According to Dylan they did “a lot of listening and observing” in those days. Mike also formed the Catskills Ceili Band to play for dancing and Dan and Dylan were active members. Mike McHale was there most of the time and he and Charlie would lead the way. An informal session would always follow where local musicians would join in. But on the first and second Sunday afternoons of every month the scruffy ground floor came alive when Father Charlie brought his friends and fellow musicians from Boston and New York and sometimes further afield to play a little acoustic concert for a small but very attentive gathering of enthusiasts. Once a rather grand building (now once more restored to its former magnificence) the small hotel at the time was no more than a charming, dilapidated semi-ruin situated right beside the Amtrak railway station.
#How long to let the band play for contra 6, 6, 7 series
The only regular Irish music event held in the Southern Catskills was the Sunday afternoon concert series in the Rhinecliff Hotel two miles from the picturesque town of Rhinebeck. He is a fine concertina and flute player, steeped in the music of East Galway. After being stationed in a parish in Staten Island he moved to Red Hook in the Catskills in the early 1980’s and has been there ever since. After years working at various jobs in the Catskills area he was drawn to the priesthood and ordained in 1968. Charlie Coen emigrated to the United States from the village of Woodford in East Galway in 1955.
He has a vast repertoire of beautiful old tunes, some of which were fairly new to the scene when he emigrated, but are now played widely. Mike emigrated to the US in 1959, one year after he won the All Ireland Title on tin whistle. He credits the influence of the all-accordion album The Big Squeeze, issued on the Green Linnet label in 1988, with introducing him to a variety of playing styles.Īs they grew older Dylan and Dan began to attend regularly the Catskills Irish Week in East Durham where they were exposed to a wide array of players from both the Irish and American music scenes.īut the primary influences on the two young musicians were flute and whistle player Mike McHale from County Roscommon and Father Charlie Coen from County Galway, both long time residents of the Catskills area. At Billy’s urging he switched from the D/G to the B/C accordion which is the version of the instrument most common in Irish music today. In those early years he took occasional lessons from some of the accordion players he most admired musicians such as John Whelan and Billy McComiskey. He was drawn particularly to instrumental music and at the age of eight took up the accordion and became really interested in Irish music. He was only ever interested in playing Irish music.ĭan grew up loving his father’s LP’s of American folk music.
He took Suzuki lessons on the violin when he was about eight and after his teacher moved away his mother drove him every other week to the Pearl River area where he took lessons from Rose Flanagan, a gifted fiddler and teacher.
Born just five years apart (Dan was born on Apand Dylan on February 8, 1992) they got good at playing Irish music at a very young age even though they grew up far from the thriving traditional music scenes of New York and Boston.ĭylan was introduced to the contra dance scene by his parents when he was about four and has pleasant memories of enjoying the music and falling asleep beside the band as the dances wore into the night. They both come from the Southern Catskill Mountains not too far from the Hudson River. Charlie Coen and Mike McHale.ĭylan Foley and Dan Gurney are two of the finest young Irish American musicians around. We would like to dedicate this recording to Fr.
Recorded and mixed by Paul Gurney at RealWorld Studios, Longford, Ireland
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