A couple of quick comments gained from a series of experiences on a trip to Ireland a couple of years ago. We went with some twenty very good musicians from the West Virginia area and a couple of clog dancers. We played all over, but only after figuring out a couple of rules:

1. Do not attempt to play Irish music, even if you have been doing the American form for some twenty years. We play at what I will call Contra Dance speed, they play about twice as fast, at what I will call Ceili Dance speed. There is simply no point in screwing up what they do best, though many of the American versions of their tunes they truely appreciate (expl: "Star of the County Down" as a waltz stunned them)

2. The good news is that they love Old Time and Country music, as long as its done well. But be prepared to "trade" songs, rather than participate on every one of theirs.

3. Many places have their own crowd, such as Doolin, which is well worth going, but don't expect play in one of their sessions, as the Pubs are crowded in a way no American can imagine, and the musicians are a clannish lot, set in a corner, and with little opportunity to interact. Besides, every person who gets three beers in him believes himself to be a musician - and while this statement is generally true for the Irish {like Aussies, they're not "tuned" till the third beer} it is not true for the Americans.

4. You might try the way we pulled it off in Doolin, which worked for us. The Allee River Hostel is a good cheap place to stay and quite scenic. After surveying the pub scene, we decided to hold a jam in the hostel, just doing American Old Time, and let our cloggers just do their thing. All hell broke loose, with our dancers teaching clogsteps and contra dancing to a mass of kids from Germany, Italy and France. The word got back to our B& B hosts who knew the owner of McGanns. The next night we did the intermission at McGanns and from then on it was history. We made no attempt to play Irish badly, but do Old Time, fresh from West Virginny. The cloggers brought the house down.

(Later we discovered that one of the antecedents of clogging is a relatively obscure form of Irish dancing called "sean nos" or literally "Old Time". The funny thing is, that our cloggers know a hell of a lot of steps the Irish never dreamed of, and they have now been invited back twice to give classes on steps the Irish are now incorperating into "sean nos" - talk about bringing it back home).

Later, we went to the Fleadh Ceoil in Listowel and ended up on Irish TV and their National Radio, as examples of what those Americans had done with the music they sent us two hundred years ago, but that is indeed another story...