Ian Byrne’s Mining Ancestry & The Appeal of Small Towns
I read a couple of articles over the last few days, of before and after the Elders gig in the Mar Theatre in Wilmington, Illinois, and both had pretty much the same theme - that of the appeal of small towns to, Elders front man, Ian Byrne due to his mining ancestry.
In the Morris Daily Herald Jo Ann Hustis did a nice feature on the background to The Elders as Ian talks about Wilmington, IL and his hometown in County Wicklow, Ireland:
It’s real small town America. It’s the character of all the people there. When we first take the stage, they look at us like at the dog in the back window. After awhile, they’re on their chairs, cheering us,” he said.
“Byrne says it’s the response from the audience the band gets to their music.
“It’s the e-mails from people analyzing the songs, inquiring about certain lines, and comparisons with their own lives,” he said.
Byrne is from a small mining village in County Wicklow, populated with Irish mining families there through the generations. He met his wife, of Kansas City, while strolling through the woods.
“These 5 good-looking sisters were walking along,” he said. “They saw me and they all ran away but one, and that’s how I met me darling (future) wife.”
Mary Baskerville in the Southwest Weekly also talks about Ian’s hometown, as well as some of the Elders fans who attended what is now a regular gig:
Speaking just after the final sound check, Byrne said he has become friends with many in “Wilmington, Illinois.”
“They’re very home-, family-oriented, community-oriented. Everybody knows each other. And, I felt at home.”
He was born in the small village of Avoca, about 40 miles south of Dublin. “We’re a mining community. My dad was a miner — my granddad, and my uncles and everybody else. It’s a population of about 500 people, so I know small towns and small villages,” he said.
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