Episode Notes

This is Bonus Episode No. 6 of the podcast and it focuses on Bring Your Own Hammer, a collaborative project bringing historians and composers together to create new song cycles based on historical sources and to re-interpret song material rooted in the history of nineteenth-century Ireland and of the Irish Diaspora.

In their own words:

“Bring Your Own Hammer is not a band, a group, an ensemble or even a collective. If anything, it is a faction but unlike nineteenth-century Irish factions, who met, armed with sticks and two-handed wattles in fairs and markets, it is armed with voices and instruments and dedicated, as no faction before, to the re-interpretation of historical material in song form.”

A few weeks ago this faction released, My Grief on the Sea, an album on the theme of sea journeys and migration to and from Ireland in the nineteenth century, featuring the late Cathal Coughlan, Mike Smalle, Jah Wobble, Eileen Gogan, Linda Buckley, Adrian Crowley, Michael J Sheehy, Carol Keogh, Michelle O’Rourke and others.

Now albums by Cathal Coughlan (EP03: Viva Dead Ponies by The Fatima Mansions, EP11: Black River Falls by Cathal Coughlan and EP20: The Clock Comes Down the Stairs by Microdisney) and Carol Keogh (EP35: This Is by The Tycho Brahe) have featured on this podcast already and the others mentioned are some of my favourite Irish contemporary singers, composers and musicians.

So in this episode I talk to two of the people behind the project: Dr Richard McMahon (lecturer in history at Mary Immaculate College in Limerick) and Mike Smalle (academic Librarian, musician and former frontman of the great Galway band Cane 141).

Our conversation is interspersed by some of the music from the album and Linda Buckley, Carol Keogh and Michael J Sheehy have recorded short introductions to their songs.

For Further Reading/Listening:

My Grief on the Sea is available on Bandcamp:

Further information about Bring Your Own Hammer is here.