John Doyle and Cathie Ryan bring Irish song to Orchard Chapel on Dec 1

One of Irish music's great accompanists and a former Cherish the Ladies singer share a Tuesday night in Hampton Falls, and tickets are on sale now.

There are rooms on the Seacoast built for loud nights, and there are rooms built for listening. When John Doyle brings his guitar to Orchard Chapel in Hampton Falls on Tuesday, Dec. 1, it will very much be the second kind.

The show was announced Oct. 21. Music starts at 7 p.m., and Cathie Ryan shares the bill. Tickets are on sale now through The Word Barn's ticketing page, and with Doyle's usual headline rooms running around 200 people, this is not a night to wait on.

For anyone who hasn't come across him, Doyle is a Dublin-born guitarist and singer best known for his work with Solas and Usher's Island, according to his Wikipedia entry). He was in on the early years of Solas, the Irish-American band that set a standard for traditional music in the 1990s, and he now lives in Asheville, North Carolina. Guitar players tend to talk about him the way drummers talk about their heroes: the rhythm under a set of reels, the chord that lands just ahead of where you expected it. He has built enough of a reputation for that accompaniment style that he teaches it in workshops and has been the subject of radio features on solo Irish guitar.

His calendar this year has been full on both sides of the Atlantic. Listings show him at Celtic Junction in Saint Paul in May, and on the bill at West Cork's festival (West Cork Music). A December weeknight in a small New Hampshire chapel is a different proposition from either, and arguably a better one.

Cathie Ryan is the other half of the draw. A first-generation Irish-American from Detroit, she joined Cherish the Ladies as lead singer in 1987 and co-wrote the title track of their 1992 album *The Back Door*, per her Wikipedia entry. She went solo in the mid-1990s, and her own timeline traces a career since then that includes being named Irish Female Vocalist of the Decade twice. Her most recent solo album, *Through Wind and Rain*, came out in 2012.

Guitar players tend to talk about him the way drummers talk about their heroes.

Put the two together and you have a pairing rooted in the same tradition from two directions: Doyle from Dublin, carrying the music outward; Ryan from Detroit, raised inside it at a remove. Both have spent decades in the songs that came over on the boats, which makes a chapel in early December about as right a setting as any.

Tickets run through The Word Barn, the Exeter barn-and-meadow venue that has become a fixture for folk and acoustic shows on the Seacoast (Boston Globe). If you've caught a show there, or heard one on NHPR's *Live from the Word Barn*, you know the kind of crowd that turns out: people who came to hear every word.

The practical bit: Tuesday, Dec. 1, 7 p.m., Orchard Chapel, Hampton Falls. Get tickets before Thanksgiving gets in the way. Then on the night, find a pew, put the phone away, and let the guitar do the talking.

Sources: John Doyle (guitarist) — Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org); Cathie Ryan — Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org); Cathie Ryan biography timeline (cathieryan.com); John Doyle in Concert — Celtic Junction (celticjunction.org); John Doyle — West Cork Music 2026 (westcorkmusic.ie); Guitar Accompaniment Workshop with John Doyle (journalofmusic.com); In Exeter, the Word Barn is housing creativity — Boston Globe (bostonglobe.com); Live from the Word Barn — NHPR (nhpr.org); Tickets — John Doyle & Cathie Ryan (tickets.thewordbarn.com)