Celtic folk
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Song of the Week: The Children’s March by The River Drivers
Happy Mother’s Day to all you moms, especially to you Mother Jones. This song by the Bristol Borough-born Celtic folk group The River Drivers chronicles the efforts of Mother Jones (Mary G. Harris Jones), an Irish-American labor organizer, to force the government to enforce child labor laws in Pennsylvania mines and mills. In 1903, she led a group of factory children from Kensington in Philadelphia to the home of President Theodore Roosevelt in New York, […] Read More
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By Denise Foley
Song of the Week: “Ladder to the Sun” by House of Hamill
The birth of House of Hamill, a Celtic folk duo (now trio), is one of those “met cute” stories movies are made of. Rose Baldino’s band, the Harleysville-based Burning Bridget Cleary, was scheduled to perform at the 2014 Folk Alliance International Conference in Kansas City but her band members were delayed by bad weather. So she approached Brian Buchanan, front man for Canadian Celtic rock band, Enter the Haggis, who agreed to play guitar for […] Read More
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John Byrne’s Songwriting Skills Take Center Stage
Standing in front of the noontime crowd at WXPN’s Free at Noon concert on this St. Patrick’s Day, John Byrne sounded almost giddy. “How are ye all?” he called to the crowd as he and his eponymous band launched into their version of the Dubliners’ “The Twang Man,” the story of a man who kills his lover’s new partner, then rolled right into “The Well Below the Valley,” an ancient tale of incest and infanticide, with […] Read More