Cobh's seafaring tradition is celebrated in the song The Holy Ground, and the town is about to play its part in celebrating the lives of seafarers the world over when it hosts its first Maritime First Song Festival over the June bank holiday weekend.
One of the organisers, Ted Creedon, explained that Cobh, with its history of emigration and the tens of thousands of Irish who left from there to build a new life abroad and its thriving tourist industry, complete with a choice of fine pubs and restaurants, seemed an ideal spot to host a festival of sea songs.
Among those appearing at the festival, which opens at the Sirius Arts Centre in the town on June 2nd, is veteran English folk singer and composer Cyril Tawney, whose experience and appreciation of life on the sea has led him to pen some of the finest of modern sea songs.
"Cyril is an ex-submariner and his work is imbued with the undulations of the ocean - songs like Sammy's Bar, The Grey Funnel Line and Sally Free And Easy have long contributed to the repertoire of folk-singers around the world," said Ted, who manages the arts centre.
Cork's Jimmy Crowley is one of the singers Cyril has given songs to. He gave him the Cork Harbour song, The Girls of Ballytrapeen, which Jimmy includes on his latest album, The Coast of Malibar, which Cyril will launch on Saturday, June 3rd. As well as the title track, which Jimmy remembers being sung to him by his mother, the album includes a new arrangement of Jimmy's own song, My Love is a Tall Ship, and a bittersweet treatment of the sailor's life ashore and afloat in Sailortown by Lincolnshire songwriter Bill Meek.
Jimmy duets with Triona Ni Dhomhmanill on a number of songs and is joined by the Canniffe family on the rousing Scots whaling song, The Ballena, while he also acknowledges the rich American sea song tradition with his inclusion of Maine writer Gordon Bok's timeless Hills of Isle au Haut.
Interestingly, the album - which also includes the specially commissioned Titanic Queenstown - features arrangements that are exclusively for the mandolin family, instruments such as bouzouki, mandola, mandocello and a new instrument designed by Joe Foley called a dordan, or bass bouzouki.
The festival promises some other delights for folk fans, including a concert by veteran balladeer Liam Clancy who, with his brothers and Tommy Makem, was a seminal influence on folk music from the early village movement in New York in the late 1950s up to the resurgence of the Irish ballad.
One of the principal participants in that ballad boom was Mick Moloney who, along with Paul Brady and Adrienne and Lucy Johnston, made up the Johnstons. The Cobh festival will give Irish folk fans a rare opportunity to see Mick, who now lives in Philadelphia.
Following a concert at the Sirius centre on Sunday, where he will be joined by fiddle player Marie O'Reilly, Mick will present an illustrated lecture on Monday on the emigrant Irish musicians who came through Cobh and how the then new recording methods in the US helped to preserve their repertoires.
The festival, which includes a sea food fair on the streets as well as a sea shanty workshop and boat racing in the harbour, will conclude with an informal session in the Roaring Donkey on Monday night. For further information on the festival, contact the Sirius Arts Centre on 021-4813790.