Irish Music Selections

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...

Why It Still Matters There’s a simple power to a song that can be a love song and a map of loss at the same time. Róisín Dubh, with its image of 'my Róisín Dubh' and lines like 'Oh! my sweet little rose', sits in that curious place between private longing and public voice. People still sing it because it carries both personal ache and a sharper, political edge — so the tune never feels trapped behind glass. In modern Ireland and among the diaspora the piece functions like a mirror. A young player in Galway will bring a different ornamentation to a sean-nós line than a band in New York, but both pick up the same mood: yearning, defiance and tenderness. Those moods travel well. Emigration and return, memory and reimagining — listeners find in the song a vocabulary for homesickness or pride, sometimes in the same breath. Adaptability is a big part of its staying power. The melody’s clarity leaves room: a harpist can make it sparse and intimate; a fiddler can thicken...