Muireann Bradley may be a 18-year-old acoustic guitarist from rural Ireland, but she plays note-perfect renditions of acoustic-guitar ragtime blues classics like a seasoned Mississippi pro. Not only does Bradley possess impeccable technique but she has a great voice as well, factors that helped her 2023 debut album, I Kept These Old Bluesbreak into the top 10 on the U.K. album charts. Credit her stay-at-home guitar-playing father for the influence.
“I’d always hear him playing guitar around the house. That was the first music that I heard,” she says. “When he’d play records, it was things like Reverend Gary Davis, Blind Blake, Blind Lemon Jefferson and Robert Johnson. I really loved it and started to get curious about it.”
To make things even more interesting, Dad had a nice selection of guitars, but they were hands-off. “He had some great guitars, acoustic and electric, including Gibsons and other great things,” Bradley says.
“I was always asking him to teach me, and he finally gave in when I was five. He got me a little travel guitar, and started teaching me to play alternating bass for a month before he added the chords on top, and then he built on things from there.
“He made up acoustic fingerpicked versions of nursery rhymes that he could use to teach me. The first proper blues tune that I learned was ‘Vestapol,’ which is on the album.”
The public got its first look at Bradley’s talents during lockdown, when she began making YouTube videos.
“During lockdown I learned to play Blind Blake’s ‘Police Dog Blues’ and put it on YouTube just for fun,” she told Guitarist magazine. “It got a lot more attention than we’d expected.”
That led to an album deal and a show-stealing appearance on the British TV program Jools Holland’s Hootenannyon New Years Eve 2023.
“My dad contacted the producer,” she explains. “It turned out that he had actually already bought my CD and really liked what I was doing. I got to meet some interesting people on there, particularly Rod Stewart.”
On I Kept These Old BluesBradley played a custom-built maple and Sitka spruce McNally S model for most songs in standard tuning, while a custom-built Iris MS-00 was employed for songs in open G, A, D and E tunings.
“For drop D, I used a black Collings Waterloo WL-14 X that used to be my dad’s,” she reveals. Other guitars include a 1934 Gibson L-50 archtop, a 2021 Gibson LG-2 ’50s reissue, and a Collings Waterloo WL-S Deluxe, a ladder-braced model based on a late-1920s Stella. “That one’s a bit delicate for gigging, but it’s used for anything and everything in the studio.”
While Bradley doesn’t play electric, she may in the future, “as I love Rory Gallagher, who combined acoustic and electric,” she says. She’s also planning to release her next album later this year and, hopefully, tour in America. “I’d like to start playing some shows there, so hopefully someone reading this might get in touch. Fingers crossed!”
