The latest offerings in the world of Irish folk music

There’s a lot of great new music this month from Irish artists with decades of experience and those just starting out.

The Fureys

The first up is from legendary family The Fureys. Well worth a shout for the name alone, Finbar Furey has his first CD release in the U.S. in six years, and it’s a gem.

As lead singer and uillean pipe player for The Furey Brothers, a band he shared with brothers Eddie, George and the late Paul, Finbar’s multi-instrumentalism and haunting vocals were a standout part of the Irish music diaspora of the 1970’s. The group’s breakthrough came as the opening act to the Clancy Brothers tour of the U.S. in 1969, and from then on they became headliners, being voted “Act of the Year” by England’s hugely influential DJ John Peel in 1972.

 

The Fureys’ innovative sound of pipes and guitar was in fact initially barred from Ewan McCall’s folk club in London as it was not traditional to combine those two instruments, an example of the great McCall occasionally having an English stick up his backside (no letters please, I’m English). The sound, of course, was subsequently taken up all around, from Planxty to Riverdance. And as with so many great players I’ve mentioned in the past, the Fureys come from an all-embracing musical family.

 “Our parents started us off in music when we were very young — my father (Ted) played the fiddle and the pipes; my mother played melodeon and five-string banjo. She was a wonderful singer as well. We lived and breathed music,” Finbar writes in the introduction to his new CD "Finbar Furey" on Cosmic Trigger records.

By way of introducing the collection of songs on the CD, he says, “This collection of songs are memories from things I’ve seen, places I’ve been, people I’ve spoken to, laughed with, cried with, drunk with, played music with. [They are about] life, love, deceit, loneliness, joy and happiness, and I hope they bring back memories to you and that we can share that moment in time.”

The songs, old and new, are a powerhouse of singing that contains echoes of Johnny Cash and even the later Bob Dylan, but as much as anything, they are the soul mate of another Irish treasure, Sean Tyrrell, in that they have a depth and passion only those singers that know their native land inside out can achieve. With musical accompaniment from the likes of Frankie Gavin on fiddle and all the Fureys on guitars, this is essential listening.

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Nster.com