Album Notes

Billy Walsh is an award winning singer-songwriter from central Massachusetts who has performed throughout New England for over twenty years. In addition to his own songs, he has specialized in the Irish music of his childhood. His grandparents were from Westport, County Mayo, and he grew up with ten brothers and sisters in Lakewood, Ohio. Billy's warm, resonant tenor is perfectly suited to the genre. The ballads, like Raglan Road, City of Chicago, and Fields of Athenry, are achingly rendered, while the upbeat classics, like Finnegan's Wake and Roddy McCorley, are energized by the raucous, new-grass style picking and playing of his virtuoso band mates. Irish music doesn't get any better than this!

The Band:
John McGann's long resume features live and session work in the Celtic, bluegrass, country, folk, jazz, and rock idioms. He is a National Guitar and Mandolin Champion and has performed in clubs, concert halls, and festivals throughout the United States and in Europe, Scandinavia, and Japan.

Tom Megan (keyboards, accordion) is a composer and lyricist of several musical theater pieces that have been presented in Boston and New York. He has won numerous ASCAP songwriting awards as well as the Yip Harburg Lyricist Award from the Musical Theater Project in New York.

The discography of Richard Gates (bass) reads like a who's who list of the top folk artists of our time: Deb Talan, Patty Larkin, Bob Franke, Bill Morrissey, Ellis Paul, Dar Williams, Jennifer Kimball, and Paula Cole to name but a few. He has toured internationally with Suzanne Vega, and he is a frequent accompanist on the national folk scene.

Joyce Andersen (fiddle) glides effortlessly between the haunting melodies of the ballads and the rip-roaring fun of the fiddle tunes. Her music has brought her from the coffeehouses and taverns of her native New England to national and international shows with folk virtuoso Harvey Reid, the stage of Carnegie Hall, the Conan O'ÕBrien show, and country music in Japan.


Dave Mattacks is a world-renowned drummer. From his early days with English folk super group Fairport Convention, he has gone on to record with Paul McCartney, Elton John, Nick Drake, George Harrison, Joan Armatrading, Richard Thompson, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Jethro Tull, and many many more.