This Sunday, April 6, it’s another grand day for traditional Irish music as the Roaring Kelly Band first settles in at the Spanish River Library in Boca Raton.  Starting at 3pm, we perform an hour of beautiful Irish tunes for discerning ears including the haunting air Amrhan na Leabhar (Song of the Books) featuring our virtuoso Rosemarie on Irish wooden flute.  This lovely, haunting melody, composed by Irish poet and instrumentalist Tomás Rua Ó Súilleabháin (1785-1848), was his lyrical response to a personal tragic event.  Employed as a schoolteacher, he was transferring to his new job at Portmagee.  Because overland freight was too expensive, he placed his huge, valuable library of books, hand written manuscripts, and clothes on board a boat while he himself traveled by road.  Just outside Derrynane Bay, he witnessed the boat strike a rock, overturn and sink taking his priceless books and manuscripts to the bottom of the bay.  This tune, probably his best known, is very popular among pipers and is played as a slow, mournful but lilting air.  The band has featured it when we played for the Irish Dracula recently as part of the evocative overture and we’re glad to present it to the cultivated patrons of the Spanish River Library along with our rousing reels, jigs, hornpipes and polkas.  You can register and get your tickets for this event at http://www.bocalibrary.org/.

As if that weren’t enough, we’re back at Tim Finnegan’s pub that very same Sunday evening.  Come along and get yer Irish up because we’re launching into some ferocious, hard-hitting tunes, rowdy drinking ditties, gritty songs of bloody rebellion and teary-eyed ballads of lost love.  Ah! It’s good to be Irish! But you don’t have to be Irish to have a rambunctious good time.  Come down to the pub and see for yourself!  The raucous carousing and dancing starts at 7pm.