1999 Alula Records CD, ALU-1014

This is the original US compact disc of The Crossing, issued by Alula Records on May 4, 1999 under catalog number ALU-1014. The single disc holds 16 tracks running about 63 minutes. O'Brien produced it with his longtime friend Akira Satake, who had started Alula as a world music label. The partnership began in 1998, when O'Brien's contract with Sugar Hill Records ended after five releases.

The plan was to draw the connecting lines between Appalachian music and traditional Irish music. O'Brien has said the project became a way to dig into both his Irish ancestry and his West Virginia roots. Reviewing it for Sing Out!, Mike Regenstreif called it a concept album about 19th-century Irish emigration to America.

Players from both sides of the Atlantic appear. Del McCoury adds the harmony vocal to the opener, "Ireland's Green Shore", an Irish dream song O'Brien learned from an unaccompanied version sung by Maggie Hammons of Webster County, West Virginia. Kathy Mattea sings the female role in "Wagoner's Lad", and Paul Brady leads "Down In The Willow Garden". Darol Anger arranged the slip jig "The Kid On The Mountain" for several mandolins, with members of Altan on fiddles and accordion. Earl Scruggs and Irish fiddler Frankie Gavin share the "Lord McDonald/Cumberland Gap" medley, and Maura O'Connell takes the duet on "The Ribbon In Your Hair". Jerry Douglas, Edgar Meyer, Stuart Duncan, Seamus Egan, Dirk Powell and David Grier are also on the record.

O'Brien co-wrote "A Mountaineer Is Always Free" with Pierce Pettis, taking its title from the West Virginia state motto. He wrote "John Riley" with Guy Clark, "Lost Little Children" with Robin and Linda Williams, and "The Ribbon In Your Hair" with Craig Fuller of Pure Prairie League. Danny O'Keefe wrote "Into The West". The title track is a fiddle tune that came to O'Brien in open A tuning the morning after a stormy overnight ferry from Fishguard to Rosslare. "Talkin' Cavan" borrows Woody Guthrie's talking-blues form for an account of his early trips to Ireland.

Bradley Hartman recorded the main sessions at Trace Sound in Franklin, Tennessee, with more recording at Mike Marshall's Gatorland studio in Oakland and at DeVille in Boulder. Scott Noll mixed the album, and Rick Rowe mastered it at Mediaforce in New York. O'Brien returned to the same Irish-American ground in 2001 with Two Journeys.

Tracklist

1. Ireland's Green Shore
2. A Mountaineer Is Always Free
3. The Crossing
4. Into The West
5. Wagoner's Lad
6. Down In The Willow Garden
7. The Kid On The Mountain
8. Lost Little Children
9. Ireland's Green Shore (Instrumental)
10. John Riley
11. Rod McNeil
12. Lord McDonald/Cumberland Gap
13. Talkin' Cavan
14. The Ribbon In Your Hair
15. Yew Piney Mountain/Dusty Miller
16. Wandering

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