Listen to trad duo The Kennedy Sisters on this month’s music podcast: on Donegal’s music traditions, and plucking songs from the air.
Sinéad and Catríona Kennedy often play Donegal-style traditional tunes, but sometimes they’re originals.
Where do those songs come from? It’s like they’re hanging in the air, in a space, waiting to be plucked, says Sinéad. “I feel like tunes are kind of around, and you happen upon them.”
In this month’s Music at Marrowbone Books, the Kennedy Sisters chat with Martin Cook about the origins of their fiddle-playing, singing with neighbours – and, of course, they play and sing a little too.
The five-decade music career of the Liberties musician never quite reached the commercial heights that he, and others, had aimed for in his twenties. But is that important, really?
“I feel confident in declaring this to be the first local release to use such a concept.”
At the end of August in Donnycarney, his brothers and friends carried his coffin to the sound of one of his last performances.
"Carving the Stone" is a gritty, gripping piece of work forged in fury and frustration at a darkening in the Dublin atmosphere.
