Saint Patrick's Day (aka Paddy's Day) is one of the main Irish festivities, but it became a worldwide event, witnessing how Irish culture spread everywhere, gathering people more or less interested in celebrating the culture itself, the music or the drinking!
This year I spent my Saint Patrick in The Hague where, in the Grote Markt square, hundreds of people joined to play, sing, dance and share the celebration for this festivity. I wasn't disappointed at all.
Spending Saint Patrick's Day outside of Ireland also gave me the chance to reflect on how Irish music affected different traditions overseas, and I couldn't think about a better composer to refer to as Ed Reavy. He was an Irish man from County Cavan who emigrated in the States when he was a teenager and spent the rest of his life near Philadelphia. He was a fiddle player and a renowed composer of some of the nicest and trickiest fiddle tunes that you're gonna find around. He wrote "In Memory of Coleman" in honour of one of the best know Irish fiddle player: Michael Coleman, County Sligo man, also emigrated to the States, author of some of the most important recordings during 1920s.
I got this tune from a nice Dutch guy I met here in Rotterdam to play some Irish music with just a few days before Saint Patrick's: he was about start practicing on this tune and got me the idea to finally start practicing it, even if looked (and really is!) a tricky tune. It's an amazing tune, with a lot of possibilities: it can be played fast, slow, plain, with a lot of ornamentations and variation, very strict to the original version...
Because it was a new tune, I opted to play it quite straight and slow, using as a reference the beautiful version by Evelyn Healy.
Hope you have fun learning and practicing it!
Mad P
Evelyn Healy's Version: