As May burgeons on the horizon it is easy to feel the soft and luscious presence of something with no measurable qualities. It is the thrust of life itself, with all the possibility that comes when energy and matter touch and existence animates. In indigenous Irish spirituality, this is the time of Bealtaine; the earth’s rejuvenation is celebrated, the return of Brigid’s flame is realized. In Catholicism it is the wind up toward Pentecost, when the Holy Spirt, represented with fire and a winged dove, comes into the bodies of the apostles and strengthens their tongues for spiritual utterance. Everywhere, life mounts its creatures with sound and story.
Song, Story, Language, Sound and Place are woven into an unseen but omnipresent fabric which covers and coats us — we don’t see it but we know it is there.
As many of you know, my work is to affirm the existence of this fabric, whose contents are song and the stories around songs, and, ever more consistently, the way the songs and stories are yolked to places. The defining feature of the internet is its placelessness. Remembering old songs, in place, and digging deeper into what makes three dimensional reality valuable as a spring of tangible creativity, is a rebellion against everything the internet does. I do not dislike the internet, but I am cautious of believing anything which come from “the country of the internet”. I believe the internet makes everyplace somehow the same place. It attempts to smooth and flatten reality. One problem! Reality does not like to be flattened.
Repetitions of behavior are locked into place, into places — music is the most staying of the substances which roots us to the past.
Nowhere is the stickiness of place more apparent than in the story of “The Sidewalks of New York”, which is the first song I am covering in my new creation: Mail Club Práta. Here is a brief plug for joining my mail club: Members receive in the mail, one zine a month. This pamphlet/zine/booklet delves into the history of an Irish American song or melody. I analyze the piece of music from three frameworks: what does this song resist? What does it remember? What does it restore? I also provide lyrics, chords and suggestions for how to play the song yourself. The subscription is $11 monthly or $111 yearly, and if you join before May 13th, you’ll receive a homemade Potato Post Person Plushie.
The Sidewalks of New York, sometimes called “East Side, West Side”, bears a feature so strange that it’s almost ominous, because it thwarts the limits of so called "three dimensional reality". If you’ve not heard the song, here is my favorite version of it, recorded by Irish American stars of the 1920s, The Flanagan Brothers: https://on.soundcloud.com/mzOwZrRJfYiKW936wX
The song begins with a place: “down in front of Casey’s old brown wooden stoop”. It goes on to describe a merry group of youngsters dancing on the sidewalk there. Thing is, this was a real memory of the lyricist's. The people named in the song were real people. It’s an ethnography. It’s a moving picture. It is a living document of a moment which, when the song was published in 1894, was already a relic, a nostalgic imprint of an evening some twenty or thirty years in the past at that point.
These characters most likely “tripped the light fantastic” in front of rows of tenements at 514 East 16th Street in the 1860s or 1870s. Their neighborhood was considered a slum and was cleared in 1943 to make way for Stuyvesant Town. Yes. Stuytown, the huge residential development, sits on top of the ghost of the most famous sidewalk in New York, The Sidewalks of New York sidewalk. The development was planned. The structures went up. And those scouring researchers? They discovered that the former location “down in front of Casey’s old brown wooden stoop”, is now Stuytown Playground 12. So in three different centuries, in the exact same spot, children play and have played and have been playing. The immaterial quality of things reigns supreme.
This spot was always a spot. The Lenape likely had settlements at this very spot according to the 2009 Mannahatta map : http://www.nyc99.org/1500/mannahatta.html
So it was always a spot with a lot of life. Was it always a spot of playfulness?
RECHOUWACKIE – place of sands – now called ROCKAWAY
Another pace of great spiritual and sonic stickiness is Rockaway Beach. I live in Rockaway in New York City, which has been called Rockaway since time immemorial, as Rockaway is the Lenape word for Rockaway. Rockaway Beach was so powerful that it stuck with someone who came all the way west to Washington State. On the island where I grew up, Bainbridge Island, there is another Rockaway Beach. Rockaway Beach on Bainbridge is strangely akin to Rockaway Beach NYC. Rockaway Beach on Bainbridge also looks out across the water at the bustling metropolis. Seattle was our Manhattan. What does it mean that I have found home in both Rockaways? What energy does this name carry? What does this word actually mean? Almost every translation I come across is different. Rockaway means “the lonely place”, or “the place of laughing waters”, or just “the place where the Rockaway people live”. The translation above has Rockaway meaning “the place of sands": https://lenapeprograms.info/3044-2/
Rockaway is an extremely dense pocket of culture and familiarity. Without analyzing my friends and neighbors too much, I can also say Rockaway is a place where a specific accent and way of speaking is hyper-preserved. I think of it as 3/4 a Brooklyn/Queens accent, 1/4 a Boston accent. It’s not like the rest of NYC’s accents. There is an enormous Irish American population here, and in the speech patterns of many people I know, I am hearing Hiberno English. This is the kind of English that Irish people speak in Ireland, with Irish language phrasing and sentence structure and word choice translated into English. I need to devote an entire year of my life to finding out which Rockaway Beach sentences in 2026 are unexpected preservations of Irish language phrases. For now, I will tell you about a completed project about Rockaway, my Rockaway Irish Town songbook zine.
Close to Paradise: An Irish Amerecan Songbook From Rockaway Beach examines songs from the lost neighborhood of Irish Town, which thrived in the mid century between beach 98th and 116th streets in Rockaway. Finding the songs and the stories for this zine was a very deep and mystical process. It involved interviewing and delving and learning to play the songs, plus a fair amount of looking at and listening to places and sounds that “were not there”. Call me nuts dot com but there were many times during the creation of this zine when I felt the presence and honestly the guidance of the deceased musical artists from the pages of this book, from the lost blocks of Irish Town. From Beach 103rd street they found me and made it clear: they want to be remembered.
- My Rockaway Songbook zine release event is July 26th at The Rockaway Hotel. Mark your calendars, save the date, see you there!
- I am playing/storytelling at a Bealtaine celebration on May 2nd at Hawk and Handsaw Farm on Rhode Island. Come!
- For all upcoming events: https://www.melaniebethcurran.com/pages/events
- I am booking for the rest of 2026, let me know if I can come perform at your establishment, for your group, at your venue. Please email for booking inquiries.
- I am taking zine commissions! Great for the history you want to share. Please email for a consultation
- EMAIL: hello [at] brigid-arts [dot] com
BIG SPRING BLESSINGS EVERYONE!
-Melanie Beth Curran