music and community

Music creates and celebrates community.

This is as true on stage as off, I think, and sometimes true across miles and distance.

I remember turning the radio dial as a kid to bring in the faint signals of the Grand Ole Opry broadcasts, and stations from Quebec, and Mexico, and other parts of the world. Today through internet radio I listen to music from Glasgow and Dublin and Belfast and the Highlands. There is a certain community in that -- one only has to think of all the social media going on to know that is true. Finding an unexpected community of interests is a good surprise -- great on line, better, even, in person. Musician Shannon Heaton (she's the woman in the photograph at the lower left below) had an experience of that in person connection. Have you?




















you may also wish to see

Music Road: Lovers' Well: Matt & Shannon Heaton

photographing music: connections

Delicious Baby's Photo Friday, where travelers offer new insights to the world each Friday

Shannon Heaton is one of the founders of the Boston Celtic Music Fesival, which is profiled in
Irish Music Festivals: a guide

a hundred years ago

A hundred years ago, most of the music people heard was live. They made it themselves, or their neighbors did, in parlor or front porch or church or kitchen. They went out to see someone play music, they listened and sang and played in pub or club or school room, as they worked and at home. A recent study shows that now, less than one per cent of the music most people hear is heard live. That may be unlikely to apply to many who travel here along the music road. Still, it’s an idea to think about.


Music to go along with this

Music Road: darwin song project
Music Road: wilderness plots
Music Road: ceol chairlinn: sharing music in winter

Remembering Woodstock, remembering Derry

Forty years go this month, it was Woodstock. What a long strange trip it’s been --

slide show with music and commentary from Joni Mitchell; and others, from the BBC

Life magazine’s photographer talks about
photographing at Woodstock, and the people he met there

Gallery of Photographs of Woodstock

I was not at Woodstock. But I have to say, the snippets of music with the BBC slideshow shot me straight back to those times, though most of it is music that I’ve rarely thought of since then. It was a different world -- and the same one. We carry the history forward within us. It changes with us, and we change with it.

Forty years ago this August, things were not so mellow in other parts of the world. South Africa, Viet Nam, Alabama... Northern Ireland. As peace and love were being celebrated in Woodstock, anger and fear filled the streets of Derry.
An Irish time line
and a song for those days.


you may also want to see

Remembering Woodstock (American Chronicles (History Press)

Music Road: Wilderness Plots: the dvd

Tommy Sands: Let the Circle Be Wide

-->If you'd like to support my creative work at Music Road and elsewhere,
here is a way to do that, through PayPal. Note that you do not have to have a PayPal account to do this.Thank you.

Creative practice: oasis

I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of oasis -- a place of renewal -- as a physical place, lately, in part because the folks over at the travel site Trazzler are holding a contest for writing about that idea. I’ve thought about places I might write about,and places I know I won’t. It’s also occurred to me along this track of thought that music sometimes arises from, and sometimes leads to, places of renewal in the physical world, and that music is often an oasis itself, whatever the place may be like where you hear it, or play it. I’d welcome your thoughts on any of that.



You may also want to see

Music Road: Songs of Homecoming, to Scotland and other places

Music Road: Irish music, Irish landscape

Music Road: ten songs

other things I’ve written about for Trazzler including Celtic Connections in Glasgow, the Sean McGuire Mural on the Falls Road in Belfast, Veggie Planet in Cambridge, Massachusetts and the Cactus Cafe in Austin, Texas

-->If you'd like to support my creative work,
here is a way to do that, through PayPal. Note that you do not have to have a PayPal account to do this.Thank you.