Musical talents team up for special Ballinasloe show

Arts Week with Judy Murphy

A trailblazer’ and ‘Ireland’s leading classical guitarist’ is how music critics from Washington DC to Dublin have described Ballinasloe’s John Feeley. And with justification.     Reared on a small farm in East Galway, John’s earliest exposure to performing was playing Mrs Gilligan’s Accordion Band – a short-lived experience, he recalls with a laugh, either because he got tired of playing accordion or he wasn’t deemed good enough.

But, in his early teens, John got hold of an electric guitar belonging to his older brother and found his instrument. He taught himself how to play it and within a couple of months the teenager, the youngest in a family of six, was in a rock band. He and fellow guitarist Tomás Gullane (of Gullane’s Hotel in Ballinasloe), were in competition for the role of lead guitarist, a title John secured.

“Tomás went on to make money and I went on to make music,” says the performer with a laugh. John certainly did go on to make music of all sorts – rock, pop, country, classical, Spanish, Irish and jazz are among the genres he has explored in a long career that has seen him perform at venues from New York’s Carnegie Hall to Sydney’s Opera House in the company of some of the world’s leading orchestras.

John recently joined forces with folk singer, Eleanor Shanley and the duo will be in concert in Ballinasloe’s Shearwater Hotel next Thursday night, March 8, with special guests, Loughrea singer-songwriter Ultan Conlon and Emma O’Reilly, a young singer-songwriter from Ballinasloe.

John will perform pieces from his extensive repertoire for the evening and will also provide accompaniment for Eleanor.

While he has worked with classical singers previously, this collaboration is a new departure, he explains. “I’m really enjoying having to create an accompaniment and backdrop for the singer. With classical, you have something very fixed to do, but with other styles you have a lot of latitude to create something interesting.”

He and Eleanor have already performed at Clifden Arts Festival and in the Dock in Carrick on Shannon, in a show, Jung, Symbols and Songs of Soul. which also featured psychotherapist Brendan Harding. As a duo, they played to a full house in Gullane’s Hotel in January.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.