Muireann Bradley Keeps These Old Blues Songs Alive

The story of how Muireann Bradley got signed to a record label at the tender age of 13 reads like the opening act of a biopic about a future pop superstar.

As a young lass growing up in Ballybofey, a small Irish town about three-and-a-half hours northwest of Dublin, Bradley had been playing music casually, but with an unmistakable ability that astonished her father John. She only got better during the pandemic when lockdowns meant she couldn’t participate in sports and she had little else to do but practice her craft. John insisted that more people needed to hear what he was hearing, even if Muireann (pronounced “moor-un”) didn’t quite agree. “I was telling her, ‘This is amazing,’” John remembers, speaking with his young daughter over Zoom recently. “She was just not listening to me. I thought, ‘You can’t go and play any gigs really because nothing was open,’ so, I was like, ‘Put it up on YouTube and see what the reaction is.’”

You can surely tell what happened from there. The videos of Muireann performing started racking up thousands of views on YouTube and Facebook. Soon enough, famous musicians were singing her praises and a record label came calling. Now, three years later, her first album is out, she’s playing gigs and doing interviews, still looking a little shell-shocked about this turn of events. When asked about how she’s been dealing with it all, Muireann, now 17, gets, at first, quiet, haltingly saying, “It’s been pretty… crazy,” but quickly warms up.

“When I heard about the record deal, I was really excited to do it and all, I guess,” she says, “And with all these gigs coming up, it’s a really good experience and will help with confidence, I suppose? I’m just happy to do it.”

The twist to this tale that is not really a twist if you look at the photo accompanying this piece or the video embedded above, is that, unlike nearly every other teen in the world, Muireann is fascinated with the folk and blues music that grew out of the American South around a century ago. The videos that got so much attention find her playing “Vestapol,” a country-blues standard famously recorded by Elizabeth Cotton, and “Police Dog Blues,” a song first recorded by Blind Blake for Paramount Records back in 1930.

While it’s disorienting to hear a pale Irish teen singing a gender-twisted version of a tune about shipping oneself to Tennessee and worrying about the angry hound protecting the boy of her dreams, there’s no denying Muireann’s abilities as a player. Her picking hand is steady, swift and confident, slipping from rhythm to melody with zero friction. And it all seems to flow out of her body as naturally as breathing. “I was saying, ‘I know loads of guitar players who’ve been playing for 30, 40 years,’” says John. “‘They’re trying to play this stuff and they’re getting nowhere near. You’ve really nailed it in no time at all — playing it and singing it.’”

The larger community of folk-blues players and fans fell right behind Muireann’s dad in registering their delight and amazement at what this young artist could do. Her initial YouTube videos have racked up tens of thousands of views, aided in no small part by John posting the clip to The Woodshed, the online forum hosted by fingerstyle guitarist Stefan Grossman on his website. “Everyone was praising them,” says John, “but Stefan himself came on and put a couple of lovely comments. As we put up another couple of videos, Stefan emailed me and told me he thought her playing was amazing.”

Around that same time, the Bradleys were contacted by Josh Rosenthal, the owner of Tompkins Square, the San Francisco-based record label that initially bubbled up in the early ’00s with the release of Imaginational Anthem, a compilation of American Primitive-style folk and blues by the likes of John Fahey, Kaki King and Jack Rose. Someone shared one of Muireann’s videos with Rosenthal and he was instantly blown away.

“I guess what struck me initially was what everyone is now starting to see,” Rosenthal wrote via email. “Just so natural on the guitar, playing very tricky things. But also her voice to match. Really good phrasing. Not hammy. Really feeling the song. Even though she’s playing old songs, I can’t think of anyone on the scene who sounds like her. So she’s almost inadvertently created her own lane to run on.”

Rosenthal offered to help Muireann release an album, but she and her parents were slow to agree to anything. She was almost 14 years old by that point and they weren’t sure if she’d even want to be playing music still once things the pandemic lockdowns were lifted and she could get back to her first loves, jiu jitsu and boxing.

“Basically, Josh agreed to everything we said,” John says. “We don’t want to put any pressure on her to do it at any particular speed. We didn’t want any obligation to promote it when the time came if she didn’t want to do it or wasn’t into it anymore.”

With that understanding in place, Muireann spent the next two years recording her debut album I Kept These Old Blues a little bit at a time, stopping by a nearby studio when she had a particular tune nailed down. “During lockdown, I had this wee list of songs I wanted to learn,” says Muireann. “I was learning the songs to record them. That’s why the album took so long. I was learning as I went.” And in keeping with the spirit of the music and how they were originally committed to lacquer discs, she recorded them quickly, often nailing it in one take.

“I got the first one nearly every time,” she says. “I kind of did the second one just to see if I could get it any better. I wanted it to be like the way they used to record it in the ’20s and ’30s because they could only do one or two recordings.”

As Rosenthal points out, the album is sequenced pretty much in chronological order and, with that knowledge, it’s easy to hear Muireann’s growing strength as a player and singer as it goes along. The lightness in her voice on her rendition of Mississippi John Hurt’s “Richland Woman Blues” starts to make way for a thicker, richer tone on later cuts like “Police Sergeant Blues,” a song from the early ’30s by Robert Wilkins. Through it all, Muireann’s guitar playing dazzles even as she takes on Fahey’s knotty arrangement of “Buck Dancer’s Choice” or a fresh run through “Vestapol.” “It’s kinda unique in that you can hear her evolve and grow up through the course of the record,” Rosenthal writes.

In speaking with John about his daughter’s still-young career and her first album, the pride that he feels is somewhat amplified by the role he played in it. (“It’s all my fault,” he says, smiling.) A guitarist himself, John has been a devotee of American roots music for his entire life. As a stay-at-home dad for his three children, he kept a steady soundtrack of Blind Lemon Jefferson and Reverend Gary Davis on as they did housework or went on family trips. “From when they were little kids, they could all sing along,” he says, “and they’d be sitting in the back pretending to play guitars.”

But while John delights in being able to interact with some of his more modern favorites like Grossman and Hot Tuna co-founder Jorma Kaukonen, he’s exercising a remarkable amount of caution regarding his daughter’s burgeoning career. Our interview had to be scheduled around her fall exams and the gigs that Muireann has played so far or will be doing soon are being booked around her school schedule.

“I feel really proud, but I’m terrified at the same time,” John says. “For a while, we tried to keep the reins on and make sure that it’s happening at a pace that Muireann can handle. I think it’s probably more than I can handle because I don’t think it’s really bothering her. It’s scarier for me! She’s not really fazed by anything.”

In fact, the only thing that has given her any pause hasn’t been the recording sessions or playing live — it was playing the music in front of some of her friends from school.

“They think the music that I listen to and play is pretty strange, to be honest,” Muireann says, with a laugh. “But when they’ve heard me play, it was a real surprise to me. They thought it was really cool. I thought they’d think it was kind of weird. They’re not going to go back and listen to ’20s and ’30s music, but when you hear it live, it’s great music.”