I felt a lot of that growing up, and I think that's characteristic of Irish Americans, of being happy and sad at the same time. "What I like about 'When New York Was Irish,' " he adds, "is the play of opposites, the old/new and joys/heartbreaks, the sense that without contraries there's no progression. It was the land of opportunity, a big, wide open world of possibility.
And yet my parents were very proud of being Americans. There were people in my neighborhood who farmed the backyards of their tenements in the Bronx. "They came over here in the early '20s and never had the wherewithal to go back until 1958, but my mother wrote to her family in Galway all the time. "That was certainly true of my parents, who had a very strong sense of being far from home. "Jim Liddy, who teaches Irish-American literature at the University of Wisconsin, wrote an essay called 'The Double Vision,' which claims that we Irish Americans live in two worlds at once," Terry Winch says. They learned music by playing in corner taverns with older, Irish-born musicians who assuaged their homesickness with traditional tunes from the Old World and new songs about that homesickness. The Winch brothers grew up in the Bronx where their parents landed from Ireland in the 1920s, an era when New York was truly Irish. It's a subtle difference, but it's there." A lot of those songs came out of the Tin Pan Alley song genre, and there was the influence of an urban environment and urban music which rural musicians in Ireland didn't have.
SAD CELTIC MUSIC FULL
"Irish American music is full of songs about missing Ireland, which, of course, native Irish musicians weren't writing.
"Irish American music has its own distinct life separate from traditional Irish music," says Jesse Winch, who cofounded Celtic Thunder 11 years ago with his brother Terry. Though their music is deeply rooted in Celtic tradition, their songs and dance tunes are indelibly tinted by the experience of growing up in America. That song, written by the band's accordionist Terry Winch, kicks off Celtic Thunder's long-awaited second album, "The Light of Other Days." It also epitomizes the distinctly Irish American nature of this band of second-generation Irish immigrants. As the cameras pan across the floats and high school marching bands, Celtic Thunder's Laura Murphy will sing over a fiddle and whistle of the days, both happy and sad, "When New York Was Irish."
SAD CELTIC MUSIC TV
Patrick's Day parade is telecast in New York Thursday, the TV coverage will open and close with a new song from Washington's Irish folk band, Celtic Thunder.