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Celtic Woman
If this section encourages you to learn even one song in Irish then it is worth it. Marc Fahrbach has given me great
encouragement and has added most of the guitar chords. I hope to add more songs in the near future. Most of the tunes are
traditional songs and have being brought back by Altan and The Cassidys. John Spillane brought out an albim recently ''Irish
Songs We Learned At School'' and most the songs of that album by John Spillane are included here
The vast majourty of songs in the Irish language have
a very distinct style that is very different to songs
in
the English language. Most of the songs in the English
language are strongly influenced by the folk/ballad form
and
are usually written as straight forward narrative,
the songs in Irish are usually more lyrical in form and
often only
hint at the background story of the song subject.
This is usually because songs in Irish have absorbed more
stylistic features from the old poetry.
Many songs
in Irish are deliberatly vague or even ambiguous.
They may open with a question, such as ''A Bhuachill An Chuail
Dualaigh''
where the first line is ''Where Did You Sleep Last
Night ''
The identities of the main people in the song may be confused
and in many cases the details of a relationship
are not given.
I most parts of Ireland what were known originally as songs
are now played as tunes. The reason is because
of the hugh decline
of the Gaelic landguage that happened after the great hunger
of 1847 /52 [So Called Famine]. In
many of the Irish speaking [Gaelteach] areas the lyrics are still sang.
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