NYC friends: Muireann Bradley is playing Tuesday Sept. 16th at 8 p.m. at the First Unitarian Church, 199 Pierrepont St., Brooklyn (doors open at 7 p.m.). I’ll be there. You should be, too.
Why? And who is Muireann Bradley?
If you didn’t know Muireann Bradley was an 18 year old from County Donegal, Ireland, you would swear she studied under the late Dave Van Ronk for years. Or Erik Frandsen. Or, like David Bromberg, that she’d apprenticed herself to the late Rev. Gary Davis in the 1960s. She’s done none of those things.
Taught guitar back home by her father, and picking up repertoire from his collection of Davis, Mississippi John Hurt, Blind Blake, Elizabeth Cotten, Memphis Minnie, and Blind Lemon Jefferson records, among others, she plays by ear (“I don’t read tabs or music,” she says in an online interview). And she sings in a sweet, nasal, country-twang-ish voice that is instantly endearing for just how young and untrained it is.
The songs — “Candy Man,” “Freight Train,” “When the Levee Breaks” — are familiar to those of us who heard them during the folk revival or earlier. She’s a new generation, though, introducing them to her contemporaries. That is the folk process at work.
In addition to those country blues that are clearly a passion, at the Evanston Folk Festival this past weekend she sang Jackson Browne’s “These Days,” Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice” and her “first original song,” which had all the sass of Bessie Smith at her lascivious best. Broad smiles raced through the crowd followed by a well-deserved ovation born as much of the delight of discovery as the superb finger-picking.
An early (which is to say recorded during lockdown, so she was mid-teens) album re-mastered and re-released by Decca UK doesn’t do her full justice (it’s streaming on Spotify/Apple/Amazon, too). She’s matured as a player and an entertainer since then and even since the six-month-old live clips on Youtube.
Come join in the delight of discovery when she plays under the auspices of the World Music Institute next week!
(More on the Evanston Folk Festival soon. What a great event!)
nightmayer 
Thank you very much , for this heads up. Would love attend this concert but will be out of town. You named several of my influences as a guitarist and all time favorite players….Best Regards, Michael Solomon, Northport NY & Rockport, Ma
Thanks, Mike. They are all iconic — and can’t wait to see/hear how Muireann continues to synthesize those influences into her own music. Cheers, Ira
When I was a freshman at Hunter College, a green memebr of the Envoy campus newspaper, you turned me onto John Prine, David Bromberg, Dave van Ronk + others, each important influences on me in my journey as a musician and guitarist !
Best regards, and I didnt realize untill recently that your grew up next door to the Penzell family…I knew Selma, Steph and David thru being a guitar counselor at a summer camp they attended in Ct back in 1974-76. Selma actually recommended that the owners hire me as my summer session at Eastman School of Music was ending.