Just Irish Music

The Perfect Holocaust — A Ballad of Ireland’s Great Hunger (An Gorta Mór) This is not a famine song. This is a cry from the soil. “The Perfect Holocaust” is a modern Irish protest ballad rooted in the Great Hunger of 1845–1852 — a catastrophe that reshaped the Irish identity forever. The common schoolbook line calls it “the potato famine.” The real history is harsher. Ireland during those years was exporting grain, beef, butter, and provisions at industrial scale, while entire parishes starved. This ballad points directly to that contradiction — that the land was productive, yet the people were dying. In this piece, the music is built around uilleann pipes, low whistle, fiddle laments, and the relentless pulse of the bodhrán. The sound is intentionally stark — not romanticised, not softened — because the story demands uncomfortable honesty. The ballad names the policy makers and the ideology behind them. Trevelyan’s famous belief that starvation was “a moral lesson” echoes through t...

The Lakes of Pontchartrain – A Timeless Story in Song “The Lakes of Pontchartrain” is one of the most haunting pieces in the old folk tradition, travelling across time, oceans, and cultures. Most people today associate the ballad with Ireland, because countless singers in the Irish folk revival brought it to new audiences. However, the scene in this song is firmly set in Louisiana. The lonely traveller is far from home, broke, and facing a future with no certainty. He is taken in by a Creole girl who shows him kindness when everyone else looks the other way. That mix of hospitality, heartbreak, and quiet gratitude is what gives the song its lasting emotional weight. The song seems to have appeared sometime in the early 1800s. It likely grew out of the chaotic period after the War of 1812, when soldiers, sailors, traders, and drifters moved restlessly through the American South. New Orleans was a port full of goodbyes. The wilderness around the lakes could be beautiful one moment and ...