Alignment is Good: Eileen Ivers and "Linin' Track"

Linin' Track, our random tune for today, is performed by Eileen Ivers, an American fiddler who grew up in the Bronx. Exposed to music, the violin, and to Ireland at an early age, she was slated to have a career in mathematics but increasingly found her interest lay in her violin, and she left her post-graduate work to pursue a career in music. She is a founding member of the iconic Celtic folk group Cherish the Ladies and performed on the Riverdance tour. Her solo work has been termed eclectic, focusing on American folk but also incorporating salsa, funk, jazz and Irish traditional music. Linin' Track is from her 2016 album Beyond the Bog Road, which has a theme of Irish immigration and assimilation into the pool of other immigrants and their traditions in the United States. Linin' Track is a traditional tune previously sung by musicians such as Lead Belly. This version features Deirdre Brennan (sister of Moya Brennan and Enya) and Tommy McDonnell on vocals, and highlights the fact that many Irish immigrants found work keeping railroad tracks aligned where they were often working side by side with African-Americans, so the song juxtaposes both Irish traditional and American blues in the music.

Listen to songs like this and more on the KUNM Global Music Show every Monday night from 10 pm - 1 am Mountain Standard Time. Live streaming, program information and the two-week digital archive can be found at http://www.kunm.org.

Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eileen_Ivers; http://georgegraham.com/reviews/ivers2016.html

Native Flute: Robert Mirabal and "Running (Reprise)"

Sorry folks...I thought I posted this yesterday but apparently shut down my computer before posting it. It's backdated for 12/16!, but you and I know the secret.

Today's global music random song is by Robert Mirabal, a New Mexican Native American musician. A flute player and maker from Taos Pueblo, he is a leading proponent of world music. He performs around the world with a mix of flute playing, tribal rock, dance and storytelling. He has been twice named Native American Artist of the Year, and was featured in a Grammy Award winning album, Sacred Ground: A Tribute to Mother Earth in 2006. This song, Running (Reprise) is featured on his Warrior-Magician CD from 1996.

More Celtic? Eileen Ivers and "The Rights of Man"

I was bogged down in meetings today and don't have time to write a post. But, here's your random tune for today. The Global Music randomizer seems to want Celtic again, so you've got it!

Eileen Ivers is an American fiddler whose parents were Irish born. She was raised in The Bronx and took up fiddle at nine years old, studying under Irish fiddler Martin Mulvihill. She first toured with the band The Green Fields of America. She later was a founding member of Cherish the Ladies and performed with them for several years. She joined the smash show Riverdance in 1985, replacing their original fiddler. She recorded an air used in the movie Gangs of New York, and she also appeared on the soundtrack for the movie Some Mothers' Son. She has released seven solo albums. This song, The Rights of Man, is from her 1996 album Wild Blue, and can be found on Putumayo's Women of the World: Celtic II.

Poetic Justice: Joy Harjo and Poetic Justice with "For Anna Mae Pictou Aquash"

I grew up in a small town in Northern California and in that town, about as far away from Native American culture as could be. There is an embarrassing photo of me, about 8 or 9 years old, dressed up in a handmade Indian headdress carrying a spear and whooping. The only thing I knew about Indians was conveyed by television - either that they were the bad guys in all Westerns or that they saved the Brady Bunch kids in the Grand Canyon.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Megan and I began to branch out in our experiences. Being Catholic, and living in Milwaukee at the time, we heard about a Native American Catholic Church and went to attend one day. We liked it so much we adopted it as our unofficial parish. At the time they met in an old firehouse, with a Polish priest named Ed who served them as pastor and who had been adopted into the tribe. Megan and I ended up being married by this priest and incorporating a small element of the ceremony we watched performed each week, the prayer to the four directions, into our own ceremony.

Through this church, we were introduced to the vibrancy of Native culture and spirituality. Fr. Ed brought the readings alive to us, because he would explain the readings to the congregation in the context of the tribal life that the parishioners experienced, relating it to the tribal life of the early Jews. We only scratched the surface, but we became aware of both the wonderful things about Indian culture, and the challenges they faced on a daily basis brought about by their shared history with that of the United States. It was a wonderful experience.

This song, For Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, is part of the hard history of Native Americans. Even as organizations rose in the 1970s to fight for Native rights, human failings so present in all of us also were also at work, and the murder of Anna Mae Aquash was not one of the shining moments of Native American activism. But who better to bring poetic justice to the death of Anna Mae Aquash than Joy Harjo, Native American poet and author? Harjo is a Muscogee Indian from Oklahoma. She is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, and also played alto saxophone with her band Poetic Justice. She is credited with being a leader and force in what has been termed the Native American Renaissance of the late 20th century. The song is an homage to a member of the American Indian Movement who died under mysterious circumstances on the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1976. You can find For Anna Mae Pictou Aquash on the Joy Harjo and Poetic Justice album Letter from the End of the 20th Century, released in 1997.