Album Notes

This excerpt from page 153 of "Drone On!: The High History of Celtic Music," Winnie Czulinski, (available on Amazon.com)

". . . a lot of Americans would argue their own kind, through that Scots-Irish influx, has dragged on Celtic musical traditions longer than the homeland. As well, Irish beats mixed with African rhythms to become rock music. The bodhran backbeat of jigs and reels also morphed into the train-beat of rockabilly, and hence to rock 'n' roll. That's the thinking of American longtime folk-rocker Henk Milne, known as the "big voice" of The Volunteers, a band equally inspired by the Volunteers who held Dublin against the British Army in 1916 and an LP by 1960s California acid-rockers Jefferson Airplane who held the age of psychedelia against the PTA. This folk-rock progression is why Milne and his crew have happily embarked on what purists would scream sacrilege, writing lyrics to Turlough O'Carolan's 17th- and 18th-century tunes, and rocking them out. O'Carolan, it seems, was a bawdy old jokester who actually penned words to a lot of his tunes, so welcome to keeping tradition alive in the new land. Milne's band Voluntarily takes time-honored Celtic themes into LPs like Whiskey, Love and Disaster, not a bad reference to Celtic history as a whole. They're also something of an anomaly in a south-Florida scene that's always gone for the Latin dance-flavored stuff, but as The Vols are called a full-throttle runaway locomotive of a band, that may have changed by now."
***************