He’s yer man: : “The Ballad of Ronnie Drew“

I’ve discovered an amazing treasure on YouTube; live concert clips of now-old Irish traditional music from the 1970s. This is the early days of the ‘modern’ (instrument-driven) folk revivial, led by furry hippies with tremendous technical skills and a passion of wild abandon. This is music I know from cassettes and LPs and it’s a shock to see the musician in action, actually playing the music. So, for instance, I found a bunch of clips of The Bothy Band, an Irish trad supergroup, very influential in their day, on YouTube, posted by devotees. Here are three classic clips from 1976, when the Bothies included Paddy Keenan, Micheal O Dhomhnaill, Triona Ni Dhomhnaill, Donal Lunny, Kevin Burke, and Matt Molloy:

“Sixteen Come Next Sunday”

“Old Hag You Have Killed Me”

“Pretty Peg/Craig’s Pipes”

But that’s really just a sampling; there’s much more –video recorded live on some unfortunate Scandanavian tour, appearances at folk music festivals, talk show appearances, and the list goes on and on. There’s also a style of YouTube posting where the song from an album recording plays behind still images, which is useful for listening but not really the same experience as actually seeing what the ’81 Lisdoonvarna show actually looked like.

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