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...

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...

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...