Last Night's Fun: A Book About Irish Traditional Music

ciaran carson

Last Night's Fun's is a sparking celebration of music and life that is itself a literary performance of the highest order. Carson's inspired jumble of recording history, poetry, tall tales, and polemic captures the sound and vigor of a ruthlessly unsentimental music. Last Night's Fun is remarkable for its liveliness, honesty, scholarship, and spontaneous joy; certainly there has never been a book about Irish music like this one, and few books ever written anywhere about the experience of music can compare with it.

Genres musicirelandnonfictionirish literaturememoirhistoryessaysbiography

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1,1996

This edition

Format: 208 pages, Paperback
Published: March 17, 1998 by North Point Press
ISBN: 9780865475311
ASIN: 0865475318
Language: English

About the author

ciaran carson

Ciaran Gerard Carson was born in 1948 in Belfast and educated at The Queen's University, Belfast. He knows intimately not only the urban Belfast in which he was raised as a native Irish speaker, but also the traditions of rural Ireland. A traditional musician and a scholar of the Irish oral traditional, Carson was long the Traditional Arts Officer of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, and is a flutist, tinwhistler, and singer. He is Chair of Poetry at the Seamus Heaney Centre for poetry at Queen's University, Belfast. He is married to fiddle player Deirdre Shannon, and has three children.

He is author of over a dozen volumes of poetry, as well as translations of the Táin and of Dante's Inferno, and novels, non-fiction, and a guide to traditional Irish music. Carson won an Eric Gregory Award in 1978.