Lots of New Happenings

Greetings, all!

The Devil's Tailors played a fantastic gig at The Royal Mile Pub on January 9th. We started a bit late, but the house was packed almost until we finished up around midnight, and had a great reception! We debuted a lot of new material, including "Ye Banks and Braes", our Shetland-inspired take on "The Bonny Ship the Diamond", a 17th century song called "The Mosstrooper's Lament", and the original version of "Auld Lang Syne".

I'd like to apologize now the the server who tripped on one of our monitors, causing the breakage of a plate, delay to a customer's meal, and the loss of a perfectly good fish & chips. To prevent a repeat of this situation, I have purchased some smaller ones, which we tried out last night with great success.

Driving into DC the second of this winter's four snowmageddons, on January 30th we followed up with a Burns Supper and Ceilidh for the Edinburgh University Alumni Association of DC, with Liz Donaldson joining us on piano for some dance sets: The Gay Gordons, Strip the Willow, Dashing White Sergeant, and The Eightsome Reel. In addition to the brilliantly fun dances, we got to play some slow tunes not normally in our repertoire during dinner, and debuted the Burns song "John Barleycorn", in addition to "Ye Banks & Braes". Thanks to the Edinburgh U. Alumni for having us, thanks for dancing to us, and we hope to see you again!

And we've got some great new gigs on the horizon.

There's the National Tartan Day Festival at Market Square in Old Town, Alexandria on April 3rd - a staple for us, and we'll be sharing the stage with a pipe band, highland dancers, Scottish Country Dancers, and possibly another band (more details as groups confirm).

Then a week later, we're playing a tartan ball in Arlington, again with Liz, for the St. Andrew's University Alumni Association of DC.

On April 24th, we've been invited to take the Pub Stage at the Southern Maryland Celtic Festival at Jefferson Patterson Park in St. Leonard, MD. We're very excited about heading down for this one!

Then we return to our home port of The Royal Mile Pub on May 22d with guest fiddler Katy Summerlin, and again on July 24th.

After that, it's the Virginia Scottish Games and more fun through fall 2010. So keep watching, because great things are happening!