As the saying goes, everyone is Irish on St. Patrick’s Day.
The same could be said for musicians who gather to perform songs from the Emerald Isle.
“You just have to be able to know some basics, and you can sit in,” Sunset Hills resident Meghan King Johnson said. “You can sit and listen and learn, and people are very welcoming.”
To celebrate this March’s Hibernian holiday, she joined like-minded folks for one of the Irish music sessions hosted monthly by East End Brewing’s Mt. Lebanon taproom.
“I thought, what better way?” she recalled. “It was always just playing on my own and with people I knew. I had not gone out to where I didn’t know anybody.”
Since then, Johnson has been a regular, adding percussion with her handheld drum called a bodhrán.
A variety of instruments — some familiar, some not so much — provide the soundtrack for each seisiún, the Irish word for “session.”
Organizer Ashley Grebe explained the differentiation from another type of informal group musical endeavor:
“A jam session would be more like blues or rock ’n’ roll.”
Whatever the label, what transpires on select Saturday afternoons at East End starts with an hour of traditional Irish songs geared toward players who are learning the genre.
“In the slower session, we allow sheet music,” Grebe said. “That’s kind of encouraged. We provide a list of tunes, and we provide the sheet music and audio files. We just want to make it possible for everyone to get in on the ground floor.”
Afterward come fast-paced flurries of jigs and reels, with fiddles, flutes and fifes combining with — during the August seisiún, for example — guitar, mandolin and button box.
Then there are Uilleann pipes, smaller cousins of the mighty Great Highland bagpipes that are volume-appropriate for indoor ensembles.
Uilleann players Casey Buchanan-Smith and her husband, George, not only participate in Irish sessions but have been holding similar once-a-month events for Scottish music at East End for the past year.
Buchanan-Smith is on the board and serves as digital media contact for the 128-year-old Pittsburgh Bagpipe Society.
“One of the Irish pipers came to our meeting and played pipes,” she said. “That’s how we got involved in the Irish sessions, and I wanted to do that for the Scottish.”
In Grebe’s case, she is a classically trained violinist who turned her focus toward Irish music with inspiration from fiddle players such as Martin Hayes and Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, members of a band called The Gloaming.
“I heard them together, and mind blown! And I started just to play along with it,” she recalled. “And now I do more of that than anything else.”
Along the way, the Chicago native has met plenty of Pittsburgh-area folks who share her interest.
“I think that’s the best part about playing Irish music anywhere, but I think it’s especially true here,” Grebe said. “The community is just awesome. It’s a great group of people.”
Through social media, she connected with multi-instrumentalist Alex Brown, the original East End seisiún organizer who decided to incorporate a beginners’ portion.
“We wanted a place where people could kind of ease into it,” Brown said. “The tunes are melodically dense, so they’re not always easy to learn. A lot of them are earworms. Once you hear them, you kind of know them.
But some of them are not.”
Whatever the case, group favorites at East End include the likes of Jimmy Ward’s Jig — he’s the musician who popularized the tune in the 1930s, although it’s known by many other titles going back centuries — and Calliope House, named for a Victorian mansion in Pittsburgh that served as a hub for traditional music.
Adding a cappella – or sean nós, “in the old style” – selections to the August session was Seamus Carmichael, a native of County Derry, Northern Ireland. He provided some context to what he was singing.
“When these songs were translated during the Victorian era, the Irish attitude toward sexuality didn’t translate into Victorian morals,” he said. “So the song gets a little bit censored in the English language. Basically, the second verse says, ‘I wish to God that I don’t die before I lie down with this woman.’”
With that, he launched into One Morning in Autumn/Maidin Fhómhair, during which he alternated languages. The song is featured on Songs of Heart’s Desire, his 2025 album of traditional Irish tunes.
As part of an Irish-American family, Johnson grew up listening to that type of music, with her father being a big fan. Patrick Henry King died last year at age 95 and is buried at Mt. Lebanon Cemetery, just a Blarney Stone’s throw from East End.
“It makes it even more meaningful,” Johnson said about the proximity, “because I feel like whenever I’m playing music here, he’s still around.”
For more information, visit Pittsburgh Irish Sessions on Facebook.