Ireland has a culture of storytelling and music, and a great way to get a sample of that music is to visit a pub. If you’re lucky and go at the right time, you might get to see a “session”, just some local folks who get together to play some music with one another. We might call it a “jam session”. They’re not getting paid by the pub owner, and they don’t take requests from other guests: they’re just there for the love of music.
Irish music is played on simple instruments, reflecting the country’s poor, rural farming heritage. The people made music on whatever they could get their hands on. There’s the bodhrán, a simple, small hoop drum. There’s the tin whistle, imported from England. If the musicians are lucky, they’ll have an Irish Pipes player with them: the Irish pipes are a more “purer” sounding instrument than their better known brother the Scottish Pipes from across the Irish Sea. And maybe there will be a guitar player. But if there are no instruments, well then they’ll just make music with only their feet, legs, arms, and sounds coming from their mouths that alternate between words and…something else.
A great introduction to traditional Irish music and the pub scene is to take the Musical Pub Crawl (
Coming in a few weeks: a YouTube video of our pub crawl experience.
