Jack Hardy - The Tinker's Coin: Celtic Anthology (2005)

Singer/songwriter Jack Hardy exclusively performs his own original compositions, but Celtic music has been a major influence on him, and over the years he has recorded enough songs influenced by Irish culture and musical styles to make up a separate album just of those tunes. This is that album, its tracks drawn from his previous discs. Hardy is sufficiently steeped in tradition to write songs that often sound like traditional material, and that is especially true of his Celtic-influenced ones, which are full of myths and drinking, and sometimes played in reels. He even adopts an Irish accent on occasion and uses bits of Gaelic. So, even though all the music on this album was written and performed by an American from New York, it certainly would fit into a collection of traditional Celtic music.