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Music is the soundtrack of life. Nothing can express emotion, comfort during a crisis, or enhance a happy occasion, better than a good song. Over the years, many songs have become part of the soundtrack of my life.

I grew up with the blues music that lingered from the Great Depression, and Irish folk music. My father and uncles played in a band, and I knew their songs as well as I knew the nursery rhymes of childhood. Some songs can transport me instantly back to childhood, such as the lovely folk ballad Skibbereen and the song one of my uncles used to sing to me, called The Holy Ground. I was born in the area of Cobh (or Queenstown as it was known then) that is called the Holy Ground.

My father's love of blues music brought many lovely and unforgettable songs into my life. Buddy Can You Spare a Dime, and Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out, are songs that reflect life generation after generation. Nowadays I listen to Eric Clapton perform these songs with all the honesty of a true blues lover.

Through the 60s, I came to love the more experimental Beatles songs, such as Norwegian Wood and We Can Work It Out. It seemed to me then that pop music was undergoing a fundamental change, and that things might never be the same again.

Popular love songs, the staple of the 50s, were giving way to a new kind of poetic song form. Asa blues and folk lover, I already knew that good songs can be about anything at all, and it seemed that pop songs could also span the whole range of human experience. With the influence of the new folk singers, it spiralled into even more abstracts themes, such as much of the songs of Bob Dylan.

Like many of my generation, Dylan's The Times They Are A'Changing was a kind of anthem to me. But I also loved his song Blowin' In The Wind, as sung by Peter, Paul and Mary.

Bit it was this folk trio's song Old Coat that really became my personal theme song;

"Take off your old coat and roll up your sleeves, Life is a hard road to travel, I believe."

How much more true to my life experience and journey that song was to become!

The 70s and 80s weren't really the musical wasteland they seemed to be, in spite of ABBA and Neil Diamond, and even they managed to produce two songs that went into my best loved category. ABBA's Fernando, with its haunting pipes and heart wrenching lyric, can still catch a surprised tear or two rolling down my cheek, while Diamond's September Morn quickly became a favorite.

In spite of the many great songs I have heard over the years,

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