Folk Bands and Artists
Jerry O´Reilly
From Dublin, Jerry O’Reilly was a founder member of Brooks Academy in 1982, where he still teaches a weekly dance class He has taught dancing in Paris to the Association Irlandaise since 1988, at the Willie Clancy Summer School since 1984, at Whitby Festival every year since 2000, and at the North American Convention of Comhaltas Ceoltoirí Eireann in Washington, DC. He has also appeared The North Atlantic Fiddle Convention in Aberdeen and the Newfoundland and Labrador Folk Festival in 2008. In 2011, he performed at The Southbank Centre in London as part of the Cultura Obscura Festival.
Jerry is also a traditional singer of note. He is one of the organisers of the Goilín Traditional Singers Club in Dublin, which has run for 38 years and is considered to be the foremost singing club in Ireland. In 2003 he released his first solo CD, Down from your pulpits, Down from your thrones. He produced Around the Hills of Clare, a double CD of archive recordings from the Jim Carroll and Pat MacKenzie collection, The Spoons Murder and Other Mysteries, a book and CD of the songs of Con “Fada” O’ Drisceóil and Cascades of Song, the CD of the Clare Festival of Traditional Singing. His second solo album, Havoc in Heaven was released in early 2012.
More recently, he has been involved with the Man, Woman and Child ballad project, researching Irish versions of Child’s collection and in December 2015, he was instrumental in re-publishing Early Ballads in Ireland, celebrating the work of Tom Munnelly and Hugh Shields, two of Ireland’s foremost collectors of folksong.
