Irish Music Selections

There’s a particular hush that falls in an Irish session when someone drops into a slow ballad. That’s the space where My Irish Girl lives — not as a museum piece but as a song people learned by ear, in kitchens and on boats, in harvest fields and narrow streets. It carries that old way of passing songs along: no printed sheet, just memory, breath and a willing listener. Generations sang it. Mothers and grandfathers taught lines between chores, emigrants took snatches of melody across the Atlantic, and local singers patched together verses from neighbours until a version felt like home. You hear traces of that life in the little Gaelic aside, "stór mo croí", and in the images that keep returning — roses, bottles of wine, a named Mollie. Those flashes tell you the song moved through bilingual households and mixed repertoires, surviving by adaptation. At a session My Irish Girl rarely stands alone. It’s the sort of ballad that follows a lively reel and quiets the room; it...

Where It Lives There’s a particular hush that falls when someone starts a slow song about local loss. That hush is exactly where McNamara and Shanahan belongs. Folks from West Clare — Doonbeg, Ennis and the little roads between — carried the words and the story for decades. It’s a song that arrived at sing-sessions the way rain arrives off the Atlantic: quietly, insistently, and already full of place. This is a ballad born of oral memory. It wasn’t only collectors’ notebooks or early broadcast recordings that kept it breathing; it was mothers and uncles at kitchens, lads in travelling bands, teachers who liked to sing at school concerts, and the quiet singers at wakes. You’ll hear versions that lean into narrative detail, and others that pare the story down. A line like 'adieu to you MacNamara, and Shanahan of Doughmore' will be tucked into the chorus sometimes, and at other times singers will improvise a phrase to suit the night. At a session the song often has a particul...