MacNamara's Band

A bit of fun to pipe you out of St.Patrick's season, a vintage sing-along cartoon that wades through some other tributes to the annual stereotype festival before it settles into a bouncing-shamrock rendition of Shamus O'Connor's war-time hit.


And what a hit it was too, solid gold for Bing Crosby back in 1945, you can hear (and sing along) that one over at Brownie-locks.


Apropos to our band-book, this song is (a tad satirically) about a community band, from the famed St. Mary's Fife and Drum Band out of Limerick, the four featured McNamara brothers emigrated to the US in the 1900's to form an ex-pat musical unit immortalized here by Bing's hit, and which, after some lyric edits and clensings, begat today's rollicking repertoire anthem to St.Patrick's.


Amazon: MacNamara's Band

Irish Tune Redux

Ok, I couldn't leave you hanging on that last rendition without resolving the cadence into the real thing, and here it is, with Anthony Parnther teasing the Derry air out of the Tennessee Brass.


It's perfect for St. Pat's, it's the perfect Irish song and here's why: It's the juiciest tune in the repetoire! First off, it is an Irish tune, an ancient Irish tune, so it has that bit of street cred to start, but before you get any farther than the name, you're already embroiled in a particularly Irish problem wincing between the Derry's and the Londonderry's. Who says concert band music isn't political.


Only, it gets better.

Irish Tune (from County Derry)

Seeing as it's St.Patrick's day, and in recognition both of how one of the all-time repetoire favourites is Percy Aldrich Grainger's beautiful Irish Tune from County Derry and how concert bands so rarely include vocalists, here's a special Irish treat, Grainger's Irish Tune lovingly rendered here by the fabulous Leprechaun Brothers! Top o' th' Mornin' to you.

Amazon: The Muppet Show

Be Thou My Vision

"Riches I heed not

Nor man's empty praise"


For a Sunday aprè St.Pat's, a common Irish hymn, rendered here in Russell Powell's first ever arrangement and I hope he kept doing those because it is the making of this music ourselves that is the thing. It is in the here are we together where the mystic magic lurks and taunts us to unlock it, and no amount of post-production edits and 'corrections' can really change that. Music is fundamental to the human species, and like our other staples of fresh air and sunshine, for all its flickrs and faulters, standing before any widest-screen surround-sound plasma is still a plastic flower by comparison.


Amazon: Be Thou My Vision