People

James W. Flannery, the Director of the W. B. Yeats Foundation and the Winship Professor of Arts and Humanities at Emory University, came to Emory in 1982 to found the University’s theater program. He has been called “Irish America’s Renaissance Man” because of his multiple talents as a producer, stage director, singer, scholar, critic and teacher.

Listed in “Who’s Who in America,” Dr. Flannery has five times been named by Irish-America Magazine as one of the “Top 100 Irish-Americans.” He holds a B. A. (Phi Beta Kappa) from Trinity College (Hartford), a Master of Fine Arts from the Yale School of Drama, and A Ph.D. from Trinity College, Dublin.

Dr. Flannery has been awarded honorary doctorates from Trinity College (Hartford) and the University of Ulster. He also received the Wild Geese Award for Outstanding contributions to Irish Culture and the Governor’s Award in the Humanities from the State of Georgia for his activities promoting the Celtic heritage of the American South.

As a singer, James Flannery is recognized as one of the foremost interpreters of Irish song, especially the amhran mór, or art song tradition based on the achievements of the ancient bards and harpers of Ireland. His book/recording, Dear Harp of My Country: The Irish Melodies of Thomas Moore, has won rave reviews and helped to establish Moore’s reputation as one of the seminal figures in the modern revival of traditional Irish music.

A landmark collection.
- Fiona Ritchie, Host of the “Thistle and Shamrock”

Blessed with a beautiful tenor voice and a remarkable feeling for the subtleties of poetic language, James Flannery also has the gift of knowing how to reach into what the Irish call uaigneas an chroi – the secret places of the heart.
- Bill Whelan, Grammy Award-winning composer of Riverdance

A work of advocacy in the deepest sense, Flannery’s voice – as singer and as writer – calls us to attention and advances Moore’s claims with an ardor that would surely have delighted Moore himself. He manages to explicate the Irishness and exhibits the melodiousness that have always been central to the allure of Moore’s epoch-making collection.
- Seamus Heaney, winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature

James Flannery has a gorgeously lyrical voice and a remark-able sense of the relationship between feeling and form. He understands the Melodies as works of art and as constituents of an Irish culture we have not yet even begun to acknowledge.
- Denis Donoghue, Henry James Professor of American and English Letters, New York University

James Flannery has a lovely tenor voice and that essential of all fine singers, devotion to the words. He is accompanied on the Irish harp by Janet Harbison, and it is a great pleasure to enjoy their total partnership exercised with impeccable musical taste.
- Charles Acton, The Irish Times

James Flannery’s rendition of Moore’s Irish Melodies is superb. His commentary on the songs contained in a beautifully illustrated book is filled with scholarly insight, perceptive musical and literary analysis, and delightful anecdotes. His discussion of the songs encompasses Irish and Egyptian mythology, Gaelic history and Goethe, Chinese music and the Chieftains, Thomas Jefferson and John Lennon, Lord Byron and Sean O’Casey, The Arabian Nights and German opera, Brecht and Bugs Bunny. The illustrations include pre-Christian Irish and continental Celtic artifacts, the Book of Kells, seventeenth-century maps, the flag of the United Irishmen, James Malton, George Cruikshank, and Unionist and Republican posters from Belfast in 1951.

Nevertheless, the printed lyrics, Flannery’s commentary, and the illustrations, impressive as they are, cannot compare to the impact of Flannery’s and harpist Janet Harbison’s stunning performance of Moore’s songs. Harbison, like Flannery a distinguished scholar and acclaimed performer, restored many of the airs to their original settings. Their collaborative effort marks a major reassessment of Moore and his songs. What it demonstrates is that Moore’s Melodies are an infinitely delightful way to appreciate the richness and plurality of Irish culture.
- Mary Helen Thuente, Irish Literary Supplement

James Flannery and Janet Harbison together bring a fresh-ness and an authority to these stunning songs . . . This release, with its handsome book, is a very worthy monument to the genius of Thomas Moore. No lover of Irish music should be without one.
- John Falstaff, Dirty Linen

So much of what we think of as “Ireland” is really Thomas Moore. Like all great artists, he created a landscape of the heart that touched something deep in his audience. Perhaps Joyce’s Dublin could be re-created from Joyce’s Ulysses, but that will never be put to the test. Moore’s Ireland, however, blooms anew when James Flannery sings it to life.
- Morgan Llywelyn, Novelist, Historian

Through a kind of sympathetic magic James Flannery has captured the impact Moore had, famously, on his live audiences in the early nineteenth century. People were shocked by Moore’s intensity of emotional realization, and I get what I feel must be the same thrill from hearing Jim half-chant, half sing Moore’s amazing lyrics.
- Robert Welch, Poet, Novelist, Translator and Critic; Dean of Arts and Humanities, University of Ulster.

Listen to the songs Thomas Moore: Minstrel of Ireland:

• "Songs of Love and Loss"
• "Songs of Romance and Rebellion"
  

James Flannery is also working on two other recordings. Heart Mysteries: Traditional Love Songs of Ireland, deals with the nineteenth century effort after Moore to carry over into English the riches of the bardic song tradition. Virtually every major writer of the Irish Literary Revival was involved in this effort and the result is one of the most beautiful song traditions on the world.

The other recording consist of songs associated with the work of James Joyce. These range from Irish ballads to drawing room favorites to songs from operettas to music hall ballads. Over 700 song references exist in Ulysses alone. Joyce, a singer himself, loved to perform many of these songs. Indeed, the recording includes two lovely songs written by Joyce – one of these a setting of the Yeats poem, “Who Goes With Fergus?”, that supplies a central motif of Ulysses.

Yet another recording of James Flannery consists of Poems, Songs and Stories for a Celtic Christmas. All of these pieces are regularly performed in the popular Atlanta Celtic Christmas Concert, now celebrating its fifteenth season.

To order the recordings, write to the W. B. Yeats Foundation, c/o Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322. Tel: 404 – 727 – 6180; email: jflanne@emory.edu.