1. The Winding Banks of Erne
The words by William Allingham (1824-89) are resonant of Goldsmith’s the Deserted Village in the manner in which a lost place is reconstructed in the mind and this, perhaps, accounts for its longevity despite being wed to a dismal waltz tune and strutted out by
too many three-piece bands for too many years. Sean Donnelly has here
added a far better melody of his own.

2. Come o’er the Mountain
Small books of popular songs called “Chap Books”, with their classical references, were fond of such rustic courting songs as this, and country singers, whether in Ireland or in Britain, were fond of singing them. And why not, with their harmless humour and their
innocence? Sean learned this version from the celebrated Co. Antrim
singer Len Graham.

3. The Blackbird of Slane
Francis Ledwidge (1867-1917) wrote these words: He shall not hear the bittern cry / In the wild sky where he is lain / Nor voices of the sweeter birds / Above the wailing of the rain for Thomas MacDonagh, executed for his part in the Easter Rising of 1916. A year later Ledwidge himself was dead -“blown to bits” according to the army chaplain’s report- during the third battle of Ypres. He had joined the Inniskilling Fusiliers as one of those Irish patriots who had hoped that by doing so Britain would grant Home Rule to Ireland after the war. Sean Donnelly’s Tyrone-born grandfather was another: he was killed at Mons at the age of 27. Now Ledwidge’s words for MacDonagh are cut into his own stone, which marks the spot where Ledwidge died. This moving song is about Ledwidge rather than by him, its title alluding to his love of birds and his many naturalist poems. Brendan
Monaghan’s elegiac whistle and pipes accompaniment lends great poignancy to Sean’s performance.

4. Western Highway
Co. Clare man Gerry O’Beirne’s truck-driver’s song is a lyrical paean to life on the road, with all its melancholies and regrets. This multi-faceted singer-songwriter is well enough travelled to have picked up a range of idioms and he is adept at writing such a song and
making it sound authentic while avoiding the maudlin sentimentality which mars so many of its genre. Sean Donnelly brings it back home to Ireland with his understated delivery.

5. The Mountains of Mourne
If Percy French (1854-1920) had never written another song this one would have ensured his immortality. Happily, he wrote many others which have become part of every Irish singer’s consciousness, among them Cutting the Corn in Creeslough, Phil the Fluter’s Ball, and the exquisite Gortnamona. He came from the Anglo-Irish side of the fence, and much of his material has that “quaint” Irishness so beloved by Hibernophiles. No matter. He brought wit and pathos to his songs, sometimes even in the same stanza, and you can hear this unique blend of humour and longing in this, arguably his most celebrated song. The tune he used is a derivative of Carraig Donn, and if you listen carefully you will hear traces of that old air from Flight of the Wild Geese days of 1691. This is mainstream “folk”, but Sean Donnelly has never been shy of performing such material to great acclaim: his versions of Homes of Donegal and Isle of Innisfree on other albums are rightly celebrated. The fact that he lives in Newcastle, Co. Down, at the foot of the
Mountains of Mourne, adds an extra piquancy to this recording.

6. The Star of Logy Bay
Logy Bay is a tiny fishing community just north of St John’s in Newfoundland, but that hardly matters, for this is a come-all-ye which might have come from anywhere. It even resembles the English folksong The Bonny Labouring Boy, and the Irish songs Bunclody and The Inniskilling Dragoon, with their themes of love thwarted by obstructive parents. The sympathetic keyboard counterpoint is by Gerard Dornan, the hard-working producer and engineer on this album.

7. I Wish my Love was a Red Red Rose
This enchanting song which, with its garden, flowers and cuckoo motifs, is really more English than Irish, despite the fact that there are floating verses from several Irish songs scattered among the lyrics and the tune, among them The Jug of Punch and Mary of Dungloe. Sean heard the song from Mrs Sarah Makem from Co. Armagh, and again from the late David Hammond who knew a thing or two about folksongs. The song has already been recorded by Sean on his early album One Day
we Saw the Sun.

8. I’m A Stranger Here
The poet Patrick Kavanagh once wrote When Drake was winning seas for England / We sailed in puddles of the past… And here, in his own song, Sean Donnelly suggests that looking backwards too often is not such a good idea, and that revisiting childhood scenes is a risky enterprise. He learned this salutary lesson when he recently visited the small
Co. Tyrone village where he grew up, only to find that he knew nobody there -and nobody knew him! Adding her own beautiful and too-brief harmony is Siobhan Skates.

9. Hard Town
Eamon Friel, who wrote this song, says that it is not about his native Derry. However, it is redolent of modern Derry, a neo-realism word picture which is captured in Friel’s own recording of the song, sung in his very Derry voice. Friel sees it as a song with wider
references, and so it is; but it takes an outsider’s voice to lift it from its parochial origins and give it a more universal relevance. Eamon Friel, an admirer of Sean Donnelly’s interpretations of his songs, should be pleased with this! Once again, Siobhan Skates adds a telling and affecting harmony and Gerard Dornan’s piano is highly expressive.

10. Now the Swallows are Away
Summer is ending, winter is approaching, and Martin Donnelly (no relative of Sean’s) captures this metamorphosis in the countryside in his melancholic song. Martin, from Co. Antrim, performs it on his own album Earthbound.

11. The Ballad of Amelia Earhart
Red River Dave McEnery (1914-2002) was a contemporary American ballad writer who found his inspiration in the lurid headlines of his time. The Ballad of Patty Hearst and The California Hippy Murders are two of his eye-catching titles. His Amelia Earhart song records the disappearance of the famous aviatrix near Honolulu on 2 July 1937.
There is a monument to her where she landed accidentally in a field near Derry City on 21 May 1932 while attempting to fly to Paris from Newfoundland. Sean sings this for his niece Claire.

JOHN PADDY BROWNE

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Upcoming Events and Official Album Launch Dates

Friday 16th July, 2010

THE LODGE ARTS CENTRE, CASTLEWELLAN, CO. DOWN

SEÁN DONNELLY IN CONCERT AT THE "CELTIC FUSION FESTIVAL"
AT 8pm

Tickets available from the festival box office at the Lodge Castlewellan

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Wednesday 17th March, 2010

THE BARDIC THEATRE, DONAGHMORE, CO. TYRONE

SEÁN DONNELLY IN CONCERT WITH MALACHI CUSH
8pm

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Friday 19th March, 2010

THE LODGE ARTS CENTRE, CASTLEWELLAN, CO.DOWN

OFFICIAL LAUNCH OF THE NEW ALBUM

SEÁN DONNELLY IN CONCERT WITH SPECIAL GUEST GERRY ANDERSON (Presenter BBC Radio Ulster)

Concert starts 8pm (doors 7.30pm) adm £10 PHONE 028 4372 22009 for tickets or pay at door

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Friday 26th March, 2010

AN CREAGÁIN VISITOR CENTRE, CREGGAN, OMAGH, CO. TYRONE

NEW ALBUM LAUNCH

SEÁN DONNELLY IN CONCERT

Concert Starts 9pm adm £10 Phone 028 807 61112 for tickets or pay at door

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Friday 9th April, 2010

”NO ALIBIS” BOOKSTORE, BOTANIC AVE, BELFAST

NEW ALBUM LAUNCH

SEÁN DONNELLY IN CONCERT

Concert starts 8.30pm for tickets phone 028 90 319607

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Friday 21st May, 2010

THE CRAIC THEATRE, COALISLAND, CO. TYRONE

NEW ALBUM LAUNCH

SEÁN DONNELLY IN CONCERT WITH BRENDAN MONAGHAN

Concert starts 8.30pm , for tickets ph. 028 8774 1100 or 028 4372 2009 or pay at door

Further dates to be announced shortly …

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samples available

1. The Winding Banks of Erne
2. Come Oe’r The Mountain
3. The Blackbird of Slane
4. Western Highway
5. The Mountains Of Mourne
6. The Star Of Logy Bay
7. I Wish My Love Was A Red Red Rose
8. I’m A Stranger Here
9. Hard Town
10. Now The Swallows Are Away
11. The Ballad of Amelia Earhart

£12.00

this includes postage and packaging

Purchase This Album

List Of All Albums   - click on album below to view details

Beyond The Open Door

 Like A Morning Star Fading

 Erins Lovely Home

On Breezes Fresh and Fair

currently viewing:

The Winding Banks Of Erne

Review

By John O’Regan

Sean Donnelly knows a good song when he hears one. He knows how to pick them, choose them, interpret them, write them and integrate them into his vast repertoire. Anyone familiar with his recorded work in Ireland and abroad will know this fact and verify it. However anyone approaching a Sean Donnelly recording for the first time, the welcome mat is out and a trusted ally is waiting in the wings for your discovery.

A native of Tyrone Sean Donnelly emigrated first to Belfast and then to Newcastle in Co. Down where he has been resident for the past two decades or more. He has the Co. Down passport to prove it!.

"The Winding Banks of Erne" this latest recording from Sean Donnelly is a typical combination of assured interpretation and carefully chosen material. Again the traditional wells of Ulster song are consulted and acknowledged with ”I Wish my Love Was a Red Red Rose” learned from no less than Mrs. Sarah Makem mother of the legendary Tommy Makem (RIP) it is appropriate to mention that the late David Hammond also had a version of this song. Sean’s revisiting of it comes two decades after he first recorded it on his debut album “One Day We Saw the Sun” issued in 1987. The Winding Banks of Erne itself is a William Allinghams poem set to music by Sean ”The Star of Logy Bay” a Newfoundland song which sounds intrinsically Irish has been recorded by Sliabh Notes, Corrib Folk and is remembered particularlyfrom Dennis Ryan of Ryan’s Fancy. ”Come o’er the Mountain” comes from the singing of Len Graham ”Johnny Lovely Johnny” is another from the Ulster song cycle awaiting reinvention with its Tyrone connections keeping the home fires burning as it were.

Interestingly enough Sean’s sole original composition ”I’m A stranger Here” recalls his return to his home village “where I was raised as a child only to discover that I knew no one there now and no one knew me!". "The Mountains of Mourne” is recorded in response to requests from The Gerry Anderson Show on BBC Radio Ulster. Sean also adds some marvellously understated readings of songs by his Northern neighbours Co. Antrim’s Martin Donnelly (no relation!) ”Now the Swallows are Away” Eamon Friel’s ”Hard Town” and Gerry O’Beirne” truck driving anthem "Western Highway”.

The most surprising inclusion of all is ”The Ballad of Amelia Erhard” a crossover from the folk/country songbook. This is a story song in the ballad tradition which tells the true story of the lost aviation pioneer Amelia Erhard and adds a fittingly diverse conclusion to Sean Donnelly’s latest recorded odyssey.

Sean handles the songs with his customary care and ease. The backings are suitably restrained and the whole collection breathes with both sincerity and poise.

If you are familiar with Sean Donnelly’s work to date, this note is a reminder of the gems in store, if you are encountering Sean Donnelly for the first time as I did in 1987, you will discover one of Ireland’s best kept secrets. "The Winding Banks of Erne" adds another excellent page to Sean Donnelly’s recorded catalogue

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John O’Regan

December 2009

Seán Donnelly with Colum Sands

Seán Donnelly with Ben Sands

Following a very successful tour with Gerry Anderson of BBC Radio Ulster Sean has suspended touring now in order to record a new album which he hopes to have on sale pre- Christmas. That said, there are a number of local dates and guest appearances to fulfil in the coming weeks and months:

LIVING TRADITION MAGAZINE

Seán Donnelly

The return of a quiet man

by John O’Regan

click here to read the full article

Review

By John Paddy Browne

You know what to expect when you get a new Sean Donnelly CD. There will be a selection of unpretentious, straightforward songs, some of them traditional, some of them of Ulster lineage, most of them Irish. There will be a small band of musicians playing unobtrusively but with mesmerising effect behind the singer. And there will be the singer himself with his distinctly north of Ireland enunciation, quiet, unshowy, almost diffident. He uses an open-tuned guitar, which means that his accompaniment forms a lacework pattern of arpeggios, accented and held together by the rich bass of the bottom string as it keeps time. I don’t know anyone else in folk music who uses a guitar so delicately.

Returning to form after a lengthy hiatus from the recording studio and from personal appearances following the tragic death of his son Michael in a freak accident in 1998, Sean Donnelly has put together a characteristic dozen tracks of mixed vintage. There are a couple of old-time songs, Carrickdown and My Own Gweebarra Bay; a ballad about the loss of Lord Franklin on his voyage to find a passage through the Hudson Bay; a former pop-song, The Isle of Innisfree, and a couple of his own songs and those of his contemporaries.

He slips seamlessly from one song to the next, imbuing each with the illusion of antiquity, as though the entire repertoire had come down to us from the mouths of old singers passing down an ancient heritage.

In a lesser singer this might give rise to a charge of reducing everything to a common level; but what Donnelly does is to bring a freshness to songs that we may have discarded because of over-familiarity or because the songs may have suffered from such a flaw as sentimentality -no longer an attraction to modern audiences. Hence, a song like The Isle of Innisfree, once ingratiatingly crooned by Bing Crosby (and enormously popular, it must be said) now takes on the mantle of a true folk song, and anyone who had never heard the commercial version back in the 1950s might easily mistake it for an old come-all-ye as Sean Donnelly breathes new life into it. The sentiment is there but not the sentimentality.

At the other end of the folk spectrum would be the more substantial Lord Franklin, with its much-used tune (The Croppy Boy, The Newry Highwayman, etc). Usually performed as a full-blooded panegyric on a heroic venture gone wrong, Donnelly delivers it as though he were reporting a piece of bad news, stripped of the mode of the epic ballad, and rendered as a come-all-ye. Placing My Own Gweebara Bay (a real come-all-ye which is still well known in Donegal) right after Franklin shows up some of the limitations of the come-all-ye style: the two tunes and the rhythms are very similar, and are reminiscent of dozens of other songs in that particular genus.

And, as though to consolidate the argument he follows Gweebarra Bay with a touching little song called Sweet King Williams Town, relating the story of a man who survived the Titanic disaster only to be killed as an American soldier in World War One.

Denny Lane’s 19th century soliloquy on the 17th century "Flight of the Earls” is a

lyrical song beloved by generations of Irish sopranos. Sean Donnelly breaks that particular tradition by singing it, not as an extravagant and florid "big song", but again as a humble come-all-ye through which the heart-breaking lyrics still echo:

Soft April showers and bright May flowers

May bring the summer back again,

But will they bring me back the hours

I spent with my brave Donal then?

And then there are Donnelly’s own songs. Here he treads carefully on dangerous ground. Songs about family and friends are notoriously difficult to write without teetering over the brink into sentimentality, but I think that he keeps a couple of feet back from the edge. The song for his lost son is genuinely moving (At the End of the Day) and he avoids those excessive vocalisations that often make such songs so unpalatable. Having said that, I could have done without the spoken lines in an otherwise tender song From Fawney Cross to Picquingny, which relates a journey undertaken by a man visiting a World War One cemetery.

In all of this Sean Donnelly is blessed by a small selection of very able musicians who make their mark on his songs yet keep their distance, so that he is never overshadowed by them. The flute of Brendan Monagan and Plunkett McGartlan’s fiddle are particularly sensitive and add greatly to Donnelly’s performances. All the musicians in their ways are partly responsible for the almost hypnotic quality of these recordings. Allied to Donnelly’s quiet story-teller’s voice, they make what looks like a routine dozen-track album anything but routine: they make it memorable.

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JPB

26 March 2008

samples available

1. Somewhere In America
2. The Isle Of Innisfree
3. Little Brigid Flynn
4. Because Of You
5. Beyond The Open Door
6. Carrickdown
7. From My Window
8. From Fawney Cross To Picquigny
9. Lord Franklin
10. My Own Gweebarra Bay
11. Sweet King Williams Town
12. At The End Of The Day

£12.00

this includes postage and packaging

Purchase This Album

——————————————————————————————————————–

List Of All Albums  - click on album below to view details

The Winding Banks Of Erne

 Like A Morning Star Fading

 Erins Lovely Home

On Breezes Fresh and Fair

currently viewing:

Beyond The Open Door

samples available

1. What’s Your Hurry
2. Eilidh
3. Down By The Green Bushes
4. The Sally Gardens
5. Keep In Touch
6. "The Enniskillen Dragoon"
7. Six Sweethearts
8. The Homes Of Donegal
9. Ballinderry
10. Cragie Hill
11. Michael
12. Like A Morning Star Fading

£12.00

this includes postage and packaging

Purchase This Album

——————————————————————————————————————–

List Of All Albums  - click on album below to view details

The Winding Banks Of Erne

 Beyond The Open Door

 Erins Lovely Home

On Breezes Fresh and Fair

currently viewing:

Like A Morning Star Fading

samples available

1. The Mountains Of Pomeroy
2. The Lass On The Brae
3. Erins Lovely Home
4. Put A Rum Through It
5. The Banks Of Kilrea
6. Farewell Mayo
7. Six Sweethearts
8. Sweet Kitty Donovan
9. Brockagh Brae
10. The Hills Of Glenswilly
11. Sliabh Gallen Brae

£12.00

this includes postage and packaging

Purchase This Album

——————————————————————————————————————–

List Of All Albums  - click on album below to view details

The Winding Banks Of Erne

 Beyond The Open Door

 Like A Morning Star Fading

On Breezes Fresh and Fair

currently viewing:

Erins Lovely Home

1. The Paris Song
2. The Roseville Fair
3. Carrowclare
4. The Tagleona
5. The Homes Of Donegal
6. You and I
7. The Jeanie C
8. The Connerys
9. Man of the Earth
10. In the One Bed Lie

£12.00

this includes postage and packaging

Purchase This Album

——————————————————————————————————————–

List Of All Albums  - click on album below to view details

The Winding Banks Of Erne

 Beyond The Open Door

 Like A Morning Star Fading

Erins Lovely Home

currently viewing:

On Breezes Fresh and Fair