Irish- American singer- songwriter Brianna McGeehan told David Hennessy about her new music, being inspired by her Irish ancestors and why it is no surprise America is such a mess as it was built on toxic foundations.
Brianna McGeehan (38) released her debut single Home recently.
Brianna is a proud Irish American and her ancestral heritage has been a key factor in shaping her sound and identity.
The Oregon- born Atlanta-based artist has been inspired by the ancestors who left Ireland in famine and has been discovering much about family members that until recently she knew little or nothing about.
Her great-great-grandparents, John Corrigan and Rose McFadden, emigrated from Tyrone County, Ireland, to Maryland, where their youngest son, Charles Corrigan, fought for the union army. The family stories of survival through smallpox epidemics and economic hardship, all while staying connected to their Irish roots, add a rich historical depth to McGeehan’s work.
Growing up in an Irish-American family, McGeehan was surrounded by tales of her ancestors’ trials and triumphs, from her great-great-grandfather’s struggles as a Civil War veteran to her grandmother’s pride in their Donegal lineage.
These stories of endurance and identity have profoundly influenced McGeehan’s songwriting, infusing her music with a sense of place and belonging.
Although Brianna admits she has not made it to Ireland yet, it is a place she feels a deep connection to.
Home is a song about community and echoes of her ancestors’ resilience and determination.
What inspired the song, Home?
“For me as a songwriter, it’s always the same: I have an experience that may be small or big but it kind of sticks with me or it triggers a lot of emotion, and then I feel called to write a song.
“I was helping a loved one through a mental health crisis and that was the spark.
“Then as a songwriter, I started to think about, ‘What’s the universal story?’
“We all have similar stories, similar suffering, similar joys.
“For me as an Irish American who was very influenced by my grandmother who was born in Philadelphia but in an insular Irish community, colonialism comes up a lot more than it would if I was just a white American.
“I end up thinking a lot about colonialism and our post-colonial world.
“We have such a fractured culture over here.
“People aren’t necessarily deeply connected to their roots and I think that that’s actually essential.
“I find that a lot of suffering comes from lack of community, this lack of rootedness.
“We prioritise buying things over here.
“We have this consumer capitalist society that’s replaced what was cultural roots.
“Home is about suffering in this particular moment.
“What’s it like to live in this post-colonial world where we really live on land where suffering occurred?
“I think mental illness is rife in America, in part, directly because of that.”
You speak about a lack of community. It seems like one thing that should have come out of the pandemic was the realisation that we are all in it together but perhaps that lesson has not been heeded as much as we would have liked..
“No, I agree completely.
“I actually wrote this song before the pandemic.
“I took a long hiatus so the songs that I’m recording right now, I’ve written over the past six years.
“But I felt like the silver lining of the pandemic was that we needed our community, we needed our people and we actually felt that. Because we do always need our people but we truly needed them.
“I was hopeful that there would be more lasting change or a bigger paradigm shift.
“Maybe it’s happening and it’s just hard to see when you’re in the moment of it.”
Your Irish ancestors left Ireland looking for a better life but maybe it wasn’t all the ‘American dream’…
“That’s something I’ve really thought about lately.
“I’ve really been reaching back and learning a lot about my ancestors which is something that I really didn’t do until recently.
“I took it for granted that I’m half Irish.
“But I look at the parts of my family that I know a lot more about.
“They needed each other so much and they worked together to get what they did achieve in America, but then how much did they lose?
“I look at my ancestors who came from Donegal, for instance.
“They came during the great hunger and they never went home.
“They did bring other people and had solidarity.
“But my family has had suffering and mental illness in America, and when they came over, no one wanted them to come in the stores.
“I feel like it probably wasn’t all it was chalked up to be.
“Suddenly, they’re child coal miners.
“I feel like if they had known the full scope of what they were signing up for….
“America was this dream that was sold to everyone, still is to a degree and we’re still over here fighting over cold pizza and we don’t have healthcare.
“I feel like at some point my ancestors were probably disillusioned with America ‘the dream’, and they were like, ‘Well, this isn’t what we thought it would be’.
“They also did work very hard and achieved things and I have to give them that, but I think a lot was lost.”
But one thing they had was community. You said there that they brought others over and they stuck together. Times were tough but they had each other..
“You’re right.
“It’s funny, I’ve been learning a lot about my McGeehan family.
“We thought we didn’t know much about them.
“I found out that they were pro baseball players so I have these detailed accounts of when they came over, who came over. My great grandfather was two when he came over. I didn’t know that.
“Now I have all this information on them.
“It’s all these sports facts and then all these details of my family in these bios.
“Maybe they were alright.
“They had their family all around them.
“I’ll never know, but I feel like they still lost something.
“They did have the community, they did have each other but there’s something about homeland and place.
“That’s what I was thinking about with Home, we’re sort of placeless in America at this point.
“Even my ancestors were sort of placeless: They’re suddenly in Pennsylvania and that wasn’t home.
“I’m sure they missed many things about Donegal..”
They were also placeless in not having home any more, weren’t they? Your ancestors from the north of Ireland had to leave on account of being Catholic…
“Yeah, they had no choice but to leave.
“I think all of them needed to come and needed something.
“They weren’t getting what they needed, from my perspective, due to colonialism which brings me back to the greater concepts as I’m writing a song.
“I’m like, ‘Why did they have to leave? Why do we lose track of home?’
Have you been over to Ireland yourself, spent much time there?
“Never.
“This summer I will be there, and I hope to play shows.
“Also I hope to spend about a month there actually playing shows and then also just exploring.
“My family’s from Lismore and Donegal and Tyrone County.
“There’s a bunch of places that I would like to go to.
“And it’s funny to me, I can’t tell you why I haven’t gone to Ireland yet, and my dad’s never been to Ireland so the plan is really to convince my dad- We’re still working on it- to go back to Ireland.
“A few years ago I was like, ‘Wait a second, I need to go to Ireland. What’s going on here?’
“It’s funny I haven’t gone but I’ve always known that I would.
“I think it’s been an important thing for me to have that sense of rootedness over there.”
Of course anyone looking into history or family stories can’t take everything as gospel..
“Some of it’s mystery and myth at this point and, as an artist, I’m fine with that.
“Some of the things my grandmother said were completely bonkers.
“She was a character.
“She claimed we are related to Roger Casement because there was a Casement who was married into my family around the right time and she was disowned from her family.
“The story goes she was Protestant, we were Catholic and she left her family to marry my great grandfather or whatever.
“Anyway, she would go around saying we were related to him and as she got older it would be like, ‘Your great grand uncle in the IRA’, and I’m like, ‘Well, he couldn’t have been my great grand uncle but good story’.
“I’ll just take it if I can write a song with it or find some like meaning for myself.”
Did you grow up in one of those strong Irish communities in America?
“Not at all actually.
“My grandmother grew up with Irish grandparents.
“They put up Irish people when they would come to America.
“If they didn’t have people, they would stay with my grandparents, even if they weren’t related, which I think is so cool.
“If you were Irish, you could come stay at our house.
“My grandmother grew up like that and then my dad grew up in a rooming house that his grandmother owned with their big Irish family until they moved for work.
“There’s this phenomenon in American culture that in the 1960s Irish communities, Italian communities, all of these communities that were insular and really holding on to their roots and their culture broke apart and American capitalism kind of took over. Everyone moved for work.
“I’m really grateful I grew up very close with my grandmother so I got it through her but that that’s really it.
“She lived in the same city as me and, even as a teenager, I’d see her three times a week and we were really tight.
“I don’t really know a lot of Americans that are my age that really grew up with their ancestors’ culture like that anymore which is maybe part of why I haven’t come back to Ireland.
“It’s interesting that I haven’t owned it or written songs about it but maybe it just wasn’t time, now’s the time.”
Your sound has moved more towards Celtic folk from what was more of an Americana sound, hasn’t it?
“Because I was close with my grandmother, I was always really drawn to Irish music.
“It always makes me want to cry just a tiny bit.
“It affects me and it’s funny because my kids are the same way.
“I didn’t get to go to the dances or have the culture, but what I did get was the music and that’s probably the most important thing to me.
“I feel like, through my Irish family, I got the music, which was the most essential thing for me as an artist.”
You spoke about mental illness which is something we are speaking about more now, do you feel that’s positive?
“I feel like the fact that we’re talking about it and the fact that we’re framing it as trauma, like people have traumas and we have to heal instead of being like, That guy’s crazy’, there’s been this change in how we have the conversation and I think that’s so essential.
“When I write a song or when I sing, what I want people to get from it is a little bit of healing.
“I think we’re going in a positive direction actually in terms of the conversation around mental illness, therapy is normalised, even encouraged.
“That’s really cool because if everyone goes to therapy, no one has to feel weird about it.
“I feel like humanity is in a moment of healing.
“I think we’re in a moment of coming back to that village and that depending on our people because we’re seeing that the earth can’t sustain our current systems.
“We can’t be creating products the way that we are, it’s not sustainable the way that we live right now.
“And if we shared more and we lived in community, things would be really different.
“I’m really optimistic as an artist.
“I feel like it’s my job as the artist to be optimistic and to kind of shine the path ahead, ‘Look, it’s going to be okay everyone’.
“I don’t think the pandemic helped with mental illness because people were isolated but my hope was that it kind of shone a light on the fact that people are so isolated, they were isolated before the pandemic too.”
What is your feeling about America right now and all that is going on, possible return of Trump etc?
“I think a lot of the people that I know see America as a problem the whole time.
“I mean, what is it built on? The genocide of indigenous people, the transatlantic slave trade and exploiting immigrant labour like my ancestors.
“So I can’t sit here and be like, ‘Suddenly, America’s a problem’.
“Because if you really start to study history, you realise the roots are toxic.
“We’re dealing with 400 years of problem.
“That’s my perspective so when I look at things like Trump- There was a school shooting 30 minutes from us, 45 minutes actually, like really close to where my kids go to school.
“But I think they’re all symptoms of a sickness that’s from the beginning, that’s my view.
“People generally, right now, are just like, ‘We’re done with this’.
“They’re just like, ‘America’s a mess, how are we ever going to fix it?’
“I do see some hopelessness in America currently.
“It’s like, ‘How on earth do we have Trump again in the conversation? How are we here?’
“There’s some optimism over Kamala Harris and then there’s many people that aren’t happy with her relationship to Israel and what’s going on in Gaza.
“It’s not a happy moment from my perspective but I feel like I have work to do here.
“We have to change things here and I just want to be a part of that positive change.
“People are definitely struggling with the moment that we’re in.”
Is there a particular story about your ancestors that you think could inspire a song?
“Yes, I haven’t written it yet but because I actually just unearthed all of these documents that are in the baseball archives.
“Connie McGeehan played for the Philly As.
“He was this rising star and then he got tuberculosis and ended up in the family’s backyard in a tent.
“Because they were coal miners, his younger sister Maggie took care of him because they probably couldn’t afford a sanatorium.
“And he died at 24 and tragically, two hours later, his little sister, who was 19, who had cared for him- No one knew she had tuberculosis, people thought that she just had the flu.
“She is quoted saying, ‘Poor boy, now he won’t suffer anymore. I’m dying too’.
“And then she just died.
“They died two hours from each other.
“They say she died of a broken heart because it took a while to find out she had tuberculosis.
“The autopsy showed it later.
“I have to write a song about Connie McGeehan and Margaret McGeehan and their tragic passing.
“I feel like that is a song, that’s already a song.
“They wrote all about my family.
“So Margaret was the prettiest girl in all of coal country and everyone loved her, and everyone loved Connie because he was just such a gentleman and he didn’t drink or smoke or chew.
“And all of them worked to support the family from a very young age anyway.
“It’s so tragic.
“This is the story of the Irish American, coal miners at age 10 because that’s what they had to do.
“That’s some of the stuff that I wonder if they knew what they were signing up for because no one wants to be a coal miner at age 10.”
Home is out now.
For more information, click here.
