After re-posting our photo-essay blog on the Wilds of Connemara to No Depression, we received an amazing comment from "Lucky Mud". A member of the vibrant No Depression online community, Lucky Mud, aka Mike McKinney, has traveled to Ireland extensively with his wife Maggie, and has some fascinating things to say about his time over there. He gave us permission to repost his comment, which we ended up liking better than our own blog!

Guest Post by Lucky Mud: The Wilds of Connemara

The first time I drove through Connemara was the first time I'd driven in Ireland. All my American training was screaming at me that we were going to die. Driving on the other side of roads the size of a table top, no white lines, no wide, safe shoulders to edge onto every time a lorry passed. Sheep stood on the road. Rain drummed the car's roof and raced down the steep hill sides in torrents, like the quick Irish rivers they were. Howling winds swept up water from Killary Fjord and made it swirl like dervishes across the surface.

It was our first Irish tour, and in our arrogance we even brought a cameraman who wanted to film our tour. To record our concert at the Linenhall in Castlebar. Fed him, filled him with Guinness and let him stay with us in homes and castles, and never saw him again. Americans, in short.

Now, eight years later, we're preparing our ninth tour for November. We stay at the foot of the Reek in Murrisk, drive (just the two of us now) through the Maum, through Connemara, have many dear friends in the West who invite us into their homes and their pubs, and we've learned a lot about Connemara.

The people of that area aren't isolated so much as they've simply stayed put. Kept on doing what they've always done while the rest of the country fell prey to the alluring ways of Europeans and Americans.

We've played in Maire Luc, laughed and drank with the good folk from the West and learned to talk softer, and to listen more than talk.

I'm amazed and disheartened at how many American musicians brag about going to Ireland to show them how to play Irish music. Luckily, most of them wind up in Dublin, which has large sections now devoted to pleasing Americans much like one of the fake cities in the Epcot Center at Disneyworld. The rest of Dublin goes on about its way.

Irish music, in Ireland, comes from the inside out. It's part of the DNA, it rages in the blood and comes out not only in song, but in the lilt of the language itself. We've been invited into inner circles where, in a room of a hundred people, Maggie and I are the only ones speaking English. On very rare occasions when we add a song, we sing a cowboy yodel or some old Honky-tonk from Lefty or Hank. But, mostly, we decline unless we really know the room.

Watch an American enter an IRA pub, like one we visit at Achill Island, and order a Black and Tan, or a Car bomb. Listen to the place get silent in an instant. Irish politics, like their music, is buried deep inside them. As is their language. I've posted some photos of Connemara, as well as the road through the Maum on our website. I loved the ones posted here on yours. They make me homesick for a place that isn't mine.

Thanks to Mike of Lucky Mud for the guest post

LUCKY MUD WEBSITE