Here is a bit of fun, a track I made as an homage to a great old record made in 1929 by Dan Sullivan’s Shamrock Band. In the original record we take a musical sight-seeing tour of Irish towns all along the way, as the title would suggest, ‘From Galway to Dublin’.
My version of this travelogue is me announcing the stops along the route of the 7 train in Queens, taking in the stops ‘From Grand Central to Woodside’. The whole route the 7 train takes in Queens has been honored as a National Millenium Trail — joining the Lewis & Clark trail, the Appalachian Trail, the route of the Iditarod Sled Dog Race...
I certainly felt like a citizen of a wider world back in the 90’s when I would frequently get off the 7 train at random stops and just walk home, late-night, through whatever wonderful jumble of neighborhoods would present themselves. Goat curry with turnips, Malaysian flatbread with sweet and spicy squid, buckwheat noodle soup with clams and seaweed, scallion pancakes, areca nut done up in betel leaf packages full of rose petal jam and candied fennel seeds… oh man, what a lucky boy I was, taking the long way home.
But this tune is specifically an Irish tune, this is definitely a shout out to the Irish bars that gave me my first paying gigs from Court Square to Woodside. And that's a trip I do often still to this day, to sing Irish songs and fiddle with the Winfield Irregulars in Woodside. The fiddle tune here is a B minor variant of a hornpipe often known as Bonaparte Crossing the Rhine.