Dónal Lunny (1947-2026)

It's been a rough year for Irish music already, and now sadly the great Dónal Lunny has died. Among the many obits and notices coming in are those from the Guardian and RTE, and I won't try to duplicate them. I've been a fan since his days in Planxty and was lucky enough to see him live in the 1990s, when he organized a band called Coolfin that toured the US. Lunny was better known as an instrumentalist, band leader (and band mate), and producer than as a lead singer, though here and there he sung a few songs in Irish in the sean-nós style. His work on the bouzouki, especially in Planxty and the Bothy Band, has had a profound influence on generations of younger musicians.

As fate would have it, I had tickets for an evening of music by a group called the Strayaways on the day he died. That fine trio consists of fiddlers Kevin Burke and Dylan Foley as well as the bouzouki player Eamon O'Leary. Burke, the senior member, is another of the giants of Irish music, with a career spanning more than a half-century, and he played with Dónal Lunny frequently, notably in the Bothy Band and as supporting musicians on the landmark Andy Irvine / Paul Brady album released in 1976. Towards the end of the evening the Strayaways dedicated several sets of Bothy Band tunes to Lunny, and it was good to see that the tradition he did so much to carry forward is in no danger of disappearing.

Domestic tranquility

This morning Marian woke me up just before dawn to tell me that one of the apes had gotten outside again. I lifted up the window shade a bit and, sure enough, there it was resting on its haunches on the lawn, looking over a wilted dandelion it had found amid the grass.

It didn't take long to persuade it to come back inside — it never does. By the time we got through the doorway its fellow had roused itself and stared at us mutely as we came into the kitchen. The apes ambled down the hall to their room and I started making tea. "Marian," I said, "you know we can't keep them here anymore. They'll have to go back." She nodded. Neither of us said exactly what "go back" might mean, and perhaps we didn't know.

Written before sunrise

I wake up early by habit and by nature, using no alarm. In part this is because I turn in early as well, but in truth I've just never had much aptitude for sleep, tossing and turning and waking up multiple times, and the quiet early morning hours are my most productive time of day. I also have a prejudice against using artificial light in the morning, which means, by this time of year, that I'm generally waking up during the period of what is called astronomical twilight and that I get out of bed during the phase known as nautical twilight, with an hour or so still to go before the sun actually rises. If I put up the window shades a bit there's enough moonlight and ambient light to find my clothes in, and I press the on button on my phone to give me enough light to make my way downstairs without falling over the dog, who is mostly black, or the cat (in the night all cats are black). The refrigerator light, when I reach in for cream, is a bit blinding at this hour, and when I open the laptop I realize that I have no idea how the keyboard lights up, but it does. By 6:30 AM I can see the changing colors of the trees outside, and grazing deer if there are any (there aren't).

The temperature has dipped into the thirties overnight, although a frost isn't expected for at least a couple of weeks, even here in southern Maine. I also have a prejudice against turning the heat on in the morning, for as long as I can stand it, so in the coming months the temptation to stay in bed in the dark will be greater. But now the sun is about to rise and it's time to stop.

Fatherland (trailer)

I greatly enjoyed Paweł Pawlikowski's Ida and (with some reservations) Cold War, so I'm looking forward to his new film, which is about a visit made by Thomas Mann (and his daughter Erika) to his native Germany in 1949. It's in theatres October 23rd.

Folk Tradition

Andy Irvine's Devoted, just released, is the culmination of his nearly lifelong passion for the songs of Woody Guthrie, a musical and personal hero since the late 1950s. It includes renditions of eleven Guthrie songs with support from longtime Irvine collaborators John Doyle, Dónal Lunny, Mike McGoldrick, Bruce Molsky, Nikola Parov, and Rens van der Zalm. The twelfth cut is a remastering of Andy's tribute to Woody, "Never Tire of the Road," which appeared on his 1996 album Rain on the Roof and sports a new fiddle track.

The most interesting selection may be the one here entitled "Wallace-Taylor Train / Bet on Wallace," which is actually a mash-up of two Guthrie songs with roots in both "The Wabash Cannonball" and the old horse-racing song "Stewball." "Wallace" is Henry A. Wallace, former vice-president and Secretary of Agriculture under FDR, whose 1948 run for president on the Progressive ticket energized the American left but garnered less than three percent of the popular vote; "Taylor" is his running mate, former senator Glen H. Taylor.

Guthrie had earlier (in 1942) adapted the melody of "The Wabash Cannonball" into a song called "The Farmer-Labor Train," alluding to Minnesota's Farmer-Labor Party; he updated the lyrics for the Wallace campaign. Andy's spirited bouzouki-based recording draws on a separate Guthrie lyric, "Bet on Wallace," which borrowed the phrase "He might win, win, win" from Leadbelly's version of "Stewball."

As for "Stewball," though the song has a long tradition in the US, it commemorates a famous horse race in Ireland in the eighteenth century. A version of the song, in a radically different version with a Balkan arrangement, appears on the eponymous 1976 Andy Irvine and Paul Brady album under the title "The Plains of Kildare."

Devoted is available from The Last Music Company, Ltd.

Update: I've just learned that Andy will be doing a brief tour of the US Midwest, September 16-20, 2026. Details here.

August Almanac

Are there ticks in Ireland? If so, Seamus Heaney doesn't mention them in his poem about foraging for wild blackberries. Here in Maine there are banner crops of both this summer. I walk along the disused gravel road just around the corner and pick the fruit that has "inked up," careful to avoid the thorns and not to wander too far into the brush lest I bring home unwanted hitchhikers concealed in my clothes. But the "rat-grey fungus" that spoiled Heaney's harvest isn't a problem for me, because every berry I can reach goes straight into my mouth.

The spring peeper above that I spotted nestling on a blackberry leaf is likewise a far cry from the "great slime kings" of another Heaney poem, "Death of a Naturalist." Below, a dapper grasshopper and a green darner dragonfly from the same stretch of road, both invertebrates substantially larger than the tiny frog.

Falling Slowly

Farewell, Glen Hansard, much too soon. (I've just watched Once again. It's even more heartbreaking, now.)

More at the Guardian.