Hi Folk DJs, listeners, and aficionados,

Great news! I put two new CDs from Gerry O’Beirne in the file cabinet in the new arrivals section. The reviews are on each and in the database.

I met Gerry while on a trip to Ireland in 2007. He plays singer-songwriter Irish style, and plays a fantastic array of stringed instruments (guitar, 12 string guitar, national steel guitar, ukelele, banjo). On the newest CD he had to lay multiple tracks down to play all the instruments. A fiddler Rosie Shipley from Maryland but whom I saw playing with Gerry in a hotel pub in Ireland three years ago is on the newest CD.

Gerry wrote the song Western Sky that Nanci Griffith and Maureen O’Connell each covered. He does a little singing but the main draw for me on each of these CDs is the guitar work on the tunes. It is just utterly terrific.

He and Rosie did a private show for my group of travelers in a seedy hotel/pub I had the fortune of staying in my second night in Ireland called the Yeats Country Inn, as I was traveling from Galway to County Donegal in the north. The first night was above a classic Irish pub in Doolin-site of fantastic Irish music and a great place to drink my first real Irish Guinness (& 2nd, & 3rd, & 4th ad nauseum.) And the Cliffs of Moher are near by.

Anyway on the newest CD, there’s traditional Irish, and Appalachian tunes and some songs Gerry wrote. I hope you will like each. The new CD was pretty high on the folk charts we report to this past month.

Slainte,
Sean Paul O’Rutter, III