MUSIC Hawaiian flavour to Westport Folk and Bluegrass Festival launch

SAYIN’ ALOHA?Felix Sonnyboy (second from left) and The White Owls will be playing in McGing’s this Friday night.

Hawaiian flavour to Westport Folk and Bluegrass Festival launch


Ciara Moynihan

The Westport Folk and Bluegrass Festival this year takes place on June 14-16, but we don’t have to wait that long for a festival gig. The annual event, now in its seventh year, will be launched this Friday, May 17, in McGing’s pub, High Street, Westport, with a special performance from the lively Felix Sonnyboy and The White Owls (Hawaii, USA).
Inspired by songs of the 1920s, their set features ragtime finger pickin’ blues, crooning kazoos and ‘stomp dancing’ music. The Westport Folk and Bluegrass Festival launch also marks the start of the band’s Irish tour, which will showcase their new album, ‘Full Moon Saloon’, recorded in Hawaii. All tracks on the album are original compositions by Felix Sonnyboy, who has been dubbed ‘a travelling street minstrel and poet’, for reasons that will become obvious.
After graduating from a Michigan high school at 17, Sonnyboy took his mother’s banjo from the wall and moved to Burlington, Vermont, collecting old records, learning songs on the five-string banjo, and busking.
At 19 after travelling down from Alaska, he landed in Bellingham, Washington, still busking in the streets, collecting 78 records and working at a preschool starting a programme called Interactive American Folk Songs for Children.
That summer he went to Europe, busking in Paris, Barcelona and Florence, before moving to Ireland, where he busked on Dublin’s Grafton Street and Galway’s Shop Street, before finding his way back to Bellingham. There, he lived on the Lummi Indian Reservation for a month, recording his first kids’ album, ‘The Leather Winged Bat’.
After spending a snowy winter hidden in a cabin writing songs in a small community on Vermont’s Quarry Hill mountain, he travelled around the state, singing and playing the banjo in schools, hospitals, libraries, YMCAs and even a detention centre.
The beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina then called, but not for too long, as then it was on to Virginia, where he hitchhiked with a fiddle player down the old hillbilly highway route 421, studying the ‘Ole Ballads’, eventually reaching Kentucky.
Since then he has released two albums, ‘Take a Walk Opie’ and ‘American Folk Songs for Families’, as well as an album with old-time band The Muddy Boots, ‘How Has It Come To Be?’.
In 2010, after another stint in Ireland and Spain, he moved to the Hawaiian island of Kaua’i, where he met met Toby Brown (Bass) and Eric Cobb (drums). They decided to form a band, The White Owls, which Sonnyboy toured with regularly around the state to great acclaim.
Sonnyboy moved to Ireland last November, and Friday’s Westport Folk and Bluegrass Festival launch gig will be one of his first Irish performances with his Hawaiian band. After that, they’re off to Clare, Cork, Wexford, Monaghan, Dublin, Longford and Roscommon.  

Watch out for more information on the Westport Folk and Bluegrass Festival (June 14-16) in The Mayo News over the coming weeks.