Our Saturday morning folk show (see Jesse James behind the wheel) at the undergraduate station was a hybrid of music, a juxtaposition of sounds that didn't always sound the best together but we made them work the best we could. One form of music that we played was something one might consider "Celtic" music – traditional reels and jigs played on pipes, fiddles, and the eccentrically named and sounding hammered dulcimer, among other instruments.
I never knew how we ended up with a lot of this music. Did Brad, the format’s creator, have a fondness for this and seek it out, or was some of it sent blindly by an independent record company and we were so far fetched for music that we'd play anything? While I personally never disliked the music, I often wondered about the listening audience. This was about the most abnormal type of music the station played up to that point (maybe some obscure classical or jazz pieces coming in a distant second place), especially since it wasn't always sung in recognizable English.
I often wondered what would have happened had we decided to "go Celtic" one morning and throw out the program clock to predominantly play this type of music for the entire program? To the untrained ear I could surmise that it might have sounded like one four-hour song, a bouncy, airy tune that sped up and slowed down every few minutes or so. In other words, the one downfall was that a lot of this music sounded the same after a while.
The other major problem would have been properly identifying the musicians or song titles. For example, someone took the time to put together a pronunciation guide for the classical shifts to assist those announcers who had never heard of Handel and Waggoner and to correct people who thought it was pronounced “terra cotta and fudge.” While it would have been very useful, a pronunciation guide would have been much difficult to do for the folk show because, to begin with, we didn't know where to go to get a proper pronunciation of Ceoltoiri. That fledging novelty, the World Wide Web, didn't have pages of text about every obscure Celtic group or song we played.
So that left the DJs of the folk show (meaning, first, Brad and then me) to come up with something that sounded believable yet mildly foreign. Ceoltoiri came out "seal-a-tory," "soul-tor-ee," and "kel-terry." I see now it’s pronounced “kyul-tory,” and Irish Gaelic for “musicians.” (Boy, were we way off....)
The group consists of Karen Ashbrook (hammered dulcimer), Connie McKenna (vocals, guitar), and Sue Richards (Celtic harp). The song tells the story of an impatient suitor [who] begs his lover to wake up and cut her hair in preparation for their wedding. By the end of the song, overtaken by eagerness, he vetos the haircut, and the trip to the priest, too!
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Arise and Dress Yourself
(Traditional)
Ceoltoiri
From the album Silver Apples of the Moon
1992
