It wasn’t your typical hotel pub, you know, the gimmick-laden rubbish that you find adjoining the lobby.  No, this place had the glowing ambience worthy of the old Sod. 

For one Saturday night in our nation’s capital, the Irish Channel Pub filled with songs of fellowship and the good earth.  They poured out of the corner entrance and flowed up H Street, in a confluence with the greater din of the vibrant Chinatown.

(Photo:  IrishChannelPub.com)

Heaping plates of steaming stew flew from the kitchen, to froth-faced recipients.  The barkeeps dashed about, checking up on half-empty stout glasses and cheering the patrons with their native brogue.

A bunch of activists were staying at the hotel that night.  They had come to Washington that week to raise hell about the destruction wreaked by coal mining in the Appalachian mountains; and they found a warm reception in each others embraces, and in the colorful entertainment.

The band members gathered up on a tiny stage, where they set to work on their originals, as well as some old recognizable pop songs. 

They were called Off the Boat.  Fitting. 

The noise in the place was so loud that I was writing a conversation, on napkins, with the woman sitting next to me.  She was from the southern West Virginia coalfields, and was drawing me a schematic of a bunker that a company had built near her home, during the union wars.

When the band struck into John Denver’s “Country Roads,” we threw up our fists and hollered.  We sang along, and I belted out my finest tenor, to the amusement of the barkeep.

The revolutionary spirit was already brimming in that packed bar room, and the band brought mine to a full boil with “Come Out, Ye Black and Tans.”

The band took a break.  When they reemerged, the frontman James Gallager was wearing a button that said “I Love Mountains.”

Gallager was from Donnegal, on Ireland’s northwestern coast, and he had his own bone to pick about the environment being degraded, especially the salmon of his own home.  His songs demonstrate it, with titles like “God’s Garden,” “Poacher Boy,” and “Moonshine.”

He took a minute to thank all the Appalachians for coming out to Washington to defend their homeland.  He said,

“You know, we had a sayin’ in Ireland, during The Troubles.  We’d say, ‘Burn everything English, we’ll save the coal!’”

A whooping roar rose from the people in the room, many of whom were three sheets to the wind. 

For more than three hours the band brought the thunder, like an old-time Viking rampage on a West Meath monastery.  The Appalachians danced along, arm around shoulder, feet sliding on the wet floor in a bastardized jig, somewhere ‘twixt the Old and New World.

The air was thick on the D.C. street corner, that night in March.  Irish and Appalachians bonded in a blissful racket and love of their home land.

Off the Boat will be playing Shenanigans in Ocean City, Maryland, this St. Patty’s Day. 

Hear the music of Off the Boat.

Off the Boat - (Photo: OffTheBoat.us)

- (Photo: Off The Boat via MySpace.)