David Ingerson

David Ingerson has been a musician all his life, starting out as a two-year-old standing on the pew next to his mother singing the hymns with all his little heart every Sunday.  In school he played clarinet and sang in choirs, and qualified for New Jersey All-State Band and Chorus.  After one year as a clarinet major at Baldwin-Wallace Conservatory he ended his formal music education but continued to participate in music as what might be called a ‘music bum.’  He played sax in a jazz band, recorder in a Renaissance ensemble, sang a role and in the chorus in two operas, sang in numerous community and Bach Festival choruses.  He also learned to play various instruments along the way: French horn, guitar, pennywhistle, fiddle, hammered dulcimer.

In his early thirties, while searching for a new instrument to learn (and could afford), he decided to focus on his singing (free!).  He was accepted in a 20-voice chamber choir and the community opera.  He also started singing more folk songs.  It was then he heard his first old-style traditional Irish song: The Shores of Lough Bran sung by Delores Keane.  His life was never the same after that.  He had finally found his musical home.

He started learning Irish songs and went to Ireland as soon as he had both the time and the money—the first summer after he started teaching.  That was 39 years ago.  Since then he’s visited Ireland fifteen times, usually for a month or more at a time, has attended dozens of traditional music and singing festivals there, and hundreds of singing sessions.  He has attended singing workshops led by such Irish traditional singing luminaries as Paddy Tunney, Seumas MacMathuna, Lillis Ó Laoire, and Roisin White and has sung in sessions with Frank Harte, Tom Lenihan, Jordie Hannah, and others.

In the intervening years he has performed and led workshops at a number of concerts, folk music festivals, and folk singing weekends from San Francisco to Vancouver, BC.  In addition, he has produced one CD, My Lovely Mountain Home, which contains fourteen traditional Irish songs and one newly-composed, almost all of them collected by David in Ireland.  One of the criteria he used to select the songs was that they were unusual, not often heard, and infrequently recorded.  There are no Danny Boys or Wild Rovers among them.  Several of them have been recorded only a few times (and those in unusual places) and one has never been commercially recorded, as far as David has been able to ascertain.

He has performed many times at the Northwest Folklife Festival in Seattle and also at the Tumbleweed Music Festival and the Princeton Traditional Music Festival in BC.  He is available for small venue and house concerts.