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Some Fine Irish Rockers for Your Saint Patrick’s Day Celebrations
An annual Rate-A-Record installment
Tomorrow is St. Patrick’s Day, the day on which Americans of all religious persuasions honor a Catholic saint with green beer, parades, and a level of drunkenness normally reserved for Super Bowl Sunday (since St. Patrick’s falls on a Monday, many probably started this revelry on Friday). To honor this great saint’s day on March 17, I give you my annual installment of the Rate-A-Record series focusing on Irish rockers. First, however, let’s dispel a few myths about the holiday.
First of all (and this may shock you), St. Patrick was not Irish. Though he is known as the Apostle of Ireland, he was actually born in Scotland in 387, the child of Romans living in Britain; he was captured by Irish raiders at the age of 14 and taken to Ireland as a slave-shepherd. He also did not drive all the snakes out of Ireland, because there were no snakes there to drive out. As this National Geographic article explains, though a few snake species did make it across the land bridge between Europe and Britain that existed until around 6,500 years ago, the land bridge between Ireland and Britain vanished two millennia before that, and no snakes made it across.
It assumed by most that Irish immigrants brought St. Patrick’s Day celebrations from…
