Zine 5: Close to Paradise - An Irish American Songbook From Rockaway Beach

*Pre-Orders, Shipping Dec 2025 (before Christmas!)*

This spiral-bound songbook gives readers a robust selection of Irish American song from a section of New York City’s Rockaway Beach, “Irish Town”.

I wound up living here on accident. It’s not Irish Town anymore. Those days waned out in the 1960s. When I arrived I noticed a density of Irish family names and first names in the people I encountered here. I noticed something that I’ve grown accomostomed to experiencing in my life as a song collector, folklorist, and musician, with a strong intuition. There were songs here. They were not being actively sung, but the air felt like it reverberated with old melodies. Some would cling to me, show up in my own songwriting, but others were more elusive, like the warmth in the air where a person once was, five minutes after they left the party.

I learned that this stretch of blocks, from 98th up toward 112th, which is about four blocks wide and flanked by the ocean to the south and Jamaica Bay to the north, was home of a density of Irish bars and dance halls no tongue can tell. One can see remnants of the old bungalow colonies where Irish blue collar workers and their families vacationed for what was likely the first time in their bloodline’s history. So this was a hard-won paradise.

Whenever I talk to my Irish American neighbors, people around retirement age, they recollect their own parents, how they sang Irish songs all night. The motif of a man in the hall with an accordion comes up again and again. Irishness is enshrined here. It’s maintained in forms of the festival, the Paddy’s day parade, the school of Irish dance. The regular vessels of holding culture are here. My sense is that they fail to capture even a sense of what once was, musically.

I don’t have to dig too long to find what I am looking for. Being Irish American means deprecating your own role or authority on things. No one thinks they are the one I am supposed to be talking to. But they give me hints. They sing a few far off memories, the songs off Paddy Noonan’s album “A Grand Irish Party”. Ah dee doo ah dee doo ah day, ah dee do aad de day-lee and he charmed the heart of a lay-ay-ay-dy. They give me a thumb drive, a few CDs, a paper songbook from their own mother. I learn of the McNulty family, who made a great living as entertainers here in Irish Town, playing Irish American music for Irish Americans. The layers are so dense. For aren’t I living here doing the same thing, fifty, sixty, seventy years later?

The songbook collects the music I observe as being significant to the Irish Americans of this place, stretching back to the early decades of the 20th century, and earlier if I can swing it. It collects the music that the people of today carry with them, singing “Ooh-Ahh Up The Ra” in the St. Camillus parking lot before the FDNY vs. Ireland boxing match, dancing about to “We’re On The One Road” before the parish closes at the end of the year 2025 for lack of priests.

That may be the very end Irish Town, or whatever remains of it. The Catholic Church doled out sacraments on sacraments for the decades when this town burst with the Ruthie Morrissey’s plaintive melodies or the McNulty family’s raucous vaudeville throwback possibly proto-folk punk Irish act, Ma Nulty looking ghostly on the melodeon while her two children tap danced a suspended musical paradise into the souls and ears of the city’s Irish, who, for brief moments at the height of the American century came as close to heaven as people may travel on earth.

Shipping Dec 2025 (before Christmas!)