About

Susan McKeown

Grammy award-winning and BBC Award-nominated vocalist and songwriter Susan McKeown is widely acknowledged as one of the most powerful and innovative voices in folk music today. In a distinguished career, Susan has performed with Pete Seeger, Natalie Merchant, Billy Bragg, Arlo Guthrie, Mamadou Diabate, Mali’s Ensemble Tartit, Queens band Mariachi Réal de Mexico, Lúnasa, Flook and The Klezmatics, with whom she won a Grammy Award performing lyrics by Woody Guthrie. She has recorded mariachi music, klezmer music, African music, Celtic music, and contemporary songwriting, and has performed at Glastonbury, The Edinburgh Festival, Carnegie Hall and the Walt Disney Concert Hall, and her music has been featured on PBS, NPR, PRI, BBC and RTE and in numerous documentaries and films.

As a teen Susan began performing as a busker on Grafton Street alongside The Hothouse Flowers and Kíla and her songwriting career began in earnest as part of the songwriting community at Sin-É Café on St. Mark’s Place when she was a scholarship student at a New York performing arts school. She has released 16 critically acclaimed albums.

Her first album Bones, commercially released in 1996 and produced by Jimi Zhivago, included original songs with her rich arrangements of guitar, cello, acoustic, bass, hammond organ, pipes, hurdy gurdy, sung in English and Gaeilge and her a cappella performance of a caoineadh (keen).

More albums followed including Prophecy in 2002 featuring two duets with Natalie Merchant: Susan’s setting of Emily Dickinson’s poem Because I could not stop for Death (later voted one of The Guardian newspaper’s Top 20 Songs of Fate & Destiny and recently performed by Ireland’s RTE National Concert Orchestra) and one of her best known songs River, a song of healing for Ireland that incants the names of the chief rivers of Ireland inspired by a story of CúChulainn from The Táin and the speech attributed to Chief Seattle.

Sweet Liberty (2004) included Oró Mhíle Grá/A Thousand Times My Love for which she collaborated with Amazigh group Ensemble Tartit, and Eggs in Her Basket, performed with Queens band Mariachi Réal de Mexico, for which she received a BBC Folk Music Award nomination.

For her album Singing in the Dark (2010), Susan invited collaborators to compose new music for lyrics by Roethke, Mangan, Sexton, Ní Dhomhnaill, and Gwyneth Lewis who were writing through the lens of depression, mania and addiction.

She conceived, arranged and produced the album Songs from the East Village (2010) for her daughter’s public school that was featured on NPR and raised $30,000+ for the school’s language and arts programs.

Belong (2012) features McKeown’s own songs such as ‘On the Bridge to Williamsburg‘ (a duet with Declan O’Rourke), ‘Everything We Had Was Good‘ (which reached #1 on the U.S. Folk Music chart) and ‘Lullaby of Manhattan‘.

Hers is the woman’s voice singing on the audio recording in the Irish apartment of New York’s Tenement Museum.

In 2014 Susan received first class honors for her post-graduate studies in culture as an economic driver at DCU business school. In 2016 she produced New York’s biggest Irish cultural festival CualaNYC, commemorating the 1916 Rising celebrating Irish New York. She established Cuala as a nonprofit in 2017.

Susan raised her daughter Róisín McKeown on the Lower East Side.

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