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= tracks you can
listen to by clicking on the song title. You will need a
Real Audio player to listen, click here to get one
free:
John McDermott - John, tall and impish with a curly mane and easy manner, is the ninth of Peter and Hope McDermott's twelve children. The McDermott family was the largest family to emigrate from Scotland to Canada en masse since the World War I. Fourteen members came to Willowdale, Ontario in 1965. After the family arrived in Canada, John was invited to attend St. Michael's Choir School in Toronto. Inevitably, he also listened to the Beatles and all the performers you would expect a teenager growing up in Toronto in the late '60s to hear, but he heard nothing in school or on the radio that could match the emotional clout of great Scottish and Irish singers like Andy Stewart and John McCormack.
McDermott is a transplanted Scot who can never quite shake off the perfect geography of a twisting highland road lined by stone walls. Like many who left, he is ambivalent about his adoptive land, although he knows that being an immigrant has led to deeper appreciation of what he left behind. He has also never forgotten the songs that the family would sing every Friday and Saturday night, a tradition that went back beyond television - beyond radio. Even in Ontario, it continued. "There'd be a big meal," he says, "Friends and family we'd gather and just sing. Unaccompanied." Today McDermott can tell you the complex genealogy of "The Old House," but it will forever be simply his mother's song; it's rooted that deeply within him.
-Colin Escott
Join McDermott's E-Mail List: McDermott's E-Mailing List
John McDermott - Catalog of Distinguished Releases:
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Remembrance |
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John McDermott |
1999 John McDermott -
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Price: Our Price: $15.95 You Save: $2.02 (8%) |
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Song
List:
1. U.S. Armed Forces Medley 2. Roses Of Picardy 3.
I'll Be Seeing You 4. Lili Marlene 5.
We'll
Meet Again
Performance Details: This collection displays all the faces of the music of Remembrance. Here we have music as motivator, to hearten the forces and strike fear in the enemy. Here we have the sadness, uselessness, wistfulness, inevitability, waste. War is not glorified even though music almost makes a bit of it tolerable. - John Downing |
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The Danny Boy Collection |
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John McDermott 1998 |
John McDermott -
vc; |
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Price: Our Price: $15.95 You Save: $2.02 (8%) |
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Song
List: 11.
The
Rose Of Tralee
Performance Details: John McDermott does more than bring the songs of hand-to-hand combat into the era of the Exocet and the Scud, though. He brings back the lost art of singing a great song without artifice. In the same way that technological enhancement today dominates war it also dominates music. The second, unaccompanied version of "Danny Boy," capped by the thrilling falsetto finale, is itself a statement of lost values. We mustn't forget the message in these songs. Their poetry can touch the soul. But lets not overlook the poignant and vocal artistry either, or forget that this was how music was made for centuries. |
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Old Friends |
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John McDermott 1994 |
John McDermott -
vc; |
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Price: Our Price: $19.95 You Save: $3.02 (12%) |
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Song
List:
1. Ye
Banks And Braes Of Bonnie
Doon
Performance Details: When the time came to creat a second recording, John drew on the many letters he had received from his audience, young and old, who encouraged him to continue to bring back to life many songs some had believed to be forgotten and more recent offerings to be enhanced by John's pure and simple singing style. "Old Friends" is partly a study of John's heritage peppered with a few contemporary songs John simply wanted to sing. |
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