Mary Black: song for Ireland

Her early career as the singer with the group De Dannan helped establish Mary Black's reputation and presence, especially outside Ireland. The very first song she recorded with them was Song for Ireland. It's a piece she's sung in many other places including during the peace process in Northern Ireland, at Stormont. Here she joins De Dannan to revisit the song.

Short profile of Mary Black, somewhat of an excerpt from the longer documentary Still Believing. Once you get past the long opening graphic,there's a fine bit of conversation and music from one Ireland's most well known singers. It's about 6 or 7 minutes long.

Emmylou Harris, Dolores Keane, & Mary Black: Sonny

From the Bringing It All Back Home sessions in 1990 in Nashville. An early celebration of the connections between American country music and the music of Ireland, this project brought several Irish musicians, including Mary Black and Dolores Keane, to Music City for collaborations with the likes of Harris and John Prine. This is a really grim song, not one of my favorites at all in the history of grim Irish family dreams gone wrong songs, but it's worth the listening to hear the three sing togther. The back up band has some well known players, too: see if you can name them. And though the song itself sounds very traditional, it was actually written by Canadian songwriter Ron Hynes.

Harris, by the way, has new box set due out in a couple of weeks. A career retrospective for which she was involved in selecting the tracks, it is called Songbird,

altan and mary black: green grow the rushes

Mary Black, Altan, and Paul Brady at the Royal Concert Hall in Glasgow...that'd be a dream gig, you'd think and it was. This was in January 2006 and I had the good fortune to be there. Mairead, lead singer and ace fiddler with Altan, was losing her voice though, which had Mary stepping in for more singing than she'd planned -- and that's why she's got the lyrics written out on a page here. Burns song in the heart of Burns country as a last minute fill in with someone else's band and arrangement -- it was actually delightfully informal to see her glancing at the lyrics now and then in the midst of this big deal concert and never missing a beat.
A gig not to be forgotten, and this excerpt from the BBC coverage brings bit of it home.