Every March, America goes nuts about green, and becomes briefly and theatrically Irish. Rivers turn green. Beer turns greener. Bagpipes appear in places that have not known sheep in living memory. Plastic bowler hats appear, and suddenly everybody sounds like a Frosted Lucky Charms commercial. An impressive number of folks discover that their great-great-great-grandmother’s second cousin once spelled her name with an apostrophe, and therefore the household is now officially Irish. At least for the rest of the day.
For those of us who care about music as something more than seasonal décor, St. Patrick’s Day represents a totally different opportunity. It’s not a day to celebrate ancestry but a day to listen. And if one listens carefully, it becomes apparent that Celtic music is not an antique. It is not a museum piece preserved in peat moss. Celtic music is alive and restless. St. Patrick’s Day is Irish in origin, of course, but the music most Americans associate with it belongs to a broader Celtic family that includes Scotland and the Isle of Man, and whose melodic patterns traveled far beyond those shores. And much of the music that eventually took root in Appalachia did not travel directly from Dublin, but from Ulster, where Scottish and Irish traditions had already been living together for generations.
What is striking about contemporary Celtic music is not nostalgia but evolution. A new generation of Irish and Scottish musicians is engaging their folklore and tradition without embalming it. Meanwhile, in the American South—where Irish and Scottish musical DNA has been circulating for centuries—young artists are rediscovering that inheritance without sentimentality. Most importantly, they are not wearing revivalism as if it were a costume. For them, the music is continuity in the face of modern pressure.
For this St. Patrick’s Day journey through modern Celtic music, we should properly begin in Dublin.
The most formidable Irish group of the past decade is unquestionably Lankum. They don’t treat traditional ballads as quaint little artifacts. They stretch and darken them. They allow the drones to settle and thicken until a centuries-old lament feels liturgical. Their instrumentation—uilleann pipes, fiddle, concertina, harmonium—remains rooted in tradition, but their pacing and atmosphere belong unmistakably to the present. Listening to Lankum is like standing in a stone chapel whose walls have absorbed both prayer and defeat.
An excellent starting point to become acquainted with Lankum is “The Wild Rover.” Yes, that “Wild Rover.” But this is not the pub sing-along version. Lankum take the familiar song and slow it to a near-funereal pace. The melody is still recognizable, but the mood completely shifts. The usual swagger in the tune totally evaporates, and in its place is something heavier and penitential. In “The Wild Rover,” Lankum takes a song Americans associate with raised glasses and turn it into a meditation on exhaustion and consequence.
If Lankum represents the severe and meditative side of contemporary Irish folk, Ye Vagabonds represent the luminous side. The brothers’ close harmonies recall the sounds of the 1960s folk revival. Their arrangements are spare, their melodies unforced, and their restraint admirable. In a musical era that frequently mistakes amplification for intensity, their quietness is deliberate. It’s difficult to fake that kind of balance. A great song of theirs to introduce yourself to their sound would be “I’m a Rover.” It has movement and lift, but still foregrounds the vocal blend that defines their sound. It feels lived-in rather than staged.
Instrumental music, too, has undergone renewal. Ímar, formed by musicians from Scotland and Ireland, demonstrates that the session tradition can be both virtuosic and disciplined. Their performances are driven, precise, and rhythmically assured. Nothing drags. Nothing meanders. The reels and jigs are not treated as quaint dance relics but as engines. The music moves forward with the confidence of players who know the grammar well enough to speak quickly without stumbling.
The best place to start with Imar is “L’Air Mignonne.” What makes “L’Air Mignonne” especially effective as an entry point is that it demonstrates Ímar’s defining characteristic: precision. Many session-style bands rely on sheer speed to impress. Ímar rely on articulation. For Americans used to hearing Bluegrass, the parallels are unmistakable. You hear how cleanly the lines interlock and the groove is disciplined rather than frantic.
If this were merely a European story, it would be interesting enough. But the American South has been in conversation with Ireland and Scotland since before there was a United States. That conversation has often been indirect—filtered through Appalachia, through hymnody, through ballad migration—but it remains audible.
When the Scots-Irish reached North America in the early eighteenth century, they made an interesting decision. Rather than embed themselves primarily within the coastal plantation system, most of them moved inland to the hills. They followed developing routes into the Shenandoah Valley, the Carolina Piedmont, eastern Tennessee, Kentucky, and the Appalachian Mountains. It was a practical decision. The uplands offered land that didn’t require deference to established aristocracies. The terrain discouraged centralized oversight. If one has spent generations avoiding authority and keeping a distance, mountains look less like obstacles and more like insulation.
In recent years, a number of Southern artists have begun to draw more consciously from that lineage. Consider The Hillbilly Thomists. Their project may surprise readers unfamiliar with it. Composed largely of Dominican friars, the group plays bluegrass-inflected music that leans heavily into modal melody and traditional instrumentation. The connection to Celtic forms is not superficial. It runs through the modal frameworks and the communal style of singing. Their work demonstrates how seamlessly Irish melodies can live in Southern soil.
Try an old familiar standard, such as “Poor Wayfaring Stranger.” Their arrangement respects the song’s familiar shape while letting the modal gravity remain intact. It underscores how easily an American spiritual can sit alongside Irish and Scottish lament traditions. The Hillbilly Thomists are a reminder that the Celtic inheritance in the South didn’t evaporate upon arrival. It settled, it adapted, and it still sings in modes older than Nashville.
A more direct revival of old-world balladry can be found in The Local Honeys from Kentucky. Their harmonies and repertoire draw from Appalachian song, which itself preserves significant Scots-Irish material. The melodic contour and narrative density of their sound make the lineage apparent to any attentive listener.
Start with “Hare’s on the Mountain,” which is one of the great floating songs of the Anglo-Celtic world. The text has circulated in England, Ireland, and Scotland for centuries with verses that appear in other courting or cautionary ballads. It’s not a narrative ballad in the epic sense but more fragmentary and fuller of a veiled romantic warning.
What unites these European and Southern artists is not just instrumentation. The best contemporary Celtic music doesn’t have to prove itself. It’s not trendy. It’s not diluted for a festival crowd. Instead, it accepts the inheritance of memory—of migration, of loss, of endurance—and renders it in present tense.
This is most important particularly on St. Patrick’s Day, when Irishness is often flattened into goofy caricature. The true musical inheritance of Ireland and Scotland is not a novelty. It is the persistence of modal melodies in a major-key world. It is the willingness to forfeit space in a culture addicted to speed. It is the understanding that lament and dance are not opposites but neighbors.
One of the quiet revelations of the current Celtic resurgence is how comfortably it coexists with modernity. These artists aren’t retreating away from present times and modern music. They record with contemporary production values. They tour internationally. They collaborate across genres. But they never surrender the structural features that make the music distinctly Celtic.
For Southern listeners, there is something instructive in this. I have written quite a bit about the Scots-Irish imprint on Southern music. The contemporary Celtic artists mentioned above offer a living laboratory. One can hear in real time what those melodic and rhythmic instincts sound like when not filtered through Nashville or commercial radio. The resemblance to Appalachian fiddle tunes, shape-note hymnody, and early country ballads becomes difficult to ignore. Their music is neither a marketing angle nor a political statement. These musicians treat the music as craft, which may be the most traditional thing about them.
St. Patrick’s Day doesn’t always have to be a costume party. Sometimes it can be an invitation to just listen a little more carefully and hear how a musical tradition survives industrialization, migration, and the tendencies of digital culture. St. Patrick’s Day can be a reminder that what we call “folk” is not fragile. It adapts, it deepens, and it occasionally surprises.
If you find yourself this March wanting something more substantial than a playlist curated by a brewery, begin with Lankum if you are inclined toward gravity. Begin with Ye Vagabonds if you want luminous harmony. Begin with Ímar if you need rhythmic propulsion. Then turn to the Southern heirs—the Hillbilly Thomists, The Local Honeys, and others quietly tending the same melodic soil on this side of the Atlantic. You may discover that the distance between Dublin and Appalachia is shorter than you thought.
The views expressed at AbbevilleInstitute.org are not necessarily those of the Abbeville Institute.
Glad that you regularly contribute now. Diversity is aidful….
And reflects clear thinking.
Thanks, Mark and Paul.
Thanks so much for the exposure to these songs and for the commentary. I especially liked Ye Vagabond’s “I’m a Rover.”
There is some reason to believe that the Appalachian Mountains never had year ’round residents until runaway indentures fled there. It fits with the desperation one would need in the 1700s to be motivated to settle there and the subsequent inherited mistrust of strangers.