Brian O’Donovan

With his gentle voice, kind demeanor and passion for Irish music, Brian O’Donovan, hosted WGBH’s A Celtic Sojourn for more than 35 years. His sheer joy in sharing Irish music with listeners defined nearly everything he did both professionally and personally, and he left a legacy among musicians and music lovers in the Boston area and beyond that will continue for years to come.

Born July 30, 1957, O’Donovan was the eighth of nine children, the son of a butcher and “professional martyr,” as he once referred to his mother, in West Cork, Ireland. He described his early life on a southwest coast that was “backward and gray” but said he considered his childhood to be “idyllic” nonetheless. He grew up in rural Conakilty, a town of some 3,500, where his family lived above his father’s shop. From there, he attended University County Cork, earning a degree in English and history in 1978. After that, he moved to London, which he described on his website as “teeming” with Irish emigrants. “The traditional Irish music scene was thriving there,” he wrote, “and I found myself very drawn to the music.”

Move to Boston

After about two years in London, he embarked on what his wife Lindsay says was supposed to be a “year-long sojourn to go around the world”; he started in Boston, which turned out to have lifelong reverberations. On his first night in the city, O’Donovan went to the Village Coach House, a traditional Irish pub in neighboring Brookline. During the traditional (“trad”) Irish session that night, he sang a couple of songs but, more importantly, he ended up sitting next to Lindsay Henes, who was playing piano that night. Though they didn’t see each other again for several months while he was traveling and studying at Emerson College, it was the start of their 43-year relationship. They reconnected when he returned to the Village Coach House several months later and were engaged three days later. The pair were married for 42 years, until Brian’s death in October 2023, and had four children and three grandchildren.

WERS, Sullivan Stadium, WGBH, A Celtic Sojourn

While studying mass communications at Emerson, O’Donovan became involved in organizing concerts and fundraising events. He also worked at the school’s radio station, WERS, and hosted a show called Folk Music from the British Isles from 1982 to 1984. Though he loved radio, his first full-time job after graduation was producing non-football events at what was then called Sullivan Stadium, home of the New England Patriots. One of his signature events at the 60,292-capacity venue was an Irish Music Festival, intended to rival the world’s largest, the Milwaukee Irish Fest, in Wisconsin.

He also booked major rock/pop acts including Aerosmith, David Bowie, U2, The Rolling Stones and Madonna. When the Sullivan family sold the stadium and the Patriots to Robert Kraft in 1994, O’Donovan stayed on as general manager at the renamed Foxboro (now Gillette) Stadium, overseeing sporting and music events. Eventually he became vice president in charge of facilities management; later, he played an important role in bringing the 1994 FIFA World Cup to Foxboro. In 1996, he helped create Major League Soccer in the US and became general manager and chief operating officer of the New England Revolution.

During his years working at the stadium, O’Donovan maintained a regular presence on the Boston airwaves. In 1986, he joined public radio station WGBH to host A Celtic Sojourn, which became integral to the lives of thousands, airing from 3pm to 6pm every Saturday for 37 years. Wanting to share his encyclopedic knowledge of Irish music for those who were new to the genre, O’Donovan did the show live, playing from a stack of CDs and often choosing tracks on the fly. He loved to share new recordings of old songs to help people understand that traditional music is a living vital force that needs to be performed and shared, not simply studied and archived. Even though Boston is often considered a largely Irish town, he found WGBH’s listenership to be incredibly diverse and interested in all sorts of world music, he said.

In 2001, O’Donovan turned his attention entirely to music and radio. “I decided to shift my professional focus back to media, arts, and broadcasting even during the years of my unexpected sports and entertainment career, when I had been hosting a weekly radio program on GBH,” he wrote on his website several years later. “Since 2001, we have given A Celtic Sojourn, a straight-forward weekly broadcast on GBH radio, much scope. In addition to producing our yearly Christmas Celtic Sojourn, we present several concert series throughout the year. These include ‘A St. Patrick’s Day Celtic Sojourn,’ ‘Summer Celtic Roots and Branches,’ a new Rockport Celtic Festival, and a weekly club presentation from the Backroom of The Burren [in Davis Square, Somerville].” His connection to The Burren began in 2010 and lasted 13 years.

Live holiday shows

Starting in the early 2000s, O’Donovan’s live holiday shows, especially “A Christmas Celtic Sojourn” and “A St. Patrick’s Day Celtic Sojourn,” became huge successes. The Christmas show began simply as a special edition of his Celtic Sojourn radio show, blending music and poetry and being aired across the US on National Public Radio. After several years, inspired by his experiences organizing live shows, O’Donovan decided to turn that format into a live stage event. In 2003, he made what he thought was a bold decision to start at the 1,100-seat Somerville Theater and was amazed to see it sell out. The following year, three performances of “A Christmas Celtic Sojourn” at the venue sold out almost immediately.

The holiday shows then moved to Boston’s Cutler Majestic Theatre and continued to grow until there were 15 “A Christmas Celtic Sojourn” events in five New England cities. Featuring a wide range of singers, dancers, spoken-word performances and musicians from around the world, the show spoke to people beyond the Celtic community, according to Lindsay. “People recall their own holiday traditions, whether they be Irish, Italian, Jewish, whatever,” she said on WGBH. “They feel something in Christmas Celtic Sojourn that’s evocative of their own memories of time and place and holidays and families.”

Introducing the virtual St. Patrick’s Day Celtic Sojourn produced on-line in 2021, Brian told Boston Neighborhood News why he thought Celtic music appeals to non-Celtic performers: “What St. Patrick’s Day has always been for me when I set out to do this is to really take a trip around the influence that Irish culture has had around the world, which course as we know is disproportionate to the size of the country,” he said. “And that’s largely created by the fact that we were a country of immigration because of our history, because of our economics, because of various disasters like the great famine in the mid-1800s. We populated the world with immigrants and so we’ve got an outsized influence and reach in our culture.”

Honors, Death, Legacy

In 2017, O’Donovan was honored for his work by being inducted into the Northeast Regional Hall of Fame of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, a nonprofit committed to the preservation of Irish culture. Also that year, then-Boston Mayor Marty Walsh declared December 14 “Brian O’Donovan Day” in the city, “in recognition of his contributions to immigrant communities in Greater Boston.”

His death at age 66 on October 6, 2023, of glioblastoma, prompted an outpouring of memories, tears and additional honors. Music was elemental to O’Donovan, he cared deeply for the musicians with whom he worked, and he mentored them whenever he could. Over decades, he touched the lives of listeners and musicians around the world, and Lindsay spoke of opening their home to performers, sitting up late over cups of tea or maybe a glass of whiskey discussing performers’ plans and futures. These days, The Burren hosts “The Brian O’Donovan Legacy Series” featuring live Celtic music each Wednesday, hosted by Lindsay, Tommy McCarthy and Tom Bianchi. The O’Donovan family has also established the Brian O’Donovan Legacy Fund at Club Passim for Celtic musicians; the fund is currently accepting grant applications and some of the money will be used to fund musicians for the 2024 Boston Celtic Music Festival.

Asked for her thoughts on what motivated her husband to become so involved in the Boston-area music community, Lindsay said it was just who he was. “I think Brian’s love of music and sharing of music went far beyond the professional level,” she says. “He cared deeply about the musicians he worked with, he opened his home – our home – and it was all him. It was always, ‘How can we support musicians?’ And I think that’s how he lived his life: always wondering how can he share this and how can he help somebody do what they love to do.”

(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.