February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
The Boys of the Lough, celebrating their 20th year, performed first, and Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys, advertised as “special guests,” followed. (Garrison Keillor of “A Prairie Home Companion” was the emcee.) I was puzzled why the house was not full for the Boys of the Lough set, which was being taped for a recording (“Live at Carnegie Hall,” Sage Arts, 1989), until I saw a flurry of patrons rush from the back bar and vestibule to their seats in time to catch the opening licks of Monroe’s band. I also noticed several patrons who raptly watched the Boys of the Lough depart for the same back bar and vestibule before the beginning of Monroe’s set.
What was going on?
I asked this question of several attendees afterward. To summarize their response: the Celtic crowd wants to hear Celtic music; the bluegrass crowd wants to hear bluegrass; and nary the twain do meet. I had watched a kind of musical apartheid.
And yet these two genres of music are actually distant cousins, with Irish and Scots music influencing old-time, rural Southern music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that anticipated bluegrass in the 1940s, of which Bill Monroe was rightly dubbed “the father.”
To be sure, there were some boundary-breaking precedents before the Carnegie Hall concert of Feb. 23, 1988. Four years earlier, Aly Bain, the Boys of the Lough fiddler, issued his first solo album, which included “Waiting for the Federals,” featuring five-string banjoist Tommy Thompson and bassist Jack Thompson of the Red Clay Ramblers. Also that year, on his “Up Close” recording, fiddler Kevin Burke did an admirable job on Monroe’s “Jerusalem Ridge.”
In 1988 uilleann piper Davy Spillane issued “Atlantic Bridge,” a solo album mixing Irish trad, bluegrass, and country rock that produced only mixed results.
In contrast, uilleann piper Jerry O’Sullivan successfully recorded an American old-timey tune, “Mike in the Wilderness,” with old-timey players Rafe Stefanini on fiddle and John Herrmann on guitar and five-string banjo for his second solo album, “The Gift,” in 1998.
Mick Moloney brought in such American old-timey musicians as Bruce Molsky and Beverly Smith for his notable 2002 album, “Far From the Shamrock Shore.” Molsky returned the favor this year by inviting Moloney in for his solo album, “Contented Must Be,” and in 2000 Molsky featured East Clare fiddler Martin Hayes on a twin-fiddle track of “Poor Man’s Troubles.”
On their 2003 album “The Road Less Traveled,” Waterford-based band Dan_ covered “Peg and Awl,” which lead vocalist Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh heard Molsky sing on a tour with Moloney. This year, on his solo album, “No Place Like Home,” Tipperary-born Gerry O’Connor, the most technically dazzling four-string banjo player on the planet, made the Kentucky Colonels’ 1964 rendition of “Billy in the Lowground” his own while also putting his distinctive stamp on “The Temperance Reel,” better-known in Irish traditional circles as “The Teetotaler.”
In short, the once apparent rift between Irish traditional and American old-timey or bluegrass has largely healed through open minds, unclogged ears, and further, tasteful experimentation. That makes 29-year-old Eric Merrill’s self-issued “The Western Star: Irish Music From America” (Yodel-Ay-Hee Records 051) all the more impressive.
A Boston resident for the last five years, this Seattle-born singer and multi-instrumentalist (fiddle, viola, five-string banjo, guitar) has familial roots in Ireland, with ancestral names like Furey and Cannon. Merrill was the first American to earn Irish traditional music certification at University College Cork, and while attending UCC, he took fiddle lessons from Cill na Martra’s Connie O’Connell and a dance class from Joe O’Donovan, a highly influential instructor from Cork City. The busy pub next to Merrill’s apartment in Cork was called the Western Star, hence the title of his solo CD. (Denis Murphy and Julia Clifford’s classic “The Star Above the Garter” album from the 1960s additionally figures in Merrill’s title choice.)
But Merrill’s roots are also planted in Eastern Idaho, where his great-grandparents homesteaded and his grandmother Helen Grace (n