Irish Music Mastery

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Added: Tue. Dec 27, 2011 10:55am
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 John Doyle and John Williams make Irish music magic.  Accompanied by a marvelously talented young fiddler, Duncan Wickel , Doyle and Williams recently played a concert in Wisconsin, to a packed house at a local college.  If you ever have the opportunity to see these guys, GO without a second’s thought! RUN like the wind to the ticket counter!

Doyle is a songwriter and guitarist, originally from Ireland but living here in the states for the past twenty years, in North Carolina.  Williams is from Chicago, and plays the button accordion and concertina.  The pair were among the founding members of the Irish-American group Solas in the 1990s. The musical reputations of both, individually and playing together, extend joyfully and to great acclaim to both sides of the Atlantic.

I first heard Doyle and Williams play a year or two ago, at the Irish Cultural and Heritage Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I’d bought tickets out of curiosity, to something that had been billed as an evening of song and guitar and accordion. With a description like that, I couldn’t dislodge the man in my life from his living room, so I met friends there in the cavernous former church on Wisconsin Avenue instead.

What a treat awaited us on those stiff wooden church benches!  Turns out that not only are Doyle and Williams extraordinarily gifted musicians with energy that’s jolting and palpable, each of them is a captivating story-teller as well.  And they play off each other, both verbally and with their instruments, with seamless ease and humor.  I had lost sight, before that night, of just how much a good Irish tune owes to the bellows of a concertina or a button accordion in the mix.  Let’s face it, it’s the violins and the pipes that usually get the lion’s share of the spotlight. But Williams, who has been described as “one of the best box players on the planet,” pulled the wool from my eyes with incredible variety and depth.

Doyle is a font of anecdote and history, both of his family and of Irish emigration.  The stories both infuse his stage presence and form the storylines of his songs as well. My favorite is the stirringly brave and tragic “Clear the Way,” based on the “Fighting 69^th” Union brigade at the Battle of Fredericksburg in the Civil War. One of the many things I had never known or thought of before hearing Doyle in concert was the massive presence of native Irish on both Union and Confederate sides of the war.  Depending on what city their ship docked at when they disembarked at the promised land of America, the young men were immediately recruited for either the Union or the Confederate army, and marched off to fight against and die at the hands of their fellow Irishmen in a war not of their own making. Here’s a link to a video  of Doyle performing the song at an Irish music retreat in 2011.  And here's a link to a video of John Williams and guitarist Dean Magraw, who collaborated to make the CD "Steam" in 2001.

An extraordinary pair of musicians, both together and standing alone.

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