How to Pronounce Andy Irvine (musician)
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Jun 14, 1942 London 81 years old
Irish folk musician and singer-songwriter
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About Andy Irvine Musician
- Andrew Kennedy Irvine (born 14 June 1942) is an Irish folk musician, singer-songwriter, and a founding member of Sweeney's Men, Planxty, Patrick Street, Mozaik, LAPD and Usher's Island.
- He also featured in duos, with Dónal Lunny, Paul Brady, Mick Hanly, Dick Gaughan, Rens van der Zalm, and Luke Plumb.
- Irvine plays the mandolin, mandola, bouzouki, harmonica, and hurdy-gurdy.
- He has been influential in folk music for over five decades, during which he recorded a large repertoire of songs and tunes he assembled from books, old recordings and folk-song collectors rooted in the Irish, English, Scottish, Eastern European, Australian and American old-time and folk traditions. Imbued with a sense of social justice, Irvine often selects or writes songs that are based on historical events and presented from the victim's perspective.
- Some of these songs chronicle the abject living and working conditions imposed on groups of people: immigrants, brutalised migrant workers, and exploited textile workers and coalminers.
- Other songs recall the archetypal experiences of single individuals: the woman seduced by an unfaithful man or disowned by her father; the destitute young man ostracised or murdered on the order of his sweetheart's rich father; the down-on-his-luck farmer or the unemployed worker; the young man inveigled by the army's recruiting sergeant, and political scapegoats.
- His repertoire includes humorous songs, but also bittersweet ones of unrequited love, or of lovers cruelly separated or dramatically reunited.
- He also sings about famous racehorses, men or women masquerading in various disguises, a fantastical fox preying on young maidens, and the violent lives of outlaws. As a child actor, Irvine honed his performing talent from an early age and learned the classical guitar.
- He switched to folk music after discovering Woody Guthrie, also adopting the latter's other instruments: harmonica and mandolin.
- While extending Guthrie's guitar picking technique to the mandolin, he further developed his playing of this instrument—and, later, of the mandola and the bouzouki—into a decorative, harmonic style, and embraced the modes and rhythms of Bulgarian folk music.
- Along with Johnny Moynihan and Dónal Lunny, Irvine is one of the pioneers who adapted the Greek bouzouki—with a new tuning—into an Irish instrument.
- He contributed to advancing the design of his instruments in co-operation with English luthier Stefan Sobell, and he sometimes plays a hurdy-gurdy made for him in 1972 by Peter Abnett, another English luthier.Although touring mainly as a soloist, Irvine has also enjoyed great success in pursuing collaborations through many projects that have influenced contemporary folk music.
- He continues to tour and perform extensively in Ireland, Great Britain, Europe, North and South America, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.
- In October 2018, he received the first Lifetime Achievement Award bestowed at RTÉ Radio 1's inaugural Folk Music Awards.
