Irish Ballads and Songs of the Sea

To commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Great Potato Famine, singer Dan Milner compiled this collection of Irish sea songs originally recorded between 1982 and 1997. The lyrics generally deal with topics related to the emigration of the Irish in the wake of the Famine, but not all of them are glum — there are the tragicomic "Yellow Meal" (in which a helpful citizen's Irish accent is responsible for a passenger's misdirection from a swift mail ship to a slow-moving grain carrier) and "Paddy West" (an account of an informal school designed to teach young would-be sailors how to talk the talk well enough to be hired on as able-bodied seamen.) But for the most part, the mood is darker, as one might expect; "The Banks of Newfoundland" bitterly describes the privations of life aboard the packet ships, while "The Nightingale" evokes the terror of the British press gangs. Milner sings in a clear, reedy tenor voice and is accompanied minimally but expertly by an all-star cast that includes accordionist Billy McComsikey and multi-instrumentalist Mick Moloney.