User:Pat Sheridan

Shanty Singers.

Pat Sheridan is from Dublin, Ireland and is now living near Cork city in Ireland. He started singing as a solo performer in 1966. He joined an a capella group called Garland in 1970. This group performed in most of the folk clubs of Dublin, in pubs and also at many traditional festivals around Ireland. They specialised in Hunting, Farming, Love, drinking and maritime songs, similar in style to the acappela singing of The Copper Family, The Young Tradition and The Watersons, all UK based traditional groups.

Sheridan created a group called Warp Four to primarily perform Maritime songs (Shanties and Forebitters). The group first performed at a tall ships festival in Waterford around 1991 and subsequently performed at tall ship festivals in Dublin and Cork. He built a working Capstan so that the group could demonstrate capstan shanty singing in days before engines when the old sailing ships were warped to the dockside using manpower. The team walked around pushing the capstan bars, a rope went around the base of the capstan and the team literally wound the ship to the dockside or alternatively out to the harbour bar where they dropped the sails and used the turn of tide to begin their voyage. The group; Pat Sheridan, Niall Fennel, (Formally of the group Press Gang), Jack Harrison.

Warp Four collaborated with Liam Clancy to produced two sister albums of Maritime Music; A Hundred Years Ago and The Wild and Wasteful Ocean.

This Warp Four team evolved into a recreation of the group Press Gang when they were short of hands for an invitation to perform at Mystic Seaport in USA. Several members were replaced by ex Press Gang members and out of this the Press Gang was revitalised and started doing gigs in Ireland and abroad at Maritime festivals. The Press Gang had been well known around Ireland. The circle was complete.

Pat Sheridan was involved in the operational side of the Cobh Maritime festival in county Cork and linked up with other performers in Poland, eventually collaborating with the Polish group Brasy to produce an unusually mixed traditional and non trad maritime CD called Rolling Home with some modern maritime songs (John Martyn's beautiful Rolling Home song inspiring the name of the album and an a capella version of the song of the same name.

Sheridan now works with several Polish groups and has performed at maritime festivals in Sosnowiec, Chorzow, Krakow, Sandomierz and recently in Gdansk.

The Gdansk concert was with Johnny Collins and Jim Mageean on 5th July the night before Johnny Collin's passed away due to a heart attack. The Last song Johnny sung was at the request of their driver on the way back to their hotel and that was Rolling Down to Old Maui.