Irish American Zines - Subscription: 1 Year, 4 Zines + Bonus Calendar

For the sacred price of $120, you will get a year-long subscription to Melanie Beth Curran's zines. I release a new zine EVERY season, near the solstice or equinox. At the year's end, you will receive your limited edition Wall Calendar (theme will most likely be potatoes).

Zines are about unsung elements of Irish American life.

Each zine is meticulously hand-crafted and researched. They are art pieces, collectable items, worth their salt, extraordinarily rugged, delicious, etc.

The zines of 2024 include:

SPRING - "Do Me Justice: The Mary Wallopers, Arena and a History of Tin Pan Alley's Racist Sheet Music". Examines Irish American and Black American caricature in music and the lasting effects of this printed material.

SUMMER - "American Irish Songs" - Songbook collection culled from Melanie's life, from Library of Congress Field Recordings, and wherever else I can find songs that embody the American Irish music practice.

AUTUMN - "Bad Boys of Irish America: What They Wear, What They Do, And Why They Art Hot". This zine examines the mystique of Irish American rogue dudes, in media, film, tv, real life, etc. This will be somewhat of a manual of how to act like them (why or why not).

WINTER - "How Brigid Made The Fire: Unverified Personal Gnosis of How Brigid Came to Run My Life". Melanie writes the account of how Brigid, ancient goddess/force/catholic saint/mysterious being from Ireland came to run her life as an American in Brooklyn, New York.

Zine 2: Happy Within: An Irish American Songbook

"Happy Within - An Irish American Songbook"

Collection of Lyrics and Commentary on 38 Irish American Songs.

Each song is hand-plucked from the waves of time. You'll find serenades from sources like: Alan Lomax's 1938 field recordings, vaudeville stages, medieval manuscripts, Butte Montana miners and railroad workers, the West coast of Ireland, Thin Lizzy, Hell's Kitchen, and more! You'll even see a few soon-to-be-classics written by Melanie Beth Curran herself. A surefire party for the lads, lassies and laxxes all.

The title “Happy Within” comes from the lyrics which sparked this songbook’s creation. In 1938, Alan Lomax recorded a guy named John W. Green on Beaver Island in Michigan. Discovering the field recording of Mr. Green singing “Kathleen Mauvorneen” sent Curran on a quest.

“Happy Within” contains lyrics and commentary for 38 songs, plus pictures and ramblings.

104 pages, full color

6.69 X 9.61 inches, spiral bound

110lb cover

70lb text

Contains:

Highway Patrolman - Bruce Springsteen

The Patriot Game - Dominic Behan

Low Places - Garth Brooks

I Am Thinking Ever Thinking - Traditional / Singing of Delores Keane

Fannin Street - Kathleen Brennan and Tom Waits

Óró sé do bheatha abhaile - Traditional / Singing of Sinéad O’Connor

Barney McShane - Andrew B. Sterling / Singing of Kevin Shannon

New York Girls - Traditional Sea Shanty / Singing of Finbar Furey

Take it and Run - The Dropkick Murphys

Kathleen Mavourneen - John W. Green, Collected by Alan Lomax, Beaver Island, MI 1938

May Morning Dew - Traditional, learned in West Clare and from singing of Delores Keane

Hell’s Kitchen - The Westies, Michael McDermott

The Boys of Barr Na Stráide - Sigerson Clifford, Singing of Arcady

Caoineadh Na Tri Mhuire (The Lament of the Three Marys) - Traditional, Singing of John Heaney

The Irish Rover - Traditional Sea Shanty, Cork or Letrim origins

By The Hush, Me Boys - American Civil War Traditional Ballad, singing of OJ Abbott

My Bonny Irish Boy - Traditional, Singing of Birdie Rainey and Margo O’Donnell

The Galway Girl - Steve Earle

Fairytale of New York - The Pogues

Donegal Danny - by Phil Coulter, Singing of Margo O’Donnell

Don’t Judge a Man by The Clothes That He Wears - Andrew Gallagher, Collected by Alan Lomax, Beaver Island, MI 1938

One Starry Night - Traveller song, heard in County Clare

Paradise by The Dashboard Light - Meatloaf

Yankee Brown - Daniel Bonner, Collected by Alan Lomax, Beaver Island, MI 1938

She Moves Through The Fair - Traditional, Singing of Sinéad O’Connor

Rop tú mo Baile / Sale / Be Thou My Vision - Dallān Forgail

Shenandoah - Traditional, from singing of Paul Clayton

The Wearing of The Green - Dion Boucicault and Others

The Dark Eyed Gypsy - Traditional, singing of Joe Holmes, from Fire Draw Near Anthology

School Days Over - by Ewan MacColl, singing of Luke Kelly

The Boys Are Back in Town - Thin Lizzy

Dublin Blues - Guy Clark

Glenswilly - Melanie Beth Curran

Landed Gentry / Rivers Just Babble - Melanie Beth Curran

I Don’t Regret a Thing - (Laoghaire Ní Sidhe) - Melanie Beth Curran

From the epilogue:

"In these songs were people burning with passion and anger. Even if they weren’t saying it outright, the anger was implied and undergirding even the most beautiful songs.

For three days I woke with the lyrics to “Hell’s Kitchen” by The Westies playing in my brain. The song was a good omen. Here was another songwriter languishing in New York City making the mistake of caring about the past and the making vulnerable choice to craft a song for it. Not sure if the writer even lived it. Was his father really some kind of Hell's Kitchen Irish Mobster? Did the places between ninth and tenth really reek of sex and sin or was he making that up? “You weren’t born a kitchen girl”, he sings. Does he know Kitchen Girl is a beloved American Appalachian Fiddle Tune? He’s just talking about a woman who wasn’t born in those streets above 42nd. He’s talking about me.

I go there one day and after a multi hour cultural assessment I discover that Hell’s Kitchen does still have a lot of Patricks and a thousand other types too. I keep seeing myself there in my precious apartment, in a silk robe, drinking iced cola, refrigerator filled to the gills with explosives. I’m good at making bombs in this fantasy. I’m a natural. I hit all my targets. I’m fearless. I’m brave. Zine is the back half of magazine. It’s pronounced “Zeen”. A Magazine gets its name from actually military magazines, places where the armaments were stored in an organized fashion. The original printed magazines did this too, but with words. Each section of the magazine was its own thing that could do harm and rip things up and explode.

This zine is a collection of Irish American Songs. These songs contain all the rage and passion I didn’t set loose on the elites this year.

I gnaw on the window sill and dig my nails into the carpet. The songs make a break for the exit but I ask them please to sit down and appear in these pages for you. I’ve done all I can to describe their fury but know that there are many yet unsung."

Zine 1: Do Me Justice: The Mary Wallopers, Arena, and Vaudeville Clairsentience

Welcome to New York City, where the Ghost of Tin Pan Alley still lurks.

This is an NYC tale about an EVIL force that threatens performers along the Mohican Road (The Bowery / Broadway). As the demon makes the author ill, she finds a balm- A SALVATION - in the performances of Fall 2023. One by The Mary Wallopers, one by a dance group doing a musical dance show called Arena. Both groups BATTLE the old cold thing.

The author illuminates histories of Black and Irish stereotypes in American Sheet Music.

8.5in x 11in, staple bound, printed on 80lb un-coated paper with a 100lb glossy cover.

Zine is full color baby, 44 pages

Excerpt:

"Do me justice, treat me fair
And I won’t be discontented
And I won’t be laughed at anywhere
But fairly represented

Andrew sings the refrain. It’s just so strange. I’ve been creeped out since I got off the subway. That cold and icy feeling crawls up my calves now. Irving Plaza is located right around the corner, literally a stone’s throw, from the former location of Tony Pastor’s Vaudeville Theater on 14th street. The cold climbs up my thighs and to my stomach. It envelopes me like a crooked hand. In the Tin Pan Alley songs, Paddy will do anything for whisky. Barney McShane will not speak to a suitor when she offers him tea, but liquor? Absolutely. It’s all comic until you’re wailing on your children and suffering liver failure. In Vaudeville skits, Irish males were often depicted as relatively harmless drunks and fighters. Vaudeville Irish females though, well, that’s a whole other story for another day. It was not pretty. Not at all.

The Minstrel Machine wound its fingers around the vaudeville stages of Union Square and scratched up Broadway’s back. Tin Pan Alley on 28th street published sheet music versions of Vaudeville’s famous songs. Tin Pan Alley then wrote songs for vaudeville stars to perform in places like Tony Pastor’s. The songs were on a feedback loop. Film began.

Early film reels played during continuous vaudeville shows, in place of actual, physical acts. These reels were simply the physical vaudeville acts made into film. They were about two minutes long. Many reels were filmed at a rooftop studio around the corner from Tony Pastor’s on Union Square. So Stage Irishness, this thing about which Andrew sings right now, this thing which he himself spars with as an Irishman on stage, especially in America, was cemented into song, into sheet, into celluloid, right here. 14th Street, Union Square, 133 years ago.

Now the cold thing is on my shoulders. It nuzzles my neck like a cat. My body sizzles and zaps with a ricocheting prickliness.

Dear wee little Francis, this is the one he called the train robber. This is the tarantula of music, crushing spirits with its dark and heaving limbs, making monsters of men, gripping pens and twisting tongues to make cash, milking people for their quirks and habits, slurping the gum water out of spittoons and pissing lemon juice over fields of green, just waiting in the wings to take its final snarling bite. It creeps up my skull, my eyes clamp against the tears, so many bodies around me blurry now, I am certain I will fall ill in the coming days. Grey milk and castor oil baron gatorade. I will stave off that thing which burnt down Japan Lithium Auto, I will repel the destructive force of this creature, which whooshing made its way across Arena’s facade, for I have shaken this man’s hand.

It happened at Bartley Dunnes. I approached Andrew at his laptop. I approached with the gingerness of journalists. I approached with calm confidence, moving into position, right on cue, and shook his hand.

“Hi. I’m Melanie and I’m here writing about Mary Wallopersism. Please, can you tell me, what is your goal?”

“To save Irish culture without becoming a false prophet.”

That was his only utterance. I could tell by the way he gripped my hand that something else manned his spirit. His body was lost under the influence of pints, but his words exacted crisping clarity.

For this is the way truth turns to language. This is the way the honest feeling forms in sound. First, it hears the call of the other, the one who presents the void. Then it parts the lips and pushes forth into waves of dependable substance."

Zine 1: "Do Me Justice"

Welcome to New York City, where the Ghost of Tin Pan Alley still lurks.

This is an NYC tale about an EVIL force that threatens performers along the Mohican Road (The Bowery / Broadway). As the demon makes the author ill, she finds a balm- A SALVATION - in the performances of Fall 2023. One by The Mary Wallopers, one by a dance group doing a musical dance show called Arena. Both groups BATTLE the old cold thing.

The author illuminates histories of Black and Irish stereotypes in American Sheet Music.

8.5in x 11in, staple bound, printed on 80lb un-coated paper with a 100lb glossy cover.

Zine is full color baby, 44 pages

Trust me, you will love it.

This in an elite zine.

Limited Edition First Run of 51 Prints.

Original Working Title: The Mary Wallopers & Arena & Vaudeville Clairsentience in NYC

Preview of Zine 1: The Mary Wallopers and Arena and Vaudeville Clairsentience

HYPOTHESIS:

The mind which understands basic things about American Vaudeville geography in New York City will have a haunting, meaning-filled, and evocative experience watching performances, in the present, there. Vaudeville awareness leads to nuanced takes.

PRE-ORDER ZINE 1: The Mary Wallopers and Arena and Vaudeville Clairsentience