FEATURING The McGee Band and David Wilson David A. Wilson and the McGee Band
AN ALMONTE CELTFEST 2012 FUNDRAISER The McGee Band and Prof. David Wilson presents a superb show that uniquely combines powerful emotion, creativity in music and words, and brings to life a compelling chapter of the history of Canada as an emerging nation. Please mark the date, and come and experience the acoustically superb Almonte Old Town Hall, SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 6th at 2 pm for this musical and literary event extraordinaire. The recipient of the University of Toronto's Outstanding Teaching Award, and a Professor in the Celtic Studies Program and History Department at the University of Toronto, David A. Wilson has completed a two-volume biography of Thomas D'Arcy McGee, the brilliant Irish Canadian politician and Father of Confederation who was assassinated in 1868 at the age of forty-two. The first volume won two major awards; Volume 2 has been described in an advance review as "one of the great historical biographies of our time."
THE MCGEE BAND excel in fusing a blend of Irish, Scottish, and Québécois music, and have recorded a CD of original music in traditional style "In Honour of the Life and Times of Thomas D'Arcy McGee," written, recorded and produced by James Stephens and Frank Cassidy in Ottawa.
The McGee Band is James Stephens (fiddle, octave mandolin, and vocals) and Frank Cassidy (tin whistles and tenor guitar), multi-instrumentalist Greg T. Brown (concertina, accordion, fiddle, tenor banjo and vocals), bodhran player extraordinaire Ken Harper, and piano and melodeon player Jeff McClintock Together, David A. Wilson and the McGee Band put on a show that combines the speeches, letters and poems of McGee with original music by The McGee Band, that is fresh, and innovative and respectful of its traditional roots. They have performed it to great critical acclaim in Canada and the United States, and Almonte Celtfest 2012 is delighted to premiere the launch of McGee Volume 2. TICKETS are $20 advance, $22 at the door and are available at: Mill Street Books 613-256-9090, Mississippi Mills MusicWorks. 613-256-7464, Baker Bob's 613-256-7674 . Refreshments are by Almonte's Naismith Pub
DAVID WILSON Thomas D'Arcy McGee is best known for his prominent role in Irish-Canadian politics, his inspirational speeches in support of Canadian Confederation, and his assassination by an Irish revolutionary who accused him of betraying his earlier Irish nationalist principles. From his early temperance speeches in Wexford, Ireland, David Wilson follows McGee across the Atlantic, where at nineteen he became the editor of America's leading Irish newspaper, and traces his subsequent involvement with the Young Ireland movement, his reactions to the Famine, and his role in the Rising of 1848. Co-winner of the James S. Donnelly Sr. Prize for Books in History and the Social Sciences presented by the American Conference for Irish Studies, 2009.
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“This is an exciting and brilliantly arranged CD, and I hope it gets the wide hearing and distribution it deserves; it’s a rare enough event to hear so excellently performed a recording of music in the traditional vein, but when it succeeds in weaving a creative melodious tapestry of the ‘folk’ and the ingeniously newly composed, it is an altogether unexpected delight.” 