This week sees the publication of the 65th episode in The Rolling Wave podcast series. The series features interviews broadcast on the popular weekly traditional music programme, presented by Aoife Nic Cormaic on Sunday night on RTÉ Radio 1.
The latest episode is an interview with musician and writer Seán McElwain about his new book Our Dear Dark Mountain with the Sky Over It. The book tells the story of James Whiteside, who collected music in the Sliabh Beagh region, an area on the border between Northern Ireland and the south straddling counties Fermanagh and Monaghan in the late 1900s.
This project has been a labour of love for McElwain. He has been researching this material for many years and 2014 he produced an award-winning CD of the same title featuring many of the tunes now published for the first time in this collection.
The book also tells James Whiteside’s own story, as well as profiling many of the musicians from whom he collected music.
Writer Pat McCabe, describing the book said: 'Seán McElwain here delivers nothing short of a golden fleece – a magic box uncovered in a miracle mountain cavern. So cared-for and painstakingly curated that it evokes the response, in another context, of the commentator Andre Jolles: ‘The miraculous is the only possible guarantee that the immorality of reality has stopped.’
Listen back to Seán’s interview on The Rolling Wave podcast here, and for more information on the project itself, go here.
