Mail Club Práta

Mail Club Práta is gael snail mail club. Members receive a pamphlet about Irish American folk music, delivered in the mail once a month. Each installment covers a song or a tune from Irish America, delving deep into the twining tubers of its history and folklore. The pamphlet also includes chords and suggestions for musicians who wish to play the piece of music and add it to their repertoire.

How does Mail Club Práta's pamphlets give its readers a brand new lens into Irish and American folk song and traditional melody? By approaching each piece of music from three areas of inquiry:

• What does this song resist? Was it made in direct protest? Does it resist collective greed? Mining monopolies? War? Or is its resistance more subtle? Does it resist the very modernity that will eventually hide the song or replace the traditions within it? Is its resistance limited? Does it accidentally embrace the very social shifts that will endanger the song’s life and cause it to become the artifact of our exploration?

• What does this song remember? What particular moments, places, or cultural practices are being enshrined here, and what will the forgetting of them cost us? How does the song act as a bastion of remembrance, and call us to remember lost worlds and customs? How does the song’s remembrance invite us toward gratitude and appreciation for the immaterial culture of our own lives?

• What does this song restore? Does the music restore something personal for the reader of the pamphlet? Does it restore the radical traditions of the Irish diaspora? Does it restore solidarity with those on the margins? The immigrants? The colonized? Does it restore bits of indigenous language? Does it restore spiritual connection? Does it restore approaches to music making that were discarded or replaced?

Every monthly installment of Mail Club Práta's paper pamphlets has a companion digital post on this website. Online, people can access recordings, images, and other relevant information to the song best archived digitally. 

SUBSCRIBE Before May 13th, 2026 and RECEIVE A LIMITED EDITION POTATO POST PERSON PLUSHIE

Mail Club Práta is great for people who are enthusiastic about Irish music, Irish music in America, Irish folk song in America, American folk and traditional music, Irish traditional music, archival research, folk music history, folk dance history, the traditions of the Irish diaspora, history of Irish rebellion and republicanism, radical irish american history, radical music history, protest music, music and memory, the history of music in place, regional music styles, field recordings, and Irish identity writ large. Mail Club Práta is also great for enthusiasts of print media, lovers of the analog, zine lovers, anarchist print people, and anyone who seeks the reprieve of physical paper and slow information exchange in the digital age.