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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At the turning of the year: music and change

The turning of the years is often a time of change, a time of looking forward and looking back, a time for forgiveness, for beginning anew. The sort of music we meet here along the music road speaks of all these things, at times. Here are several albums which make good companions for such reflection. In the songs on her album Before & After, Carrie Newcomer invites consideration of the joy and hardship of change, and the mysteries involved with it Tommy Sands knows a good bit about change as it plays out through politics, and through the movements of history. Take a listen to how he puts this into song on Arising from the Troubles The gifts of winter and longing for spring are both part of the landscape Jennifer Cutting and her fellow musicians in the Ocean Orchestra explore through their music on Song of Solstice Legend and myth, the natural world, and how those resonate with the courage it takes to risk change are part of what Cathie Ryan considers through the songs she covers and the songs she writes for her album The Farthest Wave you may also wish to see Music Road: rest in music Music Road: Best Music, 2011

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Music of Healing: Arising from the Troubles from Tommy Sands

Musician Tommy Sands is a gentle man with a powerful message, a songwriter who talks of hurt and healing, division and reconnection in his songs. He has taken his songs of peace and justice from prisons in Nevada to community groups in the Middle East. The heart of his music, though, comes from his home country County Down in Northern Ireland

Down lies right along the border with the Republic, a borderland that has seen more than its share of bloodshed and division among folk who would otherwise be a community of neighbors. It is a beautiful place, a land of mountain and water, legend and story. From these wellsprings, Tommy Sands draws his music.

In Irish history and legend, there comes a time when leader Fionn MacCumhaill is talking with his people of music. “What is the most beautiful music in the world,?” he asks them, and they speak up for the songs of birds, the laughter of a girl, the baying of hounds. Fionn agrees that they are all good, but he says. “The most beautiful music of all is the music of what happens.”

“Growing up, I heard songs all around me, songs of emigration and things that were very meaningful to those who wrote them, traditional songs. Then there were things happening around me, and I felt, as a songwriter, that I wanted to write about what was going on around me. I don’t know how historical Fionn MacCumhaill was exactly, “ says Tommy Sands, “but sometimes mythology is truer than factual stuff.”

For his album Arising from the Troubles, Sands has gathered together eighteen songs, some of which he’s been singing live for years but has not before put on record. They come from and speak of the political and personal aspects of the troubled times of Northern Ireland, the history and the present day. As well as the hard times, anger, and pain, they speak too of the possibilities of hope and peace,

Sands is joined on the album by his son Fionan and his daughter Moya. Moya takes the lead in singing on A Stone’s Throw. In four verses, Sands and his daughter illuminate the idea of communities of people who grow up separately together, and the changes that have taken place from the time Sands went to school with that situation to the time his daughter did. If you are familiar with American songwriter Kate Campbell’s work, you may see parallels with her song about growing up separately together black and white in the American south, a song called A Cotton Field Away.

We’ll Sing It All Over and You Sold Us Down the River are both anthems of a sort, from differing perspectives. Sing It All Over is a forceful statement of principles of the civil right movement in Northern Ireland (part of the words you hear in the background are ‘one man one vote one one vote’), while Sold Us Down the River is a song Sands wrote after speaking with a Protestant neighbor and thinking about the man’s feelings of being expected to be loyal to the crown and then let down by the actions of the British government.

Sailing Through the Sky explores a poetic, thoughtful, and bittersweet idea about being in prison. Troubles recalls the uncertainty of years when a strange car coming down the road or a word spoken at the wrong time might lead to fear and even death.

The sadness, pain, anger, and fear is context, though, for hope and even humor. The Mixed Marriage, a duet with Dolores Keane, finds the two singers poking fun at differences. Pete Seeger joins in for The Music of Healing, a song which became the genesis of an annual event exploring and celebrating ways music can reach across troubled times. In the opening verse, Sands writes

Don’t beat the drum, that frightens the children
Don’t sing songs about winning and losing
Sit down beside me, the green fields are bleeding
Sing me the music of healing.

and in the chorus repeats

Ah, the heart’s a wonder
Stronger than the guns of thunder
Even when we’re torn asunder
Love will come again.

It is a song Sands has sung across the world, and in his hometown of Rostrevor in County Down. As Sands was growing up there, the violence and division of the Troubles was coming on, but he saw another side, too. “When my parents played music -- my father played the fiddle and my mother played accordion -- people would come into the house, and it didn't matter what religion you were, what politics, soon I’d see their feet tapping in time, all to the same tune,” he says.

With songs that put poetry in politics and politics into poetry, and music into both, Tommy Sands keeps carrying that idea on.

you may also wish to see
Music Road: Tommy Sands: Let the Circle Be Wide
Music Road: now playing: Radio Ballads: Northern Ireland
thoughts about the summer riots in Belfast, at Perceptive Travel

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Listening to Christmas: Aoife Clancy, Tommy Sands, Matt Heaton

Those who make music for a living enjoy listening to music as well, and that’s especially true at Christmas time. A number of your favorite musicians chimed in with their ideas this season, and quite a varied lot they choose, from The Chipmunks to the monks of Glenstal Abbey, from surf music to American folk to Latin hymns. They had so many interesting things to say that this lively conversation will fill several posts.


To begin, here are Christmas favorites from Aoife Clancy, Tommy Sands, and Matt Heaton.

Aoife Clancy calls on memories of family this time of year:

"You’re not going to believe who I listen to during the holidays...The Clancy Brothers Christmas Album! I know, I know...I was almost going to say Bing Crosby, but that wouldn't really be the truth. That album brings back such lovely memories of Christmas day for me at home in Carrick-on-suir. I was always the one in the kitchen with my mother preparing dinner, while the rest of the family set the table or just hung out in the kitchen and chatted.

We'd always put on that CD because it wasn't the usual Christmas songs. It had some really lovely carols on there along with the Wren song, and Christmas in Carrick, written by a relative of mine, Seamus McGrath. Actually myself and Robbie use quite a few of those carols in our own Celtic Christmas show.

It was kind of funny. If anyone saw us they'd think we were a bit mad, serving food while dancing and singing around the kitchen to the Clancy Brothers Christmas
album! Then it was off to my grandmother’s house in Ring, County Waterford where the rest of the relatives would congregate for a few drinks and sing songs till about three o clock in the morning...And believe me, everyone sang...that's why it didn't end till three AM.

Now my father has passed on, I live in the States and my other siblings have their own families to celebrate Christmas with. Ah well, at least I have my own copy of the Clancy Brothers Christmas CD to dance around to in my own kitchen this Christmas. Not quite the same...but it's still comforting to hear their voices, and I'll always have the memories, wherever I spend Christmas."

In his music, Tommy Sands considers ideas of peace and justice as often as those of love and of Irish history, and sometimes all in the same song. He has a seasonal album out called To Shorten the Winter. Here’s what he is thinking of just now about the holidays

"Christmas can rouse us around a common hearth of humanity so that the wintery elements, some of our own making, can be more easily chorused against. I tend to be drawn to songs that shield us from the onslaught of the jingle jangle commercialism and nudge us towards the warmth and needs of shared humanity.

I find inspiration in all sorts of songs, from John McCutcheon's Christmas In The Trenches to the Weavers line "Why can't we have Christmas the whole year around," from Patrick Kavanagh's Christmas Childhood to Louis Armstrong's Wonderful World.

Christmas can also gather us well beyond the borders of category and season to throw back our heads and sing whatever we feel like singing, like 'whack fol the daddio whack fol the daddio there's whiskey in the jar.'"


Matt Heaton often performs in a duo with his wife Shannon.Together with her he’s recorded a holiday album called Fine Winter's Night,which includes original songs and tunes of the season and traditional music they like for this time of year, as well. Matt says of his holiday choices

"Singing wise, it's all the stuff from Fine Winter's Night, which is always fun to bring out once a year. Recording wise, we have a box of Christmas cds. Favorites include:

Tuck Andress--Hymns Carols & Songs About Snow--genius solo guitar recording.
A Very Froggy Christmas--late 80s, kind of lo fi samples of frogs doing the hits. really tacky but we love it.
Dwight Yoakam--Come on Christmas--'cause there's nothing like a country Christmas record.

We also love listening to the service of Lessons & Carols from Kings College England. Best choral singing you'll ever hear.

and I'm putting the Los Straightjackets Christmas CD on my wish list for this year. Surf guitar versions of the classics!"


The Heatons and Tommy Sands have holiday albums out, and Aoife Clancy often does a series of holiday concerts in the New England area with her cousin, songwriter Robbie O’Connell. Sands and the Heatons tour at Christmas time as well. All worth hearing. Stay tuned here along the music road for more Christmas listening choices from your favorite artists, and other holiday music ideas to come.

you may also wish to see

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

Music Road: 6 of the best Christmas Songs

Kathy Mattea: Mary Did You Know?

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Music and hope: Derry

Memory and emotion have run high in Derry with the release of the Saville Report, the result of a twelve year investigation into the events of Bloody Sunday thirty eight years ago. People lay dead on the streets of Derry then, and it is one of the events which deepened the divisions and struggles across the political and personal landscapes of Ireland.

Music has always been a part of the conflict, and the grieving, and the reach for reconciliation. On his album Let the Circle Be Wide Tommy Sands has a song woven from the familiar calls of both sides of the conflict, another one that considers the changes war and anger can bring in a person, a song that asks questions about times for change, and several songs, including the title track, offering hope.






















Several years ago, the BBC did a series of programs in which they invited writers to create songs based on interviews with people involved in certain events and ways of life. Radio Ballads: Northern Ireland contains both songs and spoken word from people with varying perspectives on the events of the last forty years in the north of Ireland.

Cara Dillon had a chart hit with a song Tommy Sands wrote which puts the political struggles into the context everyday life, called There Were Roses.Here is a video of Cara Dillon singing There Were Roses live.

There are other songs of conflict, and of reconciliation, of history, and of hope across the north of Irealnd, among them Sean Tyrell’s The 12th Of July (Lament For The Children)
and Robbie O’Connell’s There Is Hope. When people sing together, there is the possibility of hope.

you may also wish to see

Music Road: patrick season: far from home
Music Road: Reflections with Mary Black
Derry: healing through the arts
and Delicious Baby's Photo Friday, where travelers offer new insights to the world each Friday

this is part of a Lonely Planet Blogsherpa carnival on favourite places, hosted by Anne-Sophie Redisch at
Sophie’s World

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Best Music, 2009

Haunting music of the American and Canadian West; the infinitely flexible music of Ireland paired with music from Thailand, Norway, and India; polka played on trumpet, violin , and digeridoo; Scottish traditional fiddle tunes next to a tune from China; Robert Burns songs and a song that references Pablo Neruda and Wendell Berry; tunes and songs from the highlands of Scotland, the American south, and all across Ireland from Donegal to Down and Belfast to Clare, and from the plains of South Dakota to Music Row in Nashville are all here. along with some of the best voices and best playing around. What these albums have in common is grace, creativity, vision, and heart, along with knowledge of and respect for tradition and heritage. Take a listen.



Matt and Shannon Heaton Lovers’ Well
songs and tunes from the Irish tradition reflecting on love’s many facets
Gretchen Peters: One to the Heart, One to the Head a trip through the American west in legend and reality
Hanneke Cassel For Reasons Unseen
Scottish style fiddle with fire and grace

Dakota Lullabyy: Albert & Gage
a treasure trove of Americana songs
Claire Lynch Whatcha Gonna Do faith. love. heartbreak, bluegrass, and trains, from one of the best singers around
Tommy Sands: Let the Circle Be Wide Danny Boy traced back to its ancient roots and the future of Ireland imagined, among other things
various artists Darwin Song Project the scientist in context of his family and his world, as seen by eight top songwriters from England, Scotland, and the US

Emily Smith and Jamie McClennan Adoon Winding Nith a lively take on lesser known songs from Robert Burns
Lauren MacColl Strewn with Ribbons fiddle that evokes the highlands of Scotland
Bill Cooley The Return Journey a guitar journey of insight and courage
String Sisters: Live a fiery combination of Nordic, Irish, Scottish, and American fiddle
Liz Carroll & John Doyle: Double Play
two of the best, Carroll on fiddle and Doyle on guitar, with songs and tunes from Ireland and Carroll’s fine originals. it’s nominated for a Grammy
Jerry Christmas: Jerry Douglas
master Dobro player’s soulful take on holiday standards
Jim Malcolm First Cold Day
original and traditional songs from highland Perthshire Malcolm’s a great singer too
Cherish The Ladies: A Star in the East
sparkling view of the winter holidays with Irish American flair
Ian Tyson: Yellowhead to Yellowstone
the real west in the weathered voice of a music legend
Alison Brown: The Company You Keep
banjo at its most creative

honorable mention
three very different and very refreshing aspects of Americana music, and polka as you’ve never heard it before
Caroline Herring: Golden Apples of the Sun

Sara Milonovich Daisycutter

Johnsmith gravity of grace

Polkastra: Apolkalypse Now

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Ireland, north and south

News of violence in the North of Ireland comes in these recent days. Things are in a better situation, politically, now than in the past, but killing and loss and grief are no ways to build a lasting peace. Tommy Sands, who is from Rostrevor in Down, wrote There Were Roses, which Cara Dillon, who is from Dungiven in Derry, sings in this video. They both got it right.



you may also want to see

ten songs
ceol chairlinn: sharing music in winter
Tommy Sands: Let the Circle Be Wide
Radio Ballads: Northern Ireland
story about recent events in NI, from the Scotsman
a more hopeful story, from the Belfast Telegraph

Tommy Sands: Let the Circle Be Wide

Let the Circle Be WideTommy Sands is a musician whose ideas are rooted and grounded in his home in County Down, Northern Ireland.

He’s a man whose vision, shaped by the beauty and the community of his native place as wellas by its location in politically troubled borderlands, includes the value of connection, both personal and global. His latest album, Let the Circle Be Wide, celebrates all parts of this vision.

On the intimate level, it celebrates connections of family, which has been important to Sands since he began his musical life performing with his brothers and sisters in the 1960s.

His daughter Moya and son Fionán join him here, with both adding their singing and Fionán playing banjo and mandolin, Moya adding fiddle , whistle, and bodhran. Moya’s interest in the history of the sometimes overdone song Danny Boy led back through the history of the melody known as the Derry Air to an earlier song in Irish, called The Young Man's Dream, Aisling an Oigfhir, which has to do with dreaming a new reality.

Sands took this as a starting point to translate and recreate the song,which he uses to open the recording. There’s another song based in family which will resonate with anyone who has lost someone young. Sands’ brother, Dino, was killed in an auto accident, and You’ll Never Grow Old is, Sands says, a song which took him thirty years to write.

Time for Asking Why is likely to be the most controversial song on the recording. It was written in the wake of September 11th, and it is, Sands says, "not a song against America. It’s a song for America.” The song Rovers of Wonder brings in international connection through melody and harmony, as several Mongolian throat singers and fiddlers Sands met on his travels join in.

There's the familiar song A Stor Mo Chroi, and a funny song about Sean Maguire, a fiddler whose music is celebrated amdist the murals of poltiics along the Falls Road in Belfast. There’s a thought provoking song about the changes warand discord may bring home, in Fields of Daises, and a celebration of coming home, Carlingford Bay.

There are two songs President Obama might like, too, as he begins his work. One is the title song, Let the Circle Be Wide. Sands’ own words are the best description. “It’s a song of welcome I have sing all over the world,” he says.

The other is called Make Those Dreams Come True, with nods to past, present and possibilities, and a chorus that resonates into the new year

yYou may also like to see

listening through the changes

tommy sands: to shorten the winter

now playing: Carrie Newcomer: The Geography of Light

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Tommy Sands: To shorten the winter

To Shorten the Winter: an Irish christmas with Tommy Sands


Tommy Sands opens this collection with a song of hope and celebration for peace in Ireland at the holidays. Called Like the First Time It’s Christmas Time, it’s a piece he wrote at the request of fellow musician Dolores Keane (who turns up as a guest later on in the program). It forms both an opener and, in a way, a center piece for the music and the ideas here. One might even take the winter to be shortened in the title to be a wish for lasting peace across the island of Ireland.

One of the ways Sands celebrates that idea is, oddly enough, or maybe not so oddly, by including the 60s classic A Whiter Shade of Pale. “At Christmas time when all barriers, musical and others, melted in the wake of a few sods of turf, we threw back out heads and sang,” he says, and this was part of such evenings of singing north and south of the border. Liam O’Flynn adds pipes to the song, a very Celtic touch that works very well.

Down by the Lagan Side is another Sands original, written to welcome the beginning of the peace process in Northern Ireland. Sands is from Rostrevor, in County Down, literally a stone’s throw across Carlingford Lough from the Republic, and he’s felt and seen the worst of the troubles and been part of the best of the healing. In part to celebrate that healing, he pairs Patrick Kavanagh’s A Christmas Childhood with his own A Call to Hope, and offers his own recollections of happy Christmases in Heart of Love.

Sands has often put his music where is politics are, so it’s not surprising that he might write a song seeing Jesus as a revolutionary -- which, of course, He was. That song is called The Bushes of Jerusalem. The Mixed Marriage is an amusing song about divisions political and personal, for which Dolores Keane joins in. Sands’ storyteller’s voice is well suited to the stories he tells, including his take on another Kavanagh song, Raglan Road, which has been recorded by many including Luke Kelly and Mary Black. Sands gives a nod to the courage of emigrants and immigrants in Welcome Kind Stranger and brings the personal and the political, the music and the songs home with Slan Abhaile, safe travels, safe home. It’s a seasonal recording well suited for listening the year around.

you might also enjoy

Matt & Shannon Heaton: Fine Winter's Night

cathie ryan: the farthest wave

listening to Christmas

Gretchen Peters: Northern Lights

-->Your support for Music Road is welcome and needed. If you are able to chip in, 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.