John Doyle at the Rogue Folk Club

Irish guitarist John Doyle played a solo show at the Rogue Folk Club last night, Thursday, October 2nd. He started with the song "The Rounding of Cape Horn" or "Rounding the Horn". A lefty, he kicked into unparalleled time with his fast-picking left hand that never failed to follow the dynamics of his voice, loud to gentle and back again with great control.

Doyle didn't cross the pond to get here: he's been living in North Carolina for many years. He's on a nine-date tour of the west coast, which continues tonight in Mount Vernon, Washington's Littlefield Celtic Center and wraps up next weekend in California. He brought an octave mandolin to contrast his guitar and switched to it for the traditional song "I Know My Love", citing a version by County Cork artist Jimmy Crowley.

Doyle told a full story alongside pretty much every song. He told of the fisherman Robert Joyce and the Claddagh Ring, singing about a man who indentured himself. He let the subject matter go hardcore-folksong dark as often as it needed to; the frequent talk of ships and voyages implicitly sat against the news of the Global Sumud Flotilla's interception. When Doyle closed his second set with one of his better-known songs "Clear the Way", about the Irish Brigade at Fredericksburg in the American Civil War, he said that the song was about the civil war "that happened before".

Nevertheless, to follow the murder-ballad nursery rhyme "Burke and Hare" where a man called Knox "buys the beef" after bodies drop, Doyle sang a sea shanty, "Across the Western Ocean". (He got good crowd participation on sing-alongs in both!) That song, with its transatlantic call of "Amelia" like Earhart and its stories of Irish people immigrating in the potato famine, suggested that Doyle hasn't given up on his adopted America's promise just yet.