The Burren
“The whole thing from the start was to make it a home for musicians. We felt that if we could get that right, everything would work after that, which we believe it did.” So says Tommy McCarthy, owner of The Burren, an Irish pub in the Davis Square neighborhood of Somerville, Massachusetts. The renowned venue is the only place in the Square where people can hear live music, and boy, is there a lot to hear.
Pronounced somewhere between “burrin” and “burn,” The Burren opened in 1995 and has hosted thousands of shows of nearly every musical genre. Known primarily for presenting Irish sessions – more on that later – patrons can also enjoy folk, bluegrass, old-timey music, Gypsy jazz, up-and-coming singer-songwriters, and even the occasional Red Sox pitcher. The Burren provides about ten shows a week in two different rooms (including brunch, matinee, evening and late-night shows) and on St. Patrick’s Day there have been up to 14 shows in a single weekend.
Background, Opening, Design, Capacity, Menu
Owner/operators Tommy McCarthy and Louise Costello, who’ve been married since 1994, are both musicians (Tommy a fiddler and Louise a banjoist and accordionist); they recorded an album in 2103, Grace Bay, and appear on The Burren Backroom Series, released by Audio & Video Labs in 2014. They lived in Boston in 1986 and travelled to Australia and other parts of the world, but Boston kept drawing them back.
In 1994, Tommy was filling in as fiddle player for the Irish band Arcady, who played their final gig at the Somerville Theater. In those days, Davis Square was bereft of drinking holes, except for Johnny D’s, which was a ticketed venue until closing in 2016. “We were looking for a place where we could go into a public bar and have a drink and chat,” Tommy says. “So that got us thinking. We had just got married that year, so I think we were in two minds of where we were going to settle, in Ireland or America. I think that kind of made a decision for us that this would be a good place to start off, we could play music in our own pub and be home every night.”
Facing an economic downturn in the mid-’90s, Somerville town officials offered attractive terms on a number of empty storefronts in Davis Square. Tommy and Louise picked the present site for their bar, 247 Elm Street, because it had nearly 5,000 square feet of space, included front and back rooms, a patio for outdoor seating, and a large parking lot in the back. From the beginning, they wanted the bar to look old and comfortable and The Burren’s weathered shelves boast an array of vintage instruments, including accordions, horns, and even an upright bass.
Photographs, posters of past shows, and maps cover every available inch of wall space and the tables and benches are well-worn. One booth sports a sign that reads “Reserved for Musicians from 9 PM,” over which is a chandelier that holds mics instead of lights. Above the hallway to the back room is a five-foot, wide-angle photo of the bar taken by a customer who has been a patron since the ’90s. Both he and Tommy give all the decorating credit to Louise, who has made the space both comfortable and homey.
Initially, Tommy and Louise focused only on the front room, which holds about 100 people. Each night, the two of them performed there in the manner of a traditional Irish session. Two years later, they opened the back room, adding space for 100 to 150 people (depending on the show), a generous stage and a full bar. Like the front of the house, the walls display hundreds of framed photos and posters, but here the chandeliers are draped with lights and crystals. For a time, unless there was a special event, anyone could sit there and order dinner or listen to the music. As for dinner, Tommy and Louise are both vegans and work hard to create plant-based menus for The Burren and their sister pub, The Bebop. They provide an extensive variety of dishes including traditional fish and chips, Guinness beef stew, burgers, and shepherd’s pie for the carnivores.
Brian O’Donovan, “Celtic Sojourn” series, Irish sessions
In about 2011, things changed dramatically at The Burren as Tommy sought to turn the back room into a ticketed venue. Wanting to attract more big-name Irish artists to his pub, he approached Brian O’Donovan, the host of WGBH’s Irish-music show Celtic Sojourn and general manager at Sullivan (now Gillette) Stadium, for which he booked bands including U2 and Madonna. O’Donovan agreed to start hosting a “Celtic Sojourn” series at The Burren every Sunday evening and it continued for 12 years, featuring mostly Irish but occasionally Scottish music. Since O’Donovan’s death in October 2023, the “Brian O’Donovan Legacy Series” has continued, helmed by Tommy, Brian’s wife Lindsay and The Burren’s music-booking agent, Tom Bianchi.
The backbone of The Burren’s musical contribution to the area is the Irish session, a traditional jam. Held in the front room, they include musicians playing fiddle, banjo, a concertina, or a small Irish harp. Players watch and learn from each other and, when they really get going, the audience cheers and stomps their feet in time. The Burren hosts five sessions a week, each with unique characteristics. “It varies,” says the venue’s bartender (and nephew to Tommy and Louise) Harry Giles. “You could get more people singing in one session [and] more traditional in another session. On Mondays, there’s a slower session in the back for people who are still practicing and learning. On Friday and Saturday nights, we have fast paced Irish music.”
Sessions often become long-term traditions. For example, Harry spoke of one that had been going on for about 30 years at the Green Briar Pub in Brighton. When that bar closed following Covid shutdowns, the session moved to The Burren. Tommy and Louise started another at Jamaica Plain’s Brendan Behan Pub about 35 years ago and it’s still going.
Notable appearances, Patrons
Since its opening, The Burren has hosted many famous performers and served a variety of notable patrons, providing what Tommy calls “a house for musicians to come and enjoy and be thankful.” He recalls when The Chieftains came to the pub (after performing at Symphony Hall) and U2 doing the same since they heard that the Guinness was great. Well-known Irish performers who have appeared at The Burren include members of De Dannan, John Carty, Lunasa and Sharon Shannon. In July 2024, after performing at the MGM Fenway, Galway-based chart toppers The Saw Doctors did an after-gig show there.
Speaking of the Fenway, Bianchi tells the story of Boston Red Sox relief pitcher Bronson Arroyo holding an album-release party at The Burren for his 2005 disc Covering the Bases, a collection of covers including the Red Sox winning-game anthem “Love that Dirty Water,” originally by The Standells. Other notable performers include Greg Hawkes of The Cars, Bill Janovitz of Buffalo Tom, Tanya Donelly of Belly, Throwing Muses and The Breeders, Juliana Hatfield of Blake’s Babies and The Lemonheads and Kay Hanley of Letters to Cleo. Comedians who have brought laughs to The Burren are Louis CK, Jimmy Tingle and Eugene Mirman. Darrow Rings (Dara Ó Briain), a popular Irish comedian, was spotted in there having a pint a couple of years ago.
Bookings, Surviving COVID, The Bebop, Toad, Other ventures
Most of the bookings are handled by Tom Bianchi, who runs 24 Hour Music. For him, The Burren is a different kind of stage from others he’s seen. “What I can tell you about the beauty of The Burren is they are the most supportive live-music venue I’ve ever experienced. If there’s an opportunity to present music, they’ll do it.” The Burren presents kids shows on a regular basis, Gypsy jazz on Tuesdays, Americana artists on Wednesdays, singer-songwriters on Thursdays and bluegrass on Fridays. In addition to music, Monday is Trivia Night and there are occasional comedy shows. Late-night gigs are usually cover bands, many comprised of Berklee College of Music students.
Though Covid shutdowns were hard on every pub and club, The Burren was hit in a particularly damaging way. “We got closed down on the worst day of the year, St. Patrick’s Day [2020],” Tommy says. They were prepared to do more than a dozen shows that weekend, and, like many other places, had brought in supplies for many meals. When things eased up a bit, they were able to open up in the back parking lot and the front patio, and local, state and federal grants helped them bring back the full team. “We still had the same team that was there and before that and still with us now,” Tommy says.
In 2017, capitalizing on Boston’s abundance of student musicians, Tommy and Louise opened a similar pub, The Bebop, near Berklee. It, too, features live music seven days a week, and had a visit in 2019 from Bruce Springsteen, who came with his wife and a friend to listen to some music and have a drink. More recently, they bought the famed-but-closed venue Toad in Cambridge, for a planned reopening in the fall of 2024 There’s also talk of collaborating with the Somerville Theater, where recent renovations added a new live performance space.
People at The Burren take pride in the familial atmosphere, according to bartender Harry. “The people who aren’t family have become family over the years,” he says. “My father was a bartender when it first opened, so I’m like the next generation. Me and my brother are around these days, and hopefully it’ll keep going for another few generations.” Booker Tom Bianchi courted and proposed to his wife on the Burren’s back-room stage and his son is one of the bartenders there. As Tommy McCarthy says, once you “get that world recognition and especially people from Ireland … you feel like you’re putting Ireland on the map in a piece of Somerville. That’s always continued on since the day we opened.”
(by John Radosta)
Lifelong Boston resident John Radosta is the co-author (with Keith Nainby) of Bob Dylan in Performance: Song, Stage, and Screen (Lexington, 2019) and has written numerous articles about Dylan and Woody Guthrie for a variety of publications.
