March 19, 2007 (Vol. 5, No. 4)

Grammy Winner Visits Lehman for St. Patrick's Day Celebration

Grammy winner Susan McKewon and her band, The Chanting House.

Irish vocalist and producer Susan McKeown paid a visit to Lehman College March 14 for the College's annual St. Patrick's Day Celebration, sponsored by the Irish Cultural Society. McKeown, a guest vocalist on "Wonder Wheel," this year's Grammy winner for Best Contemporary World Music Album, performed a mix of traditional and contemporary Irish music in both Irish and English. In her long career as a musician, she has released numerous albums, including "Black Thorn" (2006), "Sweet Liberty" (2004) and "Prophecy" (2002), and continues to perform internationally with her band The Chanting House.

Q. What are your impressions of this event and of Lehman in general?

A. It really felt like walking into a little Irish community. Apart from hearing people speak your own accent—that's always great—it just seems like such a vibrant community up here, people interested in the Irish and things Irish.

Q. As the interest in the Irish language grows, is the interest in Irish music growing as well?

A. Celtic music is not as popular as it was at time of "River Dance," but I think that there's renewed hope and interest with the younger generations getting interested in the culture through the language. If people are just speaking Irish and gathering for the language, then the music and dance will follow. So I hope there are a lot of little girls who become teenagers, and Irish folk music becomes their rock music. That's what happened to me.

Q. How did you become interested in singing this kind of music?

A. Irish traditional music was not a part of my upbringing or my family's. We were living in Ireland, but we didn't do Irish dancing at home or sing Irish songs. It was in school that I learned Irish songs. And as a teenager, I heard it on the radio and just the way a pop song would hit you, this woman and what she was singing about was just really interesting to me. And I started to get interested in what Irish women were singing about. And it was old lyrics, old folk songs, but they appealed to me as much as pop songs did because they were speaking to me, because they were talking about love and longing. So I just got into it that way.

Q. Did you speak the Irish language growing up?

A. Yes, we had to learn it in school, but nobody enjoyed that class, I have to say. But today, the kids in Ireland are enjoying it a lot more. There's an Irish language TV channel, and enrollment in Irish language summer courses is up 50 percent from the day when I went, so a lot more teenagers are interested in the Irish language.

Q. Can you talk about the influence of Irish culture on music in America?

A. On Broadway and in Vaudeville, even in the early 1900s, a lot of Irish came over and became well-known entertainers. Appalachian music, Bluegrass, Cajun, and Country music—that's all heavily influenced by Irish and Celtic. And people often associate the banjo with coming from Ireland, but the banjo was actually an African instrument that came to the states and in the 1840s, it was the Irish who made it famous. An Irish guy went back on tour in the 1840s to Ireland and made it famous over there.

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