Track Listing

1. The Boatman's Dance
2. Pat Murphy Of The Irish Brigade
3. Skibereen
4. The Irish Volunteers
5. Erin's Green Shore
6. Green Grows The Laurel
7. You Lovers All
8. When The Breaker Starts Up Full Time
9. No Irish Need Apply
10. My Uncle Dan McCann
11. Paddy On The Railway
12. The Mulligan Guard
13. Maloney The Rolling Mill Man
14. Clancy's Wooden Wedding
15. The Kellys
16. Sweet King Williamstown
17. Daisy Bell

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #215782 in Music
• Released on: 2002-02-12
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.com
Mick Moloney was born in Limerick, Ireland, but makes his home in the U.S. As on 1995's Out of Ireland, his subject is the Irish in America, specifically how generations of desperate immigrants took ship, made landfall, struggled for their livelihoods, and, finally, achieved economic and social parity. He is a convincing storyteller, inhabiting the lives of railroad laborers, sailors, Civil War volunteers, and separated lovers. Backup singers Beverley Smith and Saul Broudy perform with rare empathy and grace. Fiddler Eileen Ivers, late of Riverdance, is rich toned and idiomatic, but Bruce Molsky and Marie Reilly are also remarkably fine players. Standouts include an affecting version of "Skibereen," a famine-era dirge describing the deliberate, relentless starvation of an entire village. And on "Sweet King Williamstown," a lad from steerage survives the sinking of the Titanic only to meet his fate during World War I. The accompanying book is sold separately. --Christina Roden

Customer Reviews

passion, humor, tragedy, and music to match
Far from the Shamrock Shore is an ambitious, expertly executed treatment of the mostly forgotten tradition of Irish-American song. The accents here are as much American as Irish, and so are the musical settings, which owe more to 19th-Century string bands than to Celtic flute-and-pipe orchestras. No one, in other words, will confuse what he or she hears with an Altan or Chieftains recording. Instead, Celtic-revival pioneer and folklorist Mick Moloney highlights the varieties of music sung and performed by a people finding their way in a New World; though they have not forgotten where they came from, the old country is receding into fond memory and sentimental mist.

The result is a wide-ranging selection of period folk ballads and popular songs. In those days, Moloney shows, these two genres often overlapped, and they freely plundered each other's lyrics and melodies. Though written by Dan Emmett (the Northern minstrel-show composer best known for "Dixie"), the terrific "Boatman's Dance" sounds as authentic a riverman's song as "Rock About My Saro Jane." Moloney, in fact, speculates that Emmett may have based "Dance" on a forgotten Ohio River song sung by African-American boatmen.

More representative of a purer, older Irish tradition are "Green Grows the Laurel," "Paddy Works on the Railway" (done in a variant you probably have not heard before), "You Lovers All," and "Erin's Green Shore." Several powerful Civil War-era songs -- including the irresistible patriotic rouser and barroom bellow "The Irish Volunteer" -- attest to the significant role newly arrived Irish immigrants played in that great and bloody conflict.

This is a splendid recording, an excursion into history full of the passion, humor, hard times, and wonderful music of those who lived it and made it.