Michael Kelly's Music

More often than not you have to travel quite a ways to hear good solid Irish drinking songs. But about a month ago it was just down the street. The local chapter of the Son and Daughters of Erin helped bring Michael Kelly here to help spark interest in a chapter of the Emerald Society here. The Emerald Society supports families of fallen public service workers including police and firemen. It’s big on the east coast, and hopes are it will catch on here.

Michael Kelly playing at Black Rabbit Mead in Reno, Nevada.

The evening was set at Black Rabbit Mead on East Fourth Street in Reno and it was a lovely evening indeed.

Michael Kelly plays the fiddle. He plays classical music, bluergass, jazz, rock and roll, you name it. But he says once he sort of stumbled on Irish music, it became his focus.

“Some friends invited me to play at an Irish pub in Newport, and I went. And once I heard the music I was sold. There’s something almost infectious about it,” he says.

And so now he focuses on it. Drinking songs, bar songs, ballads, instrumentals, and lullabies. He even has what he calls an Oreo reel, spanning two known reels from Ireland and one he wrote himself. He sounds the part, plays the part, looks the part and easily sweeps you away to dreams of the Emerald Isle, the rocky coasts, and the brawling barrooms of Ireland, wherever he happens to be playing.

He lives in Southern California and says he’s purposefully never been to Ireland. He says he knows that if he went he’d never want to come back, and knows because he’s adopted and can’t show his lineage, he wouldn’t be allowed to stay. But I’d say he has a clear voice for the Irish, whether he ever sets foot there or not.

You can hear everything from reels to lullabies to my favorite, Galway Girl, on this link.