'When New York Was Irish is a captivating anthology of popular Irish button accordionist Terence Winch's work from the last twenty-plus years. It features his best-known compositions with the influential Irish group he co-founded Celtic Thunder (called "one of the best Irish folk acts in America" by The Washington Post) and his current band Narrowbacks, such as "In Praise of the City of Baltimore," and "Hooley with the Herd". It also includes Winch's best-known tune, "When New York Was Irish", a song that has been admired and covered by a host of Irish artists. Named one of "The Top 100 Irish Americans" by Irish America magazine, Terence is also a prolific writer, and the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry. His work has been featured on Garrison Keillor's "The Writer's Almanac" radio program.
Terence Winch, originally from New York City, now lives in the Washington, DC, area. In the early '70s, he was one of DC's "Mass Transit" poets and was closely associated with the New York writers connected with the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in lower Manhattan.
Winch, the son of Irish immigrants, has also been part of Irish-American cultural life, both as musician and writer. Some of his poetry and other writing takes its subject matter from his upbringing in a Bronx immigrant neighborhood.
His newest book, called Boy Drinkers, is a series of mostly narrative poems that center around religion and Winch's New York brand of Irish-Catholicism. His previous volume, a collection of non-fiction stories called That Special Place: New World Irish Stories, comes out of his experiences playing traditional Irish music with Celtic Thunder, a band he started with his brother Jesse in 1977. Many of the songs he wrote for Celtic Thunder recount the story of New York's Irish community: with "When New York Was Irish," "Saints (Hard New York Days)," and "The Irish Riviera" the best-known of them. Celtic Thunder's second album, The Light of Other Days, won the prestigious INDIE award for Best Celtic Album in 1988. Terence Winch's most recent music project is a CD that collects his best-known Irish compositions on one disk: When New York Was Irish: Songs & Tunes by Terence Winch.
