Bright Star Of The West - Sean Williams and Joe Heaney

About this Episode

Just listen to this.

Sean Williams shares her memories of learning from the legendary Joe Heaney. We talk music; ornamentation; Oirishness; messengers from the otherworld; liminality; being visited by Heaney in a dream and corrected on your writing, cleaning up his apartment on Phinney Ridge. We talk the sacred, alluring and dangerous; immigration and emigration; 'you lived away for so long,' thresholds, crossing over. Transgression, and where is home.

What a dream, this conversation turned out to be. Straight after, I drove south to Portland, Oregon and watched a soccer game on a glorious summer's night while drinking an icy cold beer. The glory.

Thanks Sean.

Thanks also to Em Kildea, to Ciaran O'Grady and Aifric Boylan for the chance to share some extracts of this episode with attendees at the annual Comhaltas weekend in Queenscliff, Victoria.

You can find a comprehensive list of Joe Heaney's songs here, at The Joe Heaney Archive:
https://www.joeheaney.org/en/

And here's the Joe Heaney archive (some of it) in the University of Washington Ethnomusicology Archives in Seattle:
https://soundcloud.com/uwlibraries/sets/wauem1997016_heaney-interview

Thanks for listeneing, and see you soon I hope...

Dominic