Lake Pontchartrain is an estuary located in southeastern Louisiana in the United States. It covers an area of 630 square miles (1,600 km2) with an average depth of 12 to 14 feet. Some shipping channels are kept deeper through dredging. It is roughly oval in shape, about 40 miles (64 km) from west to east and 24 miles (39 km) from south to north.
Planxty were an Irish folk music band formed in January 1972, consisting initially of Christy Moore, Andy Irvine, Dónal Lunny, and Liam O'Flynn. They transformed and popularized Irish folk music, touring and recording to great acclaim.
Andrew Kennedy Irvine is an Irish folk musician, singer-songwriter, and a founding member of Sweeney's Men, Planxty, Patrick Street, Mozaik, LAPD and Usher's Island. He also featured in duos, with Dónal Lunny, Paul Brady, Mick Hanly, Dick Gaughan, Rens van der Zalm, and Luke Plumb. Irvine plays the mandolin, mandola, bouzouki, harmonica, and hurdy-gurdy.
Paul Joseph Brady is an Irish singer-songwriter and musician from Strabane, Northern Ireland. His work straddles folk and pop. He was interested in a wide variety of music from an early age.
Sweeney's Men was an Irish traditional band. They emerged from the mid-1960s Irish roots revival, along with groups such as The Dubliners and the Clancy Brothers. The founding line-up in May 1966 was Johnny Moynihan, Andy Irvine and "Galway Joe" Dolan.
John Moynihan is an Irish folk singer, based in Dublin. He is often credited with introducing the bouzouki into Irish music in the mid-1960s.
Lake Borgne is a lagoon of the Gulf of Mexico in southeastern Louisiana. Although early maps show it as a lake surrounded by land, coastal erosion has made it an arm of the Gulf of Mexico. Its name comes from the French word borgne, which means "one-eyed."
"Streets of Laredo", also known as "The Dying Cowboy", is a famous American cowboy ballad in which a dying ranger tells his story to another cowboy. Members of the Western Writers of America chose it as one of the Top 100 Western songs of all time.
Skewball was the name of an 18th-century British racehorse, most famous as the subject of a broadsheet ballad and folk-song.
"Arthur McBride" is a folk song probably of Irish origin, also found in England, Scotland, Australia, and North America. Describing a violent altercation with a recruiting sergeant, it can be narrowly categorized as an "anti-recruiting" song, a specific form of anti-war song, and more broadly as a protest song. A. L. Lloyd described it as "that most good-natured, mettlesome, and un-pacifistic of anti-militarist songs".
"The Maid and the Palmer" is an English language medieval murder ballad with supernatural/religious overtones. Because of its dark lyrics, the song was often avoided by folk singers. Considered by scholars to be a "debased" version of a work more completely known in European sources as the Ballad of the Magdalene, the ballad was believed lost in the oral tradition in the British Isles from the time of Sir Walter Scott, who noted a fragment of it having heard it sung in the early years of the nineteenth century, until it was discovered in the repertoire of a living Irish singer, John Reilly, from whom it was collected in the 1960s, although subsequently other versions have surfaced from Ireland from the 1950s to the 1970s; an additional full text, collected and notated in around 1818, was also recently published in Emily Lyle's 1994 Scottish Ballads under the title "The Maid of Coldingham", having remained in manuscript form in the intervening time. Based on a tape of Reilly's performance provided by the collector Tom Munnelly, the singer Christy Moore popularised the song under its alternate title "The Well Below the Valley" with the Irish folk band Planxty and later solo performances/recordings, this song providing the title of that group's second album released in 1973; the song has subsequently been recorded by a number of more recent "folk revival" acts.
Welcome Here Kind Stranger is a 1978 album by Paul Brady. After leaving The Johnstons, Brady toured with Planxty until they disbanded in 1975, and recorded a duo album with Andy Irvine in 1976.
Cold Blow and the Rainy Night is the third album by the Irish folk group Planxty. It was recorded in Sarm Studios, Whitechapel, London during August 1974 and released the same year. It takes its title from the third song on the album, "Cold Blow and the Rainy Night".
Celtic Folkweave is a studio album by Mick Hanly and Mícheál Ó Domhnaill, released in 1974 by Polydor Records. Considered a seminal album in the traditional Irish music genre, the musicians involved in the recording would go on to found some of the most innovative and important groups to perform traditional Irish music.
Rainy Sundays... Windy Dreams is Andy Irvine's first solo album, produced by Dónal Lunny and recorded at Dublin's Windmill Lane Studios in late 1979. It was released in January 1980 by Tara Records.
Andy Irvine/Paul Brady is an album recorded by Andy Irvine and Paul Brady when they formed a duo, after Planxty broke up on 5 December 1975. For this recording, they were joined by Dónal Lunny and Kevin Burke.
Andy Irvine & Dónal Lunny's Mozaik [a.k.a.Mozaik] is a multicultural folk band consisting of Andy Irvine, Dónal Lunny, Bruce Molsky, Nikola Parov and Rens van der Zalm. Created in 2002, the band have toured Australia, Europe, USA and Japan, and recorded four albums.
High Kings of Tara is a compilation album from Tara Music, showcasing tracks previously released by some of its artists: Shaun Davey, Oisín, Jolyon Jackson, Paddy Glackin, Paddy Keenan, Stockton's Wing and Christy Moore.
Between the Jigs and the Reels: A Retrospective is a two-disc anthology by the Irish folk band Planxty. It includes a 17-track CD and a 36-track DVD with over two hours of previously unreleased footage (1972–1982) from RTÉ archives.
