From Booklist
Ever since the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem became a major concert attraction in the 1960s, Irish traditional music has been the most prominent of the island country's exports. As Curtis explains in his first chapter (a survey of Irish traditional music in this century), it actually took somewhat longer for Ireland itself to appreciate its musical riches. Further, the second chapter imparts that the music was (and to a considerable extent remains) livelier in both American cities and London, to which many of its performers, mostly semiprofessional musicians, had immigrated to find work. These sociological facts Curtis, who is primarily a recording producer, largely submerges beneath an anecdote-laden chronicling of significant players and venues in the book's first half and a set of artist profiles in the second. Although his editor ought to have been harder on Curtis' repetitiousness, dead metaphors, sentence fragments, and empty superlatives (e.g., "legendary" --which means what, precisely?), his book affords an insider's comprehensive view that no fan of the Chieftains, De Danaan, Sharon Shannon, et al., will want to miss. Ray Olson
