If you don’t know Amelia Hogan, let me introduce you to another wonderful person.

Quotes shared by Amelia:

W.B. Yeats

Come away oh human Child,
To the waters and the wild,
With a fairy hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand. 

O’Shaughnessey

Artist, music-maker, dreamer of dreams,
Wanders by lone sea breakers and sits by desolate streams,
A world-loser and world-forsaker,
Upon whom the pale moon gleams;
Yet I am the mover and shaker,
Of the world forever, it seems.

With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world’s great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire’s glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song’s measure
Can trample an empire down.

We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth;
And o’erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world’s worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.

Here’s how are paths crossed

It was YouTube that first made me aware of Amelia. The algorithm, after I had been listening to some rare traditional Irish singing, had spotted her video, where she was singing Paddy’s Green Shamrock Shore with Ray Frank on guitar, and put it up on my screen as a suggestion of what to listen next.

When she traveled to Amsterdam with her partner in 2019, I invited her to sing at a few places and had the huge pleasure of accompanying a couple of her songs on my guitar at the Irish Night in Groenendijk and at the house concert at Karin’s place.

It took a few years before we met again in real life, which was at the 2024 Inishowen Traditional Singing Festival. There, in Ballyliffin, I was sandwiched for three nights between her and another female American singer in a three-bed hotel room (no sins), and next we traveled to Gorey, Wexford, for Rachel’s traditional singing session. You couldn’t think of a more pleasant way of driving the winding Irish roads than having Amelia next to you, singing songs. And she knows a few. The one I will always connect to this journey is Little Boxes, written by her friend’s mom, Malvina Reynolds. Enjoy Pete Seegers on YouTube.