2 men
Since February, 1994
100’s of guests
1000s of songs
and a few broken strings
Hank & Ray’s Monday night session
at Charlies, Union Quay, Cork City...
As 1993 turned into 1994
Mary Rob was Irish Prez
Albert was Taoiseach
Bubba Bill was POTUS
Major John was The UKPM
The EEC had just became
The EC, national currencies
were still tender...
hard borders still existed....
Hank Wedel and Ray B
arron
were about to start
a Monday Night residency
at Charlies Bar Union Quay
In Cork City
for Majella Bradley
In between then and now
There have been Wars,
Ceasefires, Famines,
Erupting Volcanoes,
Tsunamis, Comets, 9-11
Celtic Tigers, Booms, Busts, Recessions, Bank Failures
Bushes, Blairs, Berties, Endas
Peace Processes, Arab Springs
Referenda, The Internet,
moblie phones, The EU, the euro,
Roy Keane, Riverdance,
Donald Trump, Brexit
the decline of old media and
the rise of social media
Friends have arrived
Friends have disappeared
Kids have been born
Kids have grown up
There are grandkids now...
Charlie’s staff, Charlie’s Angel’s
Charlies Soldier’s have enlisted, resigned, opened earlier,
closed late, re-enlisted, flown away
swam back upstream The Riverly
River Lee or floated out
and settled downstream....
For any musician, music lover or casual guest ‘the session’
is the cornerstone of live music. One of Cork’s finest and longest running sessions has been the Hank & Ray session held every Monday night in Charlies Bar on Union Quay. Americana, Rock & Roll, Bluegrass and Folk remain the foundations of the session but on the structure is an open house where many people have been joining in, singing along or simply soaking it all in. Hank Wedel and Ray Barron, full time musicians their whole lives have busked around Europe, toured the world
with their respective bands
"Princes Street" and "Open Kitchen",
(Hank Wedel);
"Bone Idol", "Two Time Polka"
(Ray Barron) and somehow they both still manage to make it back every Monday as a constant in a particular corner of a bar on a quay in Cork... and if one of them does not make it back, the other one holds it down...
if neither of them make it back...
there many Cork Muso duos to call upon...
who gladly defend the fort...
The beauty of the session is that you can never be sure what will happen whilst Ray plays his mandolin and Hank plays guitar and sings as they pull songs from their never ending setlist. The guests they have had fall in over the years have featured names like
John Spillane, Mick Flannery, Johnny Moynihan,
Mary Greene, Eileen Healy, Eleanor Healy, Anna Mitchell
Elly O'Keefe, Clare Sands, and Declan Sinnott;
Also countless touring musicians
New York’s Tom Clark and Craig Chesler,
Nashville's Roni Stoneman
Amsterdam’s Andre Van der Hoff
and France’s Serge Desaunay...
and pretty much every Cork based up and coming musician
since 1994! Dates have gone well there; marriages found and prolonged, connections made and generations of the same family have regularly attended at Hank & Ray’s session,
a weekly occurrence that will not be ending for a long time yet.
