Hi Ted!

The whole idea of accents is quite interesting.

When they make movies of the Old West, everybody speaks with a "Why, thank you, Miss Mollie, that'd be right nice of you" accent. How did people in the Old West really speak? I read somewhere that majority who took part in the 1849 Gold Rush were from the Eastern U.S. and that, of those, a great many were immigrants.

By the time I was 17, I had lived in England, Ireland, Canada, America, England again and America again. Most people figure you're born someplace and die there or you're born in A and move to B. They like it simple. I've never lived anywhere where people didn't think I was from somewhere else!

Kevin Burke, the fiddler, was born in London of Irish parents. He spent a lot of his youth in Ireland and, of course, in his parents' company. I haven't seen him in years but he used to pronounce individual words in a sentence either with an English accent or an Irish accent. That was one of the more bizarre ways of speaking I've ever heard but it was entirely natural.

If I can be so bold as to offer advice, concentrate on singing a song as though you really mean it, as though you were there when the events were taking place. That's how Joe Heaney sang; that's how I try to sing. If you can't do that with certain songs, just sing them for yourself until you can.

Some songs are dialect pieces. I would not say that "The Patriot Game" is one of them. Hey, just sing it like your name's O'Hanlon and hear what comes out.

All the best, Dan