Morning Star, an Irish folk band from New York, came to the library auditorium on Saturday October 11th for the tenth annual Irish festival.

This is the second year that the festival has been hosted here at Bucks County Community College, and also the second year straight year that Morning Star has performed.

The library auditorium provided a great setting for the concert. Not too large creating that impersonal feeling, yet not too small, leaving plenty of space for a rather large audience with side sections available.

And the crowd was pleased. During some of the songs they hummed along with the melody, and many songs enticed them to clap along with the beat.

During the intermission as I wandered around I noticed that many of the audience members spoke in Irish and Scottish accents, though I had difficulty distinguishing between the two.

I would have assumed that they were all Irish had it not been for the insight provided by the person sitting next to me, Mr. O’Rourke, who it turns out lives just up the street from me. He and I struck up a conversation while we waited for the concert to get under way and he helped me get to know the scene that followed these sort of festivals.

Noticing that he was among the many speaking with an accent I asked if he was originally from Ireland. “No, no,” he said. “I’m from Scotland, I’m Scottish/Irish.” Mr. O’Rourke and his wife were members of the Scottish American Society group and attended Celtic cultural events all over the place.

We started talking about Ireland and he explained that he and his wife had visited many times. The first two times they had gone with a Scottish American group, but “they were no fun, so we started going with Irish American groups.”

And that was one problem I had with the concert’s atmospheric setting: it was too serious. Looking on the internet at Morning Star’s concert schedule it appears that the vast majority of their performances are held in pubs in the New York area. As the concert started back up after intermission I had grown tired of the more serious auditorium feeling and I wouldn’t have minded a nice pint (or three).

“These guys are good,” said Katelynn Gorton. “But this sort of show just goes down better in a pub. I’ve been to Ireland, and in the pubs with people dancing and playing it just has a better feel.”

Gorton, a Bucks student and former Irish dancer, said she had been raised “very Irish,” and at one point during high school had competed in a national Irish dancing competition in Chicago in which she placed fifth.

The show also featured Irish dancers from the Ryan School of Irish Dancing here in Bucks County. I asked Miss Gorton to comment on the dancers as she left: “They were really cute.”

The band’s members are Mary Courtney (vocals, guitar, and bodhran drum), John Nolan (button accordion), Bernadette Fee (fiddle), and Keith Salmon (keyboard).

Mary Courtney is from Castlegregory in County Kerry, Ireland. She is from a large musical family that owned and operated the local dance hall called “The Strand Pavilion.” She started singing at a young age on that same stage, and while growing up played in local pubs. She moved to New York in 1982, and a few weeks later formed Morning Star.

John Nolan was born in the Bronx. His father played accordion and inspired John to play. At 12 he was sent to take lessons. In 1982 he became the first ever American to win the senior All-Ireland championship on the button accordion. In 1988 he and Pat Keogh released an album called “A Taste for the Traditional,” soon to be re-released on CD. John also has a solo album called “A Rake of Reels,” which was voted one of the best Irish traditional CDs of 2000 by Irish music critics.

Bernadette Fee is the newest member of Morning Star. She is a well-known New York fiddler, a music teacher, and a champion Irish-Step dancer. She demonstrated some of her Irish-Step talent during one of the bands tunes drawing large applause from the audience.

The songs they played varied from faster dance-type tunes that got the clapping going, to slow sad sounding songs, and on to the folkier bluegrassy types that had some people singing along.

The slower tunes were reminiscent of the generic movie shot that flies through the highlands. This feeling I had made me wonder, did these movie shots create that feeling, or did the feeling create the shot. Was this sound really so rooted in Irish tradition as to have grown roots in the land itself. I stopped pondering the question and just let the images and feelings the music created flow, because I liked them, even if they were the result of prior cinematographic experiences.

Proceeds from the concert will be used to create a new scholarship here at Bucks. The Celtic scholarship will be awarded to a history major with a GPA of 3.0 or better and at least nine credits completed.

Money was also raised through a raffle held by the Bucks County Scottish-American Society. At intermission a print by Bernard W. Croke, donated by his widow, was awarded to one lucky winner. George Carmichael of the Bucks Scottish-American Society donated the proceeds to the library’s Celtic Collection. The growing collection has approximately 2200 books, 110 videos, and 300 CDs, thanks largely to contributions such as these.

More information on the band is available at www.iuma.com/IUMA/Bands/Morning_Star/.