Bibiel Hears Things: Nadia Birkenstock – “Far From Home”

Hey people! Yesterday I featured a piece by Kim Robertson, and today, I decided to share one played by Kim’s student – Nadia Birkenstock. This isn’t the first time Nadia is featured in “Bibiel Hears Things”, as I’ve shared quite a few different pieces by her in the past. This cheerful tune is a traditional Irish reel that is also known under other names, including “Slán Beo Leat”, “Fad Ó Bhaile”, or “The Windy Gap”. It has quite an interesting backstory. It was collected by Captain Francis O’Neill – a Chicago police chief with a great passion for collecting traditional Irish songs, who published several books of traditional Irish repertoire. He wrote about this reel that it was one of the very first tunes he learned after emigrating from Ireland to California, at the age of nineteen, around 1867. He picked it up “from the whistling of a companion while herding a flock of 3000 sheep on the plains at the foot of the Sierra Nevada Range”. That’s why we now know it as “Far From Home”. It…