Irish Music Selections

When Spancil Hill turns up on a record or at a session, you never quite know which song you'll get — a whisper of longing or a rollicking fair-day memory. Different singers and groups have taken the same verses and nudged them in opposite directions. Some make it feel like a private dream; others turn it into communal celebration. Three common approaches First, there’s the spare, solo reading. A single voice and a guitar or bouzouki will lean into the song’s most intimate lines, the ones about childhood and the sudden sting of waking: "I awoke in California, far far from Spancil Hill." Singers who choose that path let the melody breathe and the words land like small, sharp images. You hear every consonant, every tremble. Then you have the fuller folk-group treatment, where fiddle, button accordion and tenor banjo fill the room. That style emphasises the fair, the dancing and the village characters — tailor Quigley, Father Dan — and can turn the song into a communa...

There’s a particular gut-punch when The Ragmans Ball kicks in. It isn’t just a party tune. It’s a room full of people trying to forget hard lives for a while, laughing and fighting in the same breath. You can feel the heat of the hall, the scrape of chairs, the tin whistle trying to lift everyone out of whatever brought them there. The song reads like a neighbourhood portrait drawn in charcoal and lamp oil. Names pop up — Kieran Grace, Billy Bowlin', Eliza — and you know these faces. They’re alive in the shouting, in the “come on now” as much as in the bruises. There’s a stubborn pride in the telling: they’ll bring their mot, they’ll take the chair, they’ll sell it again, and still they'll gather. That mixture of defiance and weariness is the note that stays with you. Musically it’s puckish and relentless. The whistle and the rhythms keep pushing forward even when the verse turns ugly or tender. It’s the kind of tune that makes you grin and flinch at the same time. When t...

There’s something about the opening image in The Hills of Kerry — 'Farewell you hills of Kerry, I'll not see you anymore' — that invites interpretation. Singers have taken that farewell and turned it into so many different moods: a resigned croon, a defiant march, a homesick whisper. Each version tells you as much about the performer and their time as it does about Tralee. Versions worth another listen Listen to early 20th‑century tenor recordings and you’ll hear lush orchestral swells under a direct, emotive voice. Those takes lean into nostalgia; the arrangement often smooths rough edges so the emigrant’s sorrow becomes almost cinematic. Contrast that with 1960s folk revival groups who stripped the song back to guitar, a raw vocal and close harmony. Their renditions make the words feel immediate again — less polished, more communal. There are also Irish‑American showband or vaudeville‑style versions that give the palm‑trees line a sunnier, almost jaunty edge, as i...

There’s a particular hush that falls over a pub when someone starts 'Still Here'. It isn’t the kind of silence that comes from shock, but the kind that gathers — a pocket of attention focusing on a voice and a handful of chords. You can hear it in the catch of the throat as the singer reaches the line 'I won’t leave, no, I won’t leave' and the room breathes with them. On a Tuesday night session or a Friday kitchen ceilidh, the song sits low and honest. It doesn’t try to dazzle. A spare guitar or piano, maybe a fiddle that weeps on the edges, gives it space. That space lets the words land: the headlines, the queues, the stubborn love for this place. People lean in. Someone wipes a glass. A child at the bar hums the chorus without knowing the politics, just the promise. For the singer, 'Still Here' lives under the palate. It needs an anchored delivery — not too pretty, not shouty. There’s a weight to those verses that asks for steadiness. When you deliver 'I...