O'Malley's March
Featuring His Honor, the Mayor of Baltimore
by Pamela Murray Winters

The club is hazy, especially around the stage, where green-lit smoke billows down on the band. The front man has his muscle-T on. He's got the shortest hair on the stage, and a choirboy face, but he can pogo and duckwalk like some unholy combo of Chuck Berry and Joey Ramone. He even strums his six-string behind his head. It's a hell of a spectacle, and the music's not bad, either. He's got his dream gig, opening for Shane McGowan and the Popes, but some of this happy, staggering throng is here to see him, not some ex-Pogue.

After the first number, panting slightly, he tells the crowd: "Ladies and gentlemen, my mother and father raised me with three ambitions. Number 1, to serve my country. Number 2, to be a faithful and loving husband and father. Number 3, to open for Shane McGowan." He's three for three tonight.

Ladies and gentlemen, the youngest-ever mayor of Maryland's largest city, a family man, and a kick-ass musician: Martin O'Malley.

A native of Rockville, Maryland, Martin O'Malley has been playing Irish and Irish-based music for 20 of his 36 years. He started performing in junior year of high school, at Washington, D.C., venues like Ireland's Own, the Four Provinces, and the legendary, now-defunct Matt Kane's. "When I got into music," he said, "there must have been seven full-time Irish bars and only about four full-time Irish bands" in the Washington area, so his band, Shannon Tide, got a lot of work.

Somehow, O'Malley managed to combine music with legal studies and politics. He worked on Gary Hart's 1984 presidential campaign, graduated from Catholic University and the University of Maryland School of Law, and became Baltimore's Assistant States Attorney in 1988. That same year, he formed a trio, playing "Planxty-type music" with uilleann piper Paul Levin. The band's sound broadened and deepened over the ensuing decade with the addition of new members. "Jamie Wilson, our drummer, keeps it going," said Levin, "and our electric guitar player, Ralph Reinoldi, adds a lot. He learned my repertoire practically overnight; now he and I trade tunes all the time." The current lineup is rounded out by bass player Bob Baum and harper/trombonist Jared Denhard.

"The drums, electric guitar, and horn section have let us put more kick and drive in what we do," Levin noted. Further, O'Malley has become more active in bringing new songs to the band: "Martin has more and more written his own material from out of the Irish-American experience and his response to Irish history."

O'Malley emphasized that his perspective is Irish-American, not Irish. "My great-grandfather came from Ireland," O'Malley said. His most recent composition, "Farewell Clonbur," commemorates the Irish town from which his great-grandfather emigrated. He's been to Ireland four times, most recently last September with a group of local politicians on Aer Lingus' inaugural direct flight from Baltimore to Dublin.

This is an excerpt from issue #93.