Irish Week at Augusta Heritage

A trip in the Wayback Machine

Back in July 2021, I was still working on scanning and cleaning up photos on my computer. I came across some videos from Irish Week at the Augusta Heritage program in 2010 and posted them to my WordPress blog. In recovering my archived posts that I had migrated to SubStack in January of this year and then blew up by accident in July (see Nothing like shooting yourself in the foot), I found even more videos from Irish Week 2011 and went back down the Wayback machine of when times were really joyous… exhausting, but joyous. I remember in 2010 how Robbie and I packed everything up from the mad crazy week at the Catskills Irish Arts Week, where he taught songwriting and I sold the artists’ CDs, and drove down to West Virginia for another dose of songs, tunes, and dance. I took set dancing in the mornings and singing with Len Graham in the afternoons. In the evenings after dinner (and maybe a quick nap) we’d have singing sessions “on the porch”—Irish, Gospel, Appalachian, French Canadian… the level of endorphins was never as high as when 10 or 20 voices would all join in the chorus of “Angel Band” or “The Old Triangle.”

Times change, programs change. I recently learned that the Augusta Heritage Program has moved out of Davis & Elkins and into Elkins downtown. It’s been years since there’s been an Irish Week. Then again, I think the Elkins Irish Week was one of the first and now there are many Irish Weeks all over. You could probably spend your whole summer doing nothing but Irish music and dance. But there’ll never be anything like the one in West Virginia.

So here’s a re-post to that recovered post in honor of the great times we had 15 years ago:

The summer is almost gone so I hope you get a chance to immerse yourself in some great music!