Streaming Irish music for St. Patrick’s Day
The web has taken on a decidedly green hue today, with searches way up for Irish music, Irish culture, Irish phrases and Irish recipes.
Ireland is a country with a distinctive and broad range of musical exports, and it seems much of the web is in the mood for “Irish drinking songs,” either while trapped in a cubicle or for their corned beef and cabbage fetes this evening. (As you may be aware, no one in Ireland actually eats corned beef- it’s a substitute for Ireland’s much superior bacon, adopted when Irish immigrants lived alongside Eastern European Jews in lower Manhattan.)
Luckily for everyone who’s feeling their Irish roots today, there are options to supplement your iTunes library with some streaming ceol na nGael all over the internet. Pandora remains a great option for sifting and creating “stations” to fit your tastes. A pre-fab station exists for “Irish Pub Favorites,” and there are traditional Irish music stations, too. Creating a station for “The Pogues” or “The Dubliners” should yield some good Irish tunes if the set stations are too wide-ranging or you want something more modern.
Live365 has a selection of Irish music as well, but the more aesthetically inclined might prefer a browse on Grooveshark. Below are two tracks from my favorite Irish band- a New York based Irish traditional/hip hop group who are the house band at NYC’s best Irish bar, Rocky Sullivan’s.
