is bringing her award-winning show, “Songbirds: The First Ladies of Irish Music” to the Irish Center in Philadelphia on Friday, October 2.

From a very early age, Delia Murphy songs were the ones she remembers her parents singing. Murphy’s recordings were always on the record layer or the radio when she was young. So it was natural for Campbell to add the tunes she may have heard before birth to her repertoire when she started singing professionally at 16.

Before it was a road show and a CD, “Songbirds” was a series that Campbell co-produced and hosted which aired on the RTE network in Ireland to great acclaim. It chronicles the life of Murphy, a child of wealth from County Mayo, and four other female singers who each left indelible impressions on successive generations of Irish from the1930s to the 1960s.

There was Margaret “Maggie” Barry, a ribald traveler who left an unhappy home to sing on the streets and market fairs and later influenced a young folk singer from Minnesota who called himself Bob Dylan and Irish balladeer Luke Kelly.

Bridie Gallagher becameknown as “the girl from Donegal” after her eponymous debut LP in the mid-1950s. She sold millions of records over the last half of the twentieth century and influenced countless singers, including Daniel O’Donnell.

Ruby Murray first appeared on television as a singer at the age of 12 and made her first recording just a few years later. Murray achieved dazzling success in 1955 when five of her songs appeared on the Top 20 in the same week. It’s a feat that has never been beaten, and was only matched this past July—posthumously–by Michael Jackson.

But Murray, the sweet-voiced girl from Belfast whose biggest hit was the unforgettable tune, “Softly Softly,” came to a hard end. She died at 61 of liver cancer after years of alcoholism.

Mary O’Hara’s was a life tailor-made for a Hallmark movie. Married at 21, a widow 15 months later, this harpist with the crystalline soprano voice joined an English monastery in 1962 and lived there for 12 years. She made a comeback in 1972 and quickly sped tothe top of the world again, appearing solo at Carnegie Hall in the late ‘90s. In his autobiography Memoirs of an Irish Troubadour, Liam Clancy writes that the music of Mary O’Hara inspired and influenced him and others of the Folk Revival period of the 1960s and ‘70s.

Their voices and styles—and clearly, their lives–are as different as chalk and cheese, but together they form the nostalgic soundtrack of an Ireland long gone.

The Ireland of Fil Campbell’s childhood is also long gone. “We lived out in the country and there was no cinema or anything. All we had for entertainment were ceilis or going to a relation’s house where everyone would do their party piece,” she recalls. “There was a lot of music in my family. My father was a really good singer and his brother and sister were musical too. His brother, Gerry Campbell, was a wonderful accordian player and he spent most of his life in Yonkers, NY. On my mother’s side of the family, they were all in ceili bands.”

Once she went to school,Campbell got her second dose of music education. “I come from the little village of Belleek right on the border with Donegal,” she says. “The first day I went to school in Eniskellin, the nuns made everybody as first years sing or dance, and if you showed any ability at all they just instantly handed you instruments and you got on with it.”

She started performing in her teens, then bounced between jobs on the periphery of music—promoting entertainers, doing radio—before taking up music as a career. “In the beginning, I did mostly my own songs,” says Campbell. “Then after attending the North American Folk Alliance event in the Catskills a few years ago I started thinking about doing more traditional music.”

She immediately thought of Delia Murphy. “I wanted to do an album of Delia Murphy songs. I thought she was an amazing woman and such fun.”

And, like the other Songbirds, she had a remarkable back story. As she does in her show, let Campbell tell it:

“Delia’s father grew up during the famine in Ireland and like a lot of people he emigrated to America, making it to the west coast at the tail end of the Gold Rush. He had vowed when he left Ireland to buy the house the landlord lived it. He wound up making his fortune in America, managing a silver mine, and came back to Ireland and bought the house, with the result that the family was brought up as upper class citizens. They had a big estate, with hounds kept for the hunt, and they mixed with royalty and film stars. Delia grew up wth an incredible panache about her. She was college-educated which was unheard of for a Catholic girl. Though she came from a gentrified background, she had a broad west of Ireland accent (she was the first Irish singer to record in her own accent) and she sang songs of the common people and wound up marrying an ambassador. ”

Ultimately, of course, Campbell wound up collecting songs from other remarable female singers she’d heard growing up. She calls them traditional, though she knows not everyone will agree.

“It’s a really gray area,” she says. “There’s so much snobbery about Irish traditional music. Every traditional song was written at some point. Somebody wrote it. A lot of the songs associated with these women are known by the derogatory term “come-all-ye,” referring to songs that have a chorus that goes ‘come all ye, sing along with me.’ It’s a song everybody knows and can join in. Some of the songs, like ‘The Boys from the County Armagh’ and ‘WildRover’ are come-all-yes. Everybody knows them so everyone sings along.”

This is a bad thing? Campbell doesn’t think so. She encourages it. “We want everyone to have a good time,” she laughs. “It’s a light show. We don’t take ourselves seriously.”

here are times, she says,she thinks, “four years and here I am still Songbirding.” The show has played to packed houses in Ireland, England, and Germany, and the Irish Center show is the first time she’ll be performing it for American audiences. “I’m a bit nervous about it but it went well everywhere else,” she says.

“It’s great fun. I love doing this material–despite the fact,” she laughs, “that I’m closet rocker Bonnie Raitt in my head!”

Dance

So, You Think You Can’t Dance

The dancers wait for instructions. That's teacher Geraldine Trainor in the green capris.

The dancers wait for instructions. That's teacher Geraldine Trainor in the green capris.

A lot of things happen in Geraldine Trainor’s kitchen.

It’s where she learned to jive back in Country Tyrone to the sound of Ireland’s Queen of Country, Philomena Begley, using the door jamb as her partner.

And it was her kitchen in Norristown where she planned to teach her kids and their friends how to jive, but then they got wrapped up in the Gaelic football season.

But dancing lessons seemed like too good an idea to just toss, especially since her son is dating a dance instructor.

So, for the last three weeks (with three more to come, she and her son’s girlfriend, Laura Gittings of Take the Lead dance studio on Pine Street in Philadelphia, are teaching adults how to swing, jive, and foxtrot at the Philadelphia Irish Center in Mt. Airy on Thursday nights.
 
“I thought it would be good for people who want to get ready for the Mayo and Donegal balls this year,” said Trainor, whom I caught up with recently after a grueling hour of box-stepping and foxtrotting. And she has some other good ideas. “I’m thinking about having a couple of competitions this year, our own ‘Dancing with the Stars.’ I don’t know who the stars will be—it might be ourselves!” She laughs.

It was the popular celebrity dance show on ABC-TV that prompted her children to ask her about learning to dance. “The kids are all talking about it, and I thought it was important for them to learn. I think everyone in the world should dance,” she says. “The boys are embarrassed to learn, but I said, ‘Now, don’t fight with me because you know it’s no use.’”

Trainor plans to repeat the classes in the fall when the kids have promised to trade football gear for dancing shoes. But the classes are open to all, even her husband, Sean, who, while he can dance, “can’t jive,” she laughs.

Music

Making Musical Memories

Between numbers: Angelina Carberry and Martin Quinn.

Between numbers: Angelina Carberry and Martin Quinn.

If you missed Friday night’s concert with tenor banjo player Angelina Carberry and button accordionist Martin Quinn, you missed an opportunity to hear a particularly pure form of traditional Irish music.

This is not a slam against the Irish supergroups and other, perhaps more commercial Celts, who often blend other forms of music into the traditional. Hey, there’s lots of room in our big music tent.

But there were moments during the Carberry-Quinn performance—many moments, in fact—when it seemed like you were hearing the music in a raw, unadorned form, when the lily was unquestionably ungilded.

Carberry, with her distinctive percussive style, and Quinn, with his long, lingering chords, took Irish Center listeners on a journey back to the source. Angelina and Martin made me feel like I was sitting in a bar in Doolin or Westport.

Adding to the enjoyment was Angelina’s 11-year-old daughter Shawna, who sat in on fiddle for a couple of numbers.

We’ve preserved many of those moments for you—including an impromptu traditional music session that sprang up post-concert.

Check it all out:     

Check out the videos:

A Blazing Set of Reels
http://www.irishphiladelphia.com/video/carberryquinn01

Angelina Carberry and Martin Quinn Play “The Princess Royal”
http://www.irishphiladelphia.com/video/carberryquinn02

Button Box Player Martin Quinn Sits in at a Philadelphia Irish Music Session
http://www.irishphiladelphia.com/video/carberryquinn03

Reel Time With Angelina Carberry, Daughter Shawna, and Martin Quinn
http://www.irishphiladelphia.com/video/carberryquinn04

A Set of Jigs Featuring Angelina Carberry, Daughter Shawna and Martin Quinn
http://www.irishphiladelphia.com/video/carberryquinn05

Music

Carberry and Quinn: In Concert at the Irish Center

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

News, People

Brooklyn’s Commodore Barry Club Pays a Visit to Philly’s Club

Members of Brooklyn’s Commodore Barry Club traveled by bus last Sunday to Philadelphia to honor one of the major figures of the American Revolution—Commodore John Barry, father of the US Navy, who is buried at Old St. Mary’s Church in Philadelphia. It’s an annual trek over the Memorial Day weekend and they’re joined by members of the Commodore Barry Club (The Irish Center) in Philadelphia at a Mass, a wreath-laying, and for a meal and some dancing. We caught that last part in photos.

Music

How To Be Irish in Philly This Week

Teada's flute player, Damien Stenson.

Teada's flute player, Damien Stenson.

We’ve got one word for you: Teada. It’s pronounced Tay-da and it’s the name of one of the finest modern-day traditional bands to come out of Ireland. They packed them in at the Irish Center for their Christmas show, and they’re back on Saturday, May 16, to demonstrate again why “Living Tradition” magazine calls them “brilliant young musicians who present Irish music as it really is: the joy of it, the full breadth and depth of it, the power and pace of it.” The concert is sponsored by the Philadelphia Ceili Group. Don’t miss it.

The first of several benefits for the WTMR Irish radio shows occurs on Tuesday, with the Camden County Emerald Society sponsoring a night of Irish music at the Coastline Restaurant in Cherry Hill. Lots of local musicians are pitching in their talent and there’s a free buffet meal.

And you know, if this is the Philadelphia area, there’s an Irish traditional session going on somewhere just about every night of the week, usually in the proximity of some good draft Irish beer (with apologies to the South Jersey Irish seisun, which serves coffee at its new locale, the Coffee Garden in Audubon).

Check our calendar for all the local listings. And if you have an event, please add it to our calendar (yes, you can do it yourself).

Don’t forget to eat, drink, and buy Irish.

News, People

Monday Night at the Irish Center

Kerri Lenox,right, knits a baby blanket at the bar while chatting with fellow dance mom, Lori Scanlon.

Kerri Lenox,right, knits a baby blanket at the bar while chatting with fellow dance mom, Lori Scanlon.

Most pubs are pretty quiet on a Monday night, but not the bar at the Philadelphia Irish Center. The Cummins School of Irish Dance gives lessons in the ballroom, so the Irish dance moms and dads have a beer or soft drink at the bar while they wait. Some bring their laptops so they can work, others read, study, or, in one case, knit.

Like an Irish pub, it’s not really just a bar. It’s a place where people can congregate, bring their families, chat, or sit quietly and read or watch TV. “This place is so special,” said dance mom Shiela Ruen. “It’s like something out of another time. It’s a real gem. People don’t even know what a treasure they have here. I love it.”

So do we.

Arts

Get Ready for Thursday Night at the Irish Movies

Musician and County Clare native Fintan Malone introduces "The Boys and Girl from County Clare" at last year's film festival.

Musician and County Clare native Fintan Malone introduces "The Boys and Girl from County Clare" at last year's film festival.

It’s movie time again.

Starting on Thursday, May 8, join WTMR radio host Marianne MacDonald (“Come West Along the Road) and me for the first film of our second Irish Film Series at the Irish Center (Commodore Barry Club), Carpenter and Emlen Streets in Philadelphia. The free series will run every first Thursday at 8 PM.

Kicking off the new festival is the 2008 Cannes Camera d’Or winning film, “Hunger,” from neophyte director Steve McQueen (no relation to the actor). This powerful movie, which was recently shown at the Philadelphia Film Festival and is now playing in theaters, was co-written by Irish playwright Enda Walsh and stars Michael Fassbender as Bobby Sands, who led other prisoners in the infamous H-block of Belfast’s Maze Prison on a hunger strike in 1981. Their demand: That the British government acknowledge the Irish Republican Army as a legitimate political organizations and them as political prisoners. Ten men, including Sands, starved to death.

We’re hoping to have a special guest to introduce the film and answer questions afterwards.

Last year, we co-sponsored a series of films that included “The Secret of Roan Inish,” “The Butcher Boy,” “The Boys and Girl from County Clare,” “My Left Foot,” and “The Snapper.” We were fortunate to have Fintan Malone, a musician from County Clare, to introduce “The Boys and Girl from County Clare,” a warm and funny film about a ceili band competition. Hyacinthe O’Neill, an old friend of Christy Brown, the disabled writer and artist whose life is depicted in the Jim Sheridan film, “My Left Foot,” shared her memories with the audience after the movie was aired.

All the films are shown in the Fireside Room, the bar will be open, and snacks available for purchase.

And you can help us select subsequent films for the series. What’s your favorite Irish movie? Did you love, “The Boxer,” or are you nuts about “The Quiet Man?” How about “The Molly Maguires,” which features some local Irish actors, including musician and WTMR radio host Vince Gallagher, who is also president of the Irish Center? Maybe you’re a “Finian’s Rainbow” fanatic. Let us know what you’d like to see (click on the “contact us” button on the website) and we’ll add it to the list. (Need some help remembering the Irish movies you’ve seen. Don’t worry, you’re in good company. Here’s a place where you can jog your memory.)

We may have some surprises as the series continues, so stay tuned.