This is a welcome analytical study of Irish Traditional music, and one that has been heralded by the same author's 1998/2017 Pocket History of Irish Traditional Music. ... This is a book by a writer whose life is surely governed by 'clock time, schedules and timetables', and who earns his living and lives outside of Clare society. But he is intelligently enthusiastic about that community and, refreshingly, he avoids the destructive smugness of academic anti-essentialism...[I]t sets a marker for needed academic studies in other key rural regions in Traditional music, song and dance, not least Connemara, Kerry, and Sligo, and urban centres Galway, Belfast, Dublin, and Cork.