Ennis Trad Festival Monday Night Concert
Cathy Jordan’s Crankie Island Song Project / Frankie Gavin & Catherine McHugh
Monday, November 10th 2025 · 9pm
“Crank it up!”
Introducing The Crankie Island Song Project – A new project artistically presenting and archiving the songs of those gone before us. Combining music, sound and visuals to share musical traditions with a new generation.
Ireland’s music and storytelling is cherished and celebrated worldwide. Traditional songs have captured the heartbreak, treachery, eviction, rebellion, emigration, murder, loss, longing, as well as drinking, revelry and hilarity and spaces of the otherworld deeply connected to identity, place and history in Ireland. Many of these songs have never been recorded and survive as they are passed from generation to generation. In the Crankie Island Project, Irish singer Cathy Jordan has made it her mission to preserve songs from every county on the island.
Renowned for her stirring performances and expressive voice, Cathy is lead singer and percussion player with traditional powerhouse Dervish. Her deep understanding and love of traditional Irish songs and singing has inspired her over the years to collect hundreds of songs which may have been otherwise forgotten.
“Our songs are a part of our folklore; they ignite our memory and give us a sense of place. They are messages from our ancestors that evoke powerful imagery of landscape, mythology and connect us with the strife and struggles of generations who have walked our common paths.” Cathy.
During the pandemic, Cathy began researching and recording songs from her native Roscommon. Wanting to use the Crankie box to illustrate the songs, she collaborated with artist Peter Crann also based in Sligo.
The Crankie box is a quirky story-telling device dating back to the 19th and early 20th centuries where an original illustrated scroll is wound onto two spools in a specially made box with a viewing screen. While the song is playing, the long scroll is hand-cranked and stretched across the viewing platform, providing an evolving visual depiction of the song. Crankie boxes can range from match box size to full stage dimensions and can be up to 12 meters in length.Inspired by the mix of visual and audio narratives, and with support from the Arts Council, Cathy began archiving songs from the four provinces and selected 32, one for every county on the island, that best represented traditional song types and would also lend themselves to illustration.
The majority of the songs chosen are from the traditional canon.
Then came the mammoth task of arranging, recording, mixing and mastering, a process which involved collaborations with over 50 musicians in 8 studios around Ireland. Duets include Cathy with Lisa O’Neill on the Cavan song ‘The Rocks Of Bawn’, Donal Clancy on the Monaghan song ‘The Patriot Game’ and Andrew Hendy (The Mary Wallopers) on the Armagh song ‘Tanderagee’.
“I traveled to Benny McCarthy’s studio in Waterford and hired musicians in the area and
recorded songs from Waterford, Kilkenny, Offaly and Carlow. In Sligo, we recorded songs for the counties Meath, Sligo, Westmeath, Louth and Longford. Antrim was the recording base for Wicklow, Down, Armagh, Wexford and Antrim, in Galway I recorded Galway and Mayo songs and so on. It was a wonderfully enjoyable process, and I was honoured to work with such amazing musicians, singers and engineers.”
For each recording, an accompanying video was created using the Crankie box. The illustrations for the Crankie Island Songs have been beautifully drawn by a collective of Irish artists chosen from across the country who were tasked with making their own crankie box with a visual story for the song. Each unique Crankie box with its own style, interpretation and texture was recorded on video and is part of the Crankie Island performances.
Five years on, the Crankie Island Project – this amazing and unique audio-visual collection – is ready for the nation to cherish and share with the world. The 32 songs are available to purchase as a download or stream and the accompanying illustrations (for each track) will be available free from crankieisland.com and YouTube.
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Frankie Gavin & Catherine McHugh
Coming from a musical family, Frankie Gavin has played fiddle and flute since his teenage years. At the age of seventeen, he won All-Ireland competitions for fiddle and flute. Originally influenced by the great Irish and American-Irish fiddle players such as James Morrison, he later found himself playing with stars: The Rolling Stones, Stephane Grappelli, James Galway and Yehudi Menuhin, and for celebrity audiences including four American presidents: J. F. K on his 1962 visit to Ireland, followed later by Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama.
Perhaps most importantly, the name Frankie Gavin is synonymous with De Dannan, the globally celebrated band he founded with Alec Finn in the mid-1970s. Over the years, there have been a numerous star-studded line-ups, and 2023 saw the birth of the latest incarnation of the band. De Dannan now comprises Frankie Gavin on fiddle and flute, Ian Kinsella on guitar, Diarmuid Ó Meachair on melodeon, George Grass on Bouzouki and Kaitlin Cullen-Verhauz on vocals and cello.
“The concert from Frankie Gavin in Armagh last night was life assuring.
Not a person present was not blown away by the unfettered display of genius, fiddle-craft, knowledge of the music and deadly delivery, from Frankie, backed by the equally all in, perceptive and empathethetic accompaniment of Catherine McHugh, who was doing an inside job’ of accompaniment that was nothing if it wasn’t mind reading.
Whilst the fireworks were continually mind blowing and entertaining, the music was intact in its true dignity and fresh originality, a feat that only a true genius on fire could deliver. The raw simplicity of the tunes from his early mentors were shared in the same time and space as was given to the tunes of virtuosic complexity. Hornpipes, barndances, slow airs, flings, complex harmonic variations, intricate bow-work were all in the tapestry of the great story that Frankie had to tell us last night. He brought a feast of music-lore and craic to the halls of Emain Macha, like the great hero that he Is.
Bhí a chroi istigh sa cheol areir agus tá sé inár gcroíthe inniu is beidh sé go deo.”