Bluegrass/roots outfit Southern Tenant Folk Union play the Crane

The folk/bluegrass Southern Tenant Folk Union band will make a welcome return to Galway on Tuesday, August 31 with a concert in the Crane Bar. After years spent playing in the folk scene in London, the band is now based in Edinburgh. What prompted this move north?

“My wife is from Edinburgh,” explains Pat McGarvey, the banjo-playing band leader by phone from Scotland. “We were kind of having a long distance relationship thing. She moved to London; then when she got pregnant – with our son Johnny – we decided to move here.”This move meant a long commute for Pat and, ultimately, led to some changes within Southern Tenant Folk Union.

“For about a year and a bit I was going backwards and forwards between rehearsals and gigs,” he says. “Eventually some of the guys said they wanted to move on to other things. It ended up that I had to recruit almost a completely new band. That was just over a year ago.”Fortunately for Pat, he found himself living in one of Scotland’s cultural hot spots.

“I was kind of lucky with where my wife is from because Edinburgh’s actually packed full of folk musicians,” he says. “They come more from the Scottish traditional angle but I kind of took advantage of that when making this new album.”

The album Pat is referring to is The New Farming Scene, which sees Southern Tenant Folk Union merge American bluegrass with its Scots/Irish origins. Pat explains how Roddy Nielsen, the band’s fiddle player, inspired him to find the title for their third album.

“We were actually on tour in Ireland, staying on a farm in Cork, and he wrote this instrumental,” he says. “He gave it a real silly title and I thought it’s actually is a beautiful piece of music. I said ‘look Roddy, you should write some lyrics for that. Or let me’. A few months later I thought just do it and see if he likes it.”

Given that most of the band members have been replaced since the last Southern Tenant album it’s no surprise there’s been a change in their sound. With such a talented group at his disposal, however, Pat didn’t have too many difficulties in achieving the folky tone he was after, although it did require a fresh approach.

“Any small change can make a big difference,” he says. “It’s not really telling people what to play – it’s sometimes telling people what not to do. To try and keep some of the purity of the folk sound and not have it too singer/songwritery.”

The mandolin playing of Adam Bulley is an impressive new element of the revamped Southern Tenant Folk Union.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.