I just sat down and went through the entire Letters from Ireland book with its arrangements of Irish folk songs by Mark Brymer interspersed with texts, mostly taken from letters written in the relevant historical period. Some are what you’d call “rollicking;” others are very somber, with perhaps “Skibbereen” being the most tragic. So what’s going on here? I’m going to give some general ideas here, and if you find them interesting I’d encourage you to head on over to the page of this website where you can purchase my book that includes a chapter on each of the selections in this fabulous work.
To begin with, let me give you a couple of astoundingly obvious observations: