Tonight we will be playing and singing songs from Ireland at the local library and going to a nearby pub afterwards — in Historic Lower Mills, a unique part of Boston, Massachusetts. One of these Irish songs is “Ride On” — a three-chord song I learned in the Hanwell Ukulele Group (HUG) in London. In teaching this song to my group here in Boston, I suddenly realised that I needed to listen to the original to get the feel of it.
Hanwell Ukulele Group (HUG) meets each Tuesday evening at The Green W7 in London
Some songs are so easy to learn that you think you can just follow the crowd. That’s how I learned “Ride On”. I love harmonising my voice on top of it, against the unison of fifty voices of HUG in the pub in West London when I actively participated in 2017 and 2018. Patrick, one of the Irish ukulele players told me to listen to Christy Moore’s version. It’s very different from my imagination of it.
Compare Christy Moore’s version with ours, at our first jam session on a Saturday night (below). His is so much more relaxed. Beautiful! Can we recreate that feeling tonight?
Download the song sheet here. We will be singing other songs, too.
Why did we choose songs from Ireland for March 14th? It’s close to St Patrick’s Day, which is observed in Boston because of the large Irish population and history. There will be a parade through downtown Boston that day.
More importantly, I led three other ukulele enthusiasts in London to the Irish Hooley, the annual Irish ukulele festival near Dublin in August 2017. It brings back fond memories of flashmobbing, playing with 3,000 ukulele players in People’s Park in Dun Laoghaire, jumping into the 40-foot swimming hole, and playing ukulele until four in the morning.
I’ve flown Aer Lingus so many times that I thought I knew Irish songs. Learning to sing and play outside of Ireland is an entirely different experience.