Music, time, memory: Mary Black

“I'll never actually stop singing,” Mary Black says. The Irish musician does find herself, after more than thirty years of taking her music to places as diverse as Chicago and Tokyo, Australia and Amsterdam, ready to give up the road, though. To mark and celebrate that, Black is in the midst of a year long run of gigs that takes her back to many of her favourite places. She’s calling it The Last Call Tour.

It’s good to know that she’ll not be giving up singing -- indeed that’s been a part of her life since her earliest memories, and something she has always loved.

“My father was born and reared on Rathlin Island, off the north east coast of Ireland, within the six counties, so it’s not under Irish rule. It’s an incredibly beautiful place, a place of great magical memories for us growing up. We were born and reared in the heart of Dublin city, in a business street with a shop, Black’s General Grocers, and to be whisked away every summer from that kind of environment to this wild kind of place that had no electricity, no running water, all the things that people take for granted in the big city but yet had this lifestyle that was so exciting to us as kids -- it was a magical place. It holds a special place. It’s very much a part of who we are, as a family,” Black says.

Black’s father, Kevin, was a fiddle player steeped in the traditional music of this remote place halfway between Ireland and Scotland. To this was added the musical tastes and love of singing of her mother, Patty, who grew up in the Liberties area in the heart of Dublin City and loved popular music and show tunes. The couple instilled a love of music in their children, so much so that brothers Shay, Michael, and Martin, and sister Frances as well as Mary have all worked professionally in music. At times, all five have performed and recorded together as well.

Though at first she struggled with the idea of being on stage, by her late teens Black joined up with the band General Humbert. It also caused her to add a dimension to her stage work. “It was a traditional Irish band, and it was like they were the musicians and I was the singer. When they were playing tunes, I felt like, what’ll I do with myself? So, I picked up the bodhran.” That’s a traditional Irish frame drum, an instrument Black plays still. ”I was lovely to be a part of what they were doing, and not just be the singer,” she says, and she still enjoys that.

Black began her international touring career in the early 1980s when she was invited to join the long running band De Dannan. The first song she recorded with them, Song for Ireland, is a favorite with her audiences still. It’s a contemporary song, one that honors tradition while bringing it forward. From her earliest days of recording, Black has been as master of choosing songs which do that, and which allow her room to put her own stamp on them. “I always want to choose strong material,” she says, “and something I feel I can work with and interpret and express something, and add something to the song.”

So she has. After three years (“three amazing years -- we packed so much into them it seems like more even when I look back,” she recalls) touring with De Dannan and learning about the music business, during which she recorded several well received solo albums, Black decided it was time to take the risk of going out on her own and exploring more deeply the direction in which her own musical tastes were calling her.

By the Time it Gets Dark, released in 1987, found Black drawing on folk, pop, and singer songwriter styles in an elegant combination that introduced her to audiences beyond Ireland as a solo artist, and continued the threads of musical exploration and adventurous taste in material that have lasted on in her recordings. A few years later, she was part of a project of a different scope which also found wide international audiences. Black’s record company was working on a compilation project featuring Irish artists. “So many of them came out to be women,” Black recalls, “that I said, why not keep it just to women? And I think the lovely thing about it is that people might know Maura O'Connell, or they might know me, and they’d buy the record on that, and they get to hear all these other artists, so it was great for everyone.” The first album sparked two more, resulting in A Woman's Heart: Trilogy and subsequent recordings building on the idea as well.

Though she often includes songs in Irish on her albums and in her concerts, Black did not grow up grow up speaking Irish, other than as required in school. Over the years, though, she’s increasingly come to hold the language as part of ireland’s way of life, of its music. “That's why I’ve chosen to have a holiday home down in an Irish speaking area,” she says. “I love the language, and I love the fact that it’s alive and kicking!”

But what about this Last Call Tour business? "I've been touring for thirty years and all that travelling does take it out of you, so I just felt it was the right time," she told the Irish Independent. “I'll never actually stop singing, I'm not ready to give that up yet, but I just don't want to do that hard slog any more; it's grueling.” Black has grandchildren at home to enjoy now, and she’s also just completed work on a memoir. It is called Down the Crooked Road and is expected to be published in October. Black’s daughter Roisin worked on the book with her.

Black, as ever, is looking forward. “I'd like to pick and choose what I want to do,” says Mary Black. “It's another chapter for me and my family and it's exciting."

photograph courtesy of Mary Black

You may also wish to see
Mary Black: 25 years 25 songs

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Listening to Ireland: Patrick season

Ireland: it is a twenty first century country, to be sure, and yet... the music and the stories, the legends and the landscapes, reach back across time to connect, to share to create, to reassure, to inspire. The music and the stories reach across the world, too, to new landscapes where Ireland’s far flung sons and daughters have made their homes, and to places where the sound of the music is the only connection.

During the spring of the year, Patrick season, folk often turn thoughts and hearts especially to those connections and to the music of Ireland. Here along the Music Road Irish music and the people who make it are a subject of conversation and reflection often, as are those Irish landscapes; you’ll find upwards of three hundred stories on these ideas in our archives.

For your Patrick season enjoyment, here are several to explore

Tommy Sands is from Rostrevor in County Down, just along the border with the Republic. He knows both dark and light sides, both the political side of recent Irish history and how it plays out in day to day life. To hear ways these make part of his music, take a listen to his albums Let the Circle Be Wide and Arising from the Troubles.

Cathie Ryan is first generation Irish American, and has lived long in both countries. Landscape, legend, and story all play their parts in the music she writes herself and what she sources from traditional and contemporary song. Hear this in her recordings Through Wind and Rain and The Farthest Wave.

The four members of T With the Maggies each have careers as members of other ensembles and collaborations. When the four women, who knew each other growing up in Donegal before their music took them along differing paths, got together to create an album, they made a project through which you may hear the wind and water, rugged mountains and hidden glens and crashing waves and tales and history that form Ireland’s far northwest. Learn more about this recording from T With the Maggies.

One of the Maggies on that album is Mairéad Ni Mhaonaigh, singer, fiddle player, and songwriter who is also founding member of the band Altan. They have traveled the world with their music and collaborated with symphony orchestras and American country superstars. Home in Donegal is where they made their album Poison Glen, which they chose to name after an especially lovely spot in their native county. Take a listen to fiery fiddling, graceful singing, and class act ensemble work on Poison Glen.

Mary Black does not always -- or even often -- choose music from Irish tradition. The native Dubliner is brilliant and hearing the stories and poetry, the threads that connect and pull through, in the work of contemporary songwriters, though. Many of her choices are songwriters from Ireland, but whatever she chooses, Black puts her own graceful and very Irish stamp upon it, and adds to the ongoing tradition of class act songs and singers in Ireland. Hear this in Twenty Five Years Twenty Five Songs.

There is more, of course, much more, to the music of Ireland, and I’ve more recordings and conversations with artists waiting in the wings to share with you -- and a book or two in the works as well. Keep in touch here along the Music Road to know more about all that.

Photograph of hillside in Louth, Republic of Ireland, is by Kerry Dexter and is copyrighted. Thank you for respecting this.

You may also wish to see
Women of Ireland: Music
Learning about Irish Music: a bouquet of albums
Julie Fowlis and Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh: Dual

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Robert Burns, Altan, and Mary Black

Words and music have their own unique connection. There is plenty of music of all sorts with no words attached, of course, as there is poetry which may hold its own rhythms but does little to evoke melody. Then there are lyrics which stand on their without music, and those that don’t, as well as poems which have been set, successfully and less to, to music. Not to mention the melodies of familiar songs which are sometimes challenging to hear without adding the words in your head as you listen.

These are all tools of the artist, whether that artist is poet or songwriter or composer or all three. It is poetry month in the United States, which is what has this on my mind. Are song lyrics poetry set to music.? I get exasperated when people say this. They can be, certainly, but that’s not the way the making of a song works, even if it is a poem being set to music. There’s a connection between lyric and sound of lyric, note and sound of music, which makes the song a unique creation of its own, through alchemy which takes place in the ideas of the artist, and then is created anew each time a song is shared and heard.

To go along with these thoughts, the Irish band Altan offers Green Grow the Rashes O by Robert Burns. Mairéad Ni Mhaonaigh, who would usually have done the singing, was losing her voice that night, and so old friend Irish singer Mary Black stepped in -- and came in for a a bit of ragging from the Scottish crowd (this was a concert during Celtic Connections at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall) for having the lyrics on a paper to refer to. See what she does with them though.

you may also wish to see
Mary Black and Steve Cooney: Just a Journey
Celtic Connections 2012: the music begins
music of Donegal: Altan: The Poison Glen -Gleann Nimhe

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Song for autumn: Mary Black & Steve Cooney: Just a Journey

Steve Cooney, Australian songwriter long writer resident in Ireland, captures the mystery in the landscape and life of both places in his song Just a Journey.

“we are wheat for the bread, we are wind and fire...”

“just a journey of a spirit through a lifetime’s changing...”

are just a few of the phrases which offer new perspective each time one hears the song. It has also always struck me as a song particularly suited for the turn of seasons in autumn. A song with a distinct story to tell yet plenty of room for the listener to bring his or her own stories to the telling as well.

Mary Black sings it here, with Steve Cooney on guitar and backing vocals. You may also find a recording of it, along with a raft of other fine songs, on Black’s two disc set Best Of Mary Black Volume 2

you may also wish to see

Mary Black: Stories from the Steeples

learning about Irish music: a bouquet of albums

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Mary Black: Stories from the Steeples

Back in the 1980s when Irish singer Mary Black released her first solo album, she chose contemporary and traditional folk song in English, a hint of country, a bit of Irish tradition, “and it didn’t really tell people what I was about!” Black recalls, laughing. Yet, in a way it did: several decades on, Black's latest recording Stories From the Steeples still holds that mix of contemporary and traditional music, of good stories well told, and that fine voice which marked her first solo album and has been part of all her music over the years.

With a storyteller's instinct and that distinctive voice, Black offers a gathering of songs that explore change, reflection, celebration, love -- and murder. Indeed, there’s a murder ballad here, Marguerite and the Gambler. Black says she was drawn to it at first because the story begins in the same way as the traditional Irish song Anachie Gordon, with a woman drawn to a man her father becomes set against, but, Black points out that “It ends in quite a different way!” It holds a story that will keep you listening, and a melody that will stay with you, as well.

In the first of three collaborations with guests on the album, Black joins up with Imelda May for an intertwining of voices that well suits the vivid images of journeys and returns on Mountains to the Sea. A quieter journey is the subject of The Night Was Dark and Deep, set as a vignette of a moment on a night car trip which paints a picture of a childhood memory. Just as it is with such memories, in the song not everything is explained. Healing, hope, resignation, and facing change all play their parts in varied ways in the songs Faith in Fate and Steady Breathing. Black and Finbar Furey join up for the lovely relaxed celebration of Walking With My Love, while Black adds understated grief and grace to the anti war song All the Fine Young Men.

Black’s children, Danny, Roisin, and Conor O’Reilly, are each involved in various tracks across the album. All three join in on a song which asks powerful questions (and which Danny wrote), The Night Is on Our Side. Lighthouse Light draws together ideas of journeys, change, and the continuance of love in a graceful song that is at once straightforward and complex, and makes a fine piece for Black and Janis Ian to share in the singing.

Songwriters new and time tested, emotions that last, stories well told and music that gets to the heart: those things, have been hallmarks of Mary Black's music across the years, and with Stories From the Steeples she takes the next right steps along that path. Come along for a listen.

you may also wish to see
Music Road: Reflections with Mary Black
Music Road: new song from Mary Black

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Song for early summer

A bit of a meditative take on this well known and sometimes overdone song. It goes well with early and mid summer. The singer is Mary Black; the song was writen by Sting. You may find this version recorded on Mary Black's album Speaking with the Angel

"I never made promises lightly
and there've been some that I've broken
but I swear in the time that's left
we'll walk in fields of gold..."

you may also wish to see
Music Road: Reflections with Mary Black
Music Road: late summer: two for the road
Music Road: ten songs

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New song from Mary Black

Mary Black is not a traditional Irish singer. ”People often think I come from a traditional music background, but, really, I don’t, “ she says. What the Dublin born Black has is an ear for the poetry of a song and a fine way of putting her own interpretation on a song while remaining true to its heart and spirit. She’s done that with songs from the tradition -- Anachie Gordon, Suil Aroon, Rose of Allendale, Bruach Na Carraige Báine all come to mind. She also has a fine ear for choosing newer songs that have depth and substance, among them Song for Ireland, No Frontiers, Summer Sent You, Columbus, and Just a Journey. Black has been working on a new album, her first in a good while. She’s released a song from that, called Marguerite and the Gambler. She makes the point that this song tells essentially the same story as does the song Anachie Gordon. A guest spot on a television show at the invitation of Christy Moore saw Black singing Anachie Gordon, and it was that appearance in the 1980s that helped her road to national and international fame. Follow this link to see a video of Marguerite and the Gambler. While we’re at it take a look at Mary singing one of my favorite songs, By the Time It Gets Dark. Emmylou Harris joins in, and they are accompanied by Jay Ungar, Molly Mason, Jerry Douglas, among others. you may also wish to see Music Road: Reflections with Mary Black Music Road: Mary Black: 25 years 25 songs Music Road: Mary Black: By the Time It Gets Dark

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Listening to Christmas: Shannon Heaton, Cathie Ryan, Mary Black, Hanneke Cassel

The artists who make the music you love to hear at Christmas, and at other times of year, are themselves engaged listeners of music as well. That’s not a surprise. What they choose to listen to at the holidays might not always be what you’d expect, though. Listen in as the conversation with musicians about what music fills their homes at the holiday season continues.

Singer, flute player, and songwriter Shannon Heaton tours in a duo with her husband Matt, is part of the band Long Time Courting, and has a solo album out as well. Matt and Shannon have a Christmas album out, too, called Fine Winter's Night. One of the great things about being a musician and touring at the holidays, Shannon finds, is that "you get to do your work, your regular job, but you get to be part of the holiday, too. You don't get so caught up in work and travel that you lose sight of the holiday."

When she’s off the road, her holiday listening choices include Tuck Andress, Hymns Carols & Songs About Snow. “The Christmas season begins as soon as we play Tuck's marvelous instrumental album--great playing and great arrangements that have stood the test of time for us--this is probably our favorite Christmas album,” Heaton says.

She also likes the Christmas music of country star Garth Brooks “because Garth--like Brad Paisley--can actually play guitar and write his own songs, his records tend to pay respect to writers and to music,” Heaton says. “His rendition of The Friendly Beasts has each person who contributed a song to the album singing a verse. This is pure class, and makes for a very sweet sound.” Handel's Messiah is another Christmas favorite at the Heaton household. “Matt's dad is an organist,” Shannon says, “and it's a joy for him to hear the Messiah without having to turn pages--hearing Handel around Christmas for us is like hearing bagpipes at a wedding or a funeral... it's perfect tradition that never ceases to move us.”

Though her tastes when recording her own albums are quite eclectic, whether she’s celebrating at her home in Dublin or at her holiday place in County Kerry, Irish singer Mary Black finds herself turning to the old Latin Christmas hymns, and to the carol O Holy Night.

Fiddle player and composer Hanneke Cassel most often works in music of the Scottish and Irish traditions (she is a national champion of Scottish style fiddle, among other awards). At Christmas, she too turns to a favorite Latin hymn and to an Austrian carol. “ I love O Come Emmanuel, “ she says. “It's probably my favorite Christmas carol. I also love Still, Still, Still. It's beautiful.”

Songwriter and singer Cathie Ryan is both Irish and American, born in the US to Irish parents, and she has lived in both countries. Those things come out in her music, and when she is listening to music at Christmas time, as well.

“I grew up listening to Bing Crosby's Merry Christmas album and still listen to it a lot every year. And Elvis' Christmas Album will be in heavy rotation along with The Chieftains, The Bells of Dublin," she says. “I have rakes of Christmas music that I mix in with those three, including Blue Yule featuring Lightnin' Hopkins on Rhino - great collection, The Temptations, The Chipmunks, A Very Special Christmas.

Another recording Ryan finds a place for is the Best of Celtic Christmas on Narada. “I play that one when I have friends over at the holidays,” she says.” It is wonderful as background music or it can be forefront when I am sitting by the tree in the dark watching the lights flicker and the fire flame in the hearth. Another CD I love is The Soul of Christmas. It was produced by the late Johnny Cunningham and features some beautiful songs and arrangements. Sadly, it is no longer available. But it always reminds me of Johnny. And Christmas is like that, isn't it? If you're lucky, you get to spend it with those you love and those who are gone come visit, they fill the room and remind us that life is short and love is very long.”


you may also wish to see
Music Road: listening to Christmas: Heidi Talbot, Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh, Patty Larkin

Music Road: listening to Christmas: Aoife Clancy, Tommy Sands, Matt Heaton

Music Road: Another Fine Winter's Night: Matt & Shannon Heaton
Music Road: Cathie Ryan: Songwriter

update: Cathie Ryan talks about winter, Christmas music, and her 2016 Christmas tour Music for the heart of winter: Cathie Ryan

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Mary Black & Emmylou Harris on a hillside journey

The Appalachian mountains have always reminded me of the mountains in Donegal, and Derry, and Cooley, and those Irish hills have reminded me of Appalachian landscapes as well. Mary Black, from Ireland, and Emmylou Harris, from the United States, sing The Green Rolling Hills of West Virginia. Take a listen.






In a few weeks, the Great American Road Trip will get to West Virginia, where there will be more powerful music of the hills to share with you.

There's also more music ahead here along the music road, from Ireland, and from America, and from places where they intersect. Stay with us.

you may also wish to see

Music Road: Reflections with Mary Black
Music Road: now playing: Emmylou Harris: Songbird: disc three
Music Road: Altan: 25th Anniversary Collection
Music Road's Irish music store at Amazon

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Song for ireland

"...I saw a land where no one had to fight..."

Just a few days back, a car bomb exploded in Newry, a town where I've spent good amounts of time. There have been deaths and attacks linked to politics rising up again along the border and through the counties in the north these last months.

Mary Black sang Song for Ireland at Stormont, during the peace negotiations there, some years back now. I've no idea which way the voting on devolution will go. Whatever happens, though, the words of the song ring true

"...I saw a land where no one had to fight..."

you may also want to see
Music Road: Ireland, north and south

Music Road: Reflections with Mary Black

RTE News background on the devolution vote

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Michael Black: music, family, & friends

"I'm not a romantic about it at all, but I think the music in my blood, and there's nothing I can do about it," Michael Black says, laughing. He holds a doctorate in sociology and has taught at university, but his life and his identity have always been as much or more grounded in music as in academic pursuits.

Though he lives now in San Francisco, Black was born in Dublin, the second oldest of five brothers and sisters. His father Kevin, from Rathlin Island off the Antrim coast, "played lots of instruments. I wouldn't call him a traditional musician, but he was a versatile one," Black says. His Dublin raised mother Patty loved to sing, usually theatrical and popular songs on her day, the forties, and fifties. The house was filled with music from family and friends, although"people often confuse our background with a traditional one," Black's sister Mary says, "but really it wasn't until we were teenagers, and started listening to the folk songs that were popular then, that we had much to do with traditional music."

Mary is international star Mary Black, Michael's younger sister. Sister Frances is also a top solo artist, and brothers Shay and Martin often perform together and in duos or trios with Michael. All five have recorded several albums together as The Black Family. Each maintains a connection to Irish tradition while seeking out songs from other times and places that fit in with that, and with individual musical visions. "When I go out to play gigs, I always include some Irish songs, and songs with Irish connections," Michael says, "but I don't think I have to be limited to that. I choose what suits my voice, and what I like."

With all that musical background, it has taken Michael a while to get around to releasing a solo album of his own. The self titled disc is a set of songs you can picture him sharing at a pub of coffeehouse, funny at one moment, thought provoking at the next. There's the poignant Don't Laugh at Me, perhaps a reflection on walking another's path drawn from Black's experiences as a teacher, and a gorgeous take on Billy Edd Wheeler's ballad on change and conscience in the Appalachians, The Coming of the Roads, which is a fine instance of Black's gifts as a singer and his understanding of storytelling, as well. The disc also includes a music hall song from the 1930s, a traditional song sung in Irish, a ballad about war and the costs of it from New Zealand, a sea shanty, and a song to dance the baby on your knee. What holds it all together is that voice, that understanding of story, and Black's knowledge that, as he says, "I'm rooted in roots music, music of the people."

On the disc, the family comes along to add harmonies on various tracks. "Well, we're all singers, and it'd be disrespectful not to have then along," Michael says, laughing. He chose guitarist and singer John Doyle, who has worked with Liz Carroll, Linda Thompson, Cathie Ryan, and others, to produce the project. "I'm not a man who gives away superlatives," Black says, "but I couldn't have made a better choice."

Black expects to be booking more tour dates on his own now that the record is out, balancing that with his other job which "is a dad. I have three kids, three girls. My wife works a professional career, and when they came along we made the decision that I'd be the child minder. I've been a teacher, been around kids all my life, so it was a natural decision." With his children growing up, Black decided it was time to take another step in his music, to make his own recording. "There wasn't a record company involved at the time, I just was thinking of something to sell at gigs," he says. Compass Records became interested in releasing it, though, and "and in a way, that's just icing on the cake," Michael Black says. "This music has kept my family close, and has brought me to places I'd never have seen. So I thought, this is what I do, why not give the music a chance?"

you may also want to see Reflections with Mary Black creative practice: laughter Liz Carroll & John Doyle: Double Play

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Patrick season: another song

Patrick season is a time when many who are not Irish think of Ireland, and those who are, how ever close or distant their ties may be, think often of home, and family, of landscape, of change, of music, and of hope and courage. Those thoughts are well needed in the world this Patrick season, as ever, and as ever, music from the tradition and newer music from Ireland both have things to say that work with all this.

music to go along with these ideas




you may also want to see

Reflections with Mary Black
ceol chairlinn: sharing music in winter
and it is not Irish, but still --
now playing: Angels Unaware

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Ceol chairlinn: sharing music in winter

Through the varied political history of Ireland, people have always found ways to connect. One of those ways has been through music. Mary Black, whose father was from the north and whose mother grew up in the republic, thinks that ”When it comes to religion or difference in political belief it doesn’t matter-- if somebody likes a song, it doesn’t matter what your background is, it makes you equal to the other person who likes it. I think it’s a healing thing as well,” says Black, who among other things sang during the peace process negotiations in northern Ireland.

Music, and the connections formed through the teaching, learning, and sharing of it, was the subject of things at Ceol Chairlinn, the winter music school that just finished its fourth year of lighting up early February in north county Louth. Louth sits on the border of northern Ireland, facing County Down across Carlingford Lough. Both counties have their place in legend and in more recent history, facts which were part of the inspiration that led artistic director Gerry O’Connor and others to collaborate on the festival and school, which has grown over the years. Part of the idea behind the weekend is to allow adults and children who live in the different traditions around the area to get to know each other over sharing music .This year, there were taster concerts to allow children in nearby schools to meet the musicians who’d be offering classes, instruction across two days in flute, fiddle, tin whistle, banjo, accordion, singing, highland pipes, uillean pipes, and dance, a concert by all the tutors, and a range of sessions in pubs around the Carlingford area.

The tutors were a mix of local musicians and world renown talent. Every aspect of the weekend showed them working together with fun and enjoyment of the music and their students. The students enjoyed things as well. Two women who’d taken fiddle classes joked that they’d definitely had a full weekend “Our heads are just stuffed full of notes and tunes,” said one. “We’ve learnt so much we don’t even know how much we’ve learnt,” added her friend, laughing. Fiddle classes were taught by O’Connor and by Tommy Peoples, legendary tune smith and player with the Bothy Band among others. A man who’d taken the singing class showed the sheaf of lyrics for the songs he’d been introduced to, and when asked which one he’d liked the best, said he couldn’t choose. “They were all so brilliant to learn,” he said. “The teaching was just brilliant, so welcoming and encouraging.” The singing tutor was Cathie Ryan, well known in America and Europe for her solo career as a singer and songwriter. Cathal McConnell, of Boys of the Lough, taught flute and kept listeners engaged with his lively stories at the concert. Highland piping was taught by James Hanratty, Aine McGeeney taught tin whistle, Emmett Gill was the instructor for uillean pipes, Gary McKeown taught banjo, Elaine O’Sullivan taught accordion, and Micheal and Kathleen McGlynn taught sean nos dancing -- and received the festival’s lifetime achievement award on the concert evening as well.

A celebration and a sharing of music and the friendships and connections it allows, Ceol Chairlinn adds light and warmth to the winter season. This year -- perhaps the coldest winter Ireland has felt for some long time -- the area was blanketed with snow, but the unusally cold weather only made the three days of music, connection, friendship, learning, and laughter burn the brighter.




























































If you'd like to know about next year’s Ceol Chairlinn, information will be posted here. There are other winter music schools, in Ireland and in America. One of the best known is the Frankie Kennedy Winter School, in Donegal, started by the members of Altan and held usually around the new year. Workshops for both beginners and intermediate players are also part of Celtic Connections in Glasgow, a festival about which you’ve heard before here along the music road.

you may also want to see

Cathie Ryan: Irish and American

winter music

Irish music, Irish landscape

Molloy, Brady, Peoples

Cathie Ryan: Songwriter

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best music, 2008

Songs of heart and spirit, about life in the coal fields of the Appalachians, the western isles of Scotland, the heart of Indiana, the deep south of Mississippi, songs about winter, about love, loss, grief, healing, faith, and questions, answered and unanswered, and many other things are part of what you’ll find in this list of choices for the best recordings of 2008. the links will lead to to further information about each recording. I invite you to take some time with my list, and to let me know yours.

Gretchen Peters: Northern Lights top songwriter reflects on the quieter side of the winter season

Dual: Julie Fowlis & Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh songs in Irish and Scots Gaelic, exploring their connections and differences

Carrie Newcomer: The Geography of Light faith, hope, love, and questions -- and email gone astray


Kathy Mattea: Coal old and new songs about what it means to make a living, and a life, in coal

Caroline Herring: Lantana southern gospel and souhtern gothic both run through Herring’s stories in song

Emily Smith: Too Long Away songs from the tradtion and original songs by Smith illuminate lives and love and time through stories set in southwestern Scotland

Sarah-Jane Summers: Nesta Highland Scotland and Nordic influences meet

Mary Black: 25 years 25 songs a fine trip through Black’s ability to tell true songs and true stories through the years.
several new songs are included as well


Wilderness Plots: the dvd this is actually a dvd but it belongs here. five top songwriters singing songs and talking about creative process

Tish Hinojosa Our Little Planet country and folk with heart integrity, and originality

Capercaillie Roses & Tears Scots trad and originals with groove, beat ,invention, and thought

Heidi Talbot: in love +lighttop notch voice, top notch song selection from Tom Waits to Tim O’Brien


Beth Nielsen Chapman: Prism: the human family songbook songs of the spirit from many places



“Europe is in my blood and Texas is in my soul,” says Christine Albert of her album Paris, Texafrance

barry walsh : the crossing original piano meditations and creations

Hanneke Cassel and Christopher Lewis: Calm the Raging Sea
melodies of familiar hymns on Scottish style fiddle and guitar






you may also like to see

season of grace

listening to Christmas

:best of 2007

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Mary Black: By the Time It Gets Dark

Mary Black
By the Time It Gets Dark


Listening to Mary Black's recently released collection Twenty Five Years Twenty Five Songs has had me going back to look out the some of her earlier albums. There are two songs from this 1987 collection on the retrospective release, Pat Alger's’ Once in a Very Blue Moon and the title track, By the Time It Gets Dark. As with all of Black’s albums, her choices here show her wide ranging taste in the search for good songs and her ability to understand and add to the songwriters’ meanings.

This recording has eleven tracks and two bonus cuts [the bomus cuts were recorded live at the Cork Opera House]. Richard Thompson, Noel Brazil. Ewan MacColl, Jimmy McCarthy, Sandy Denny, Henry Mancini, Billie Holiday, a traditional song and an instrumental -- that’s just part of what’s on here, and even more interesting that her choice of music is that Black makes it all work, and all work together. It’s also true that, some twenty one years after it first came out, out stands as clear and fresh as it did back then. Over the years, Black has moved toward more sparse arrangements than she has here, and that’s to the good, but these too are uncluttered and serve the music. If there could be said to be a theme that runs through the songs, it might be change, and moving on, and recognizing that though there’s hard stuff in doing that, it may lead to good as well. All that as seen through the eyes of many fine songwriters and musicians and one gifted singer. Outstanding tracks include Trying to Get the Balance Right, Leaboy’s Lassie, and the title track.




you may also want to see

Music Road: now playing: Mary Black: 25 years 25 songs

Music Road: Reflections with Mary Black

Music Road: now playing: cathie ryan: the farthest wave

Music Road: now playing: Emily Smith: Too Long Away

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Reflections with Mary Black

“I always want to choose strong material,” Mary Black says, “something I feel I can work with and interpret and express something, and add something to the song.” The range of that material she embraces, from the enigmatic Speaking with the Angel to the bright Carolina Rua, from the searching Columbus to the celebratory Summer Sent You, from the traditional Anachie Gordon to the earthy Flesh and Blood, is apparent in the music she’s selected for her latest album 25 Songs -- 25 Years.

Though Black released her first solo album twenty five years ago, she’s actually been singing far longer than that, almost since she can remember. “My father was born and reared on Rathlin Island. It’s a little island off the north east coast of Ireland, within the six counties, so it’s not under Irish rule,” she said. “It’s an incredibly beautiful place, a place of great memories for us growing up. We were reared in the heart of Dublin city, in a business street with a shop, and to be whisked away every summer from that kind of environment to this wild kind of place that had no electricity, no running water, all the things that people take for granted in the big city but yet had this lifestyle that was so exciting to us as kids -- it was a magical place. It’s very much a part of who we are, as a family.” Her dad, Kevin, played the fiddle, and her mother, Patty, came from Dublin and was a singer “Even up into her eighties she was still singing,” Black said. They passed their passion for music along to their children. Mary is the middle child of five. Older brothers Shay and Michael, and younger brother Martin and younger sister Frances have all worked professionally in music.

Black has always loved to sing herself, although she found hard at first to be on stage in front of a microphone. “Sitting in a room, yes, I could do that, but up on stage, I was terrified. It took me a while to get over that,” she said. One of the things she’s learned over the years of performing, she reflects, is to communicate with her audiences in a relaxed way. She’s still surprised, though, when, as at a recent show in Dublin, “the audience just went mad. I tend to get lost in the song, myself, and then I’m glad people are going there with me, but I have to look around a bit to remember that and it’s still a surprise sometimes!”

In her late teens, Black began doing gigs with her brothers, and then joined the traditional band General Humbert. Irish singing star Christy Moore invited her ton a television program with him (she sang Anachie Gordon) and that began her rising profile. That traditional ballad is on her first album, but so is music by Karla Bonoff and a take on Billie Holiday’s God Bless the Child. “It didn’t really do much to clarify what kind of singer I was,” Black said, laughing.
Black took a bit more of a traditional turn when she accepted an invitation to join the renown traditional band De Dannan. She stayed with them for three years, One her best known pieces, Song for Ireland, was the first song she recorded with the band, and it’s proved a favorite the world over. Black also sang it during events surrounding the negotiations for a peace agreement in northern Ireland.

In her solo career, she’s balanced folk, pop, and traditional music, always looking for the strength of the song and and idea she can convey well. Her songs allow for both the light and shadows of life, as do her interpretations of them. If there’s one thread running through the material Mary Black chooses, it could be said to be the persistence of hope.

That’s evident too, in one of the highest profile projects in which she’s taken part, the Woman's Heartseries, which comprises three discs and spans a decade of time and the talents of dozens of the best female voices in Irish and Irish American music, including Dolores Keane, Eleanor McEvoy, Maura O’Connell, Cathie Ryan, and many others. The title track is on the 25 Years collection. “I think the lovely thing about it is that people might know Maura O'Connell, or they might know me, and they’d buy the record on that, and they get to hear all these other artists, so it was great for everyone,” Black said.

One of the two bonus tracks on 25 Years (the other is a Tom Waits cover) is Sweet Love, which Black wrote with her son Danny O’Reilly, who is a rising star with the indie band The Coronas. Song writing is something that Black has come to fairly recently. “A lot of things happened in my life these last few years, the sort things that make you really sit back and think about your life and how you feel about it, and what’s going on,“ she says . “I had ideas I wanted to put into songs, and I sat down with Danny and It was great, because it ws always something that I felt was a hurdle I might never jump.”

Did Black expect a 25th anniversary album when she was starting out? “No,” she says, laughing, “I wondered what I’d be doing when I was forty -- surely not singing, I thought.” Now in her mid fifties, Mary Black is willing to be surprised about what the future holds. “I tend not to plan ahead, to live in the moment more. That’s always been part of my personality, from the very beginning,” she says. It’s a gift that’s served her well, and she’s ready to see what the next moment -- and the next years -- will bring.

The recording is available in Ireland and will shortly be released in Europe. A US release date has not been set, but it’s possible to order the disc online from Black’s website.

The album is now available in the US from Amazon as well 25 Years 25 Songs


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Music Road: The Highland Sessions: Mo Ghile Mear video

Music Road: now playing: Mary Black: 25 years 25 songs

Music Road: now playing: Mary Black: best of

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