Kennedy’s Kitchen to Play Petoskey & Suttons Bay

Band brings traditional Irish tunes to warm up the North for St. Pat’s

By Ross Boissoneau | Feb. 19, 2022

While many people look to the month of March — specifically St. Patrick’s Day — for their dose of music from the Emerald Isle, the leader of Kennedy’s Kitchen celebrates his vocation on a daily basis. “Every day when I wake up, I get to do music,” says joHn Kennedy. 

And before you ask, yes, that’s how he spells his name. Rather than face endless questions about his name and any relation to the famous Kennedy clan, he decided to stake out his own identity with the unusual spelling. “This is my way of saying, ‘It’s me,’” he says. As to the band’s name, it’s derived from a description of the music: “Kitchen Music from the home, the hearth, and the heart.”

Kennedy and his five-piece band perform two shows, March 5 at the City Park Grill in Petoskey, and March 6 at the Bay Theatre in Suttons Bay. He and the band are looking forward to the shows as the past couple years have been stop and start due to the pandemic. These shows in northern Michigan are some of the band’s first shows since November. As a result, he and the band, as well as their fans, have suffered. 

“It left a really large hole,” he says, though the time away seemed to do wonders for both sides once the band was back on stage. When the band began playing again, Kennedy says the response from the audiences was beyond what the group anticipated. 

“The shows were off the charts,” Kennedy says. As any musician will tell you, the interaction between performer and audience is crucial. “We need each other. If you’re a fish, you’ve got to swim. Then suddenly [when the pandemic closed down performance spaces] there was no water.” And when things opened back up? It was as though the floodgates opened.

So what can northern Michigan audiences expect when Kennedy’s Kitchen comes ’round next week? “The audience can expect joy. For me, that’s that whole point. On a great night, maybe there’s healing, tears. Some are just magic.”

The band has been making Irish music together since 1998, and their longtime connection and experience shows. Kennedy says the evening will be a rich mix of stories and songs, all rooted in traditional Irish music: jigs, reels, hornpipes, aires, and recitations, including original compositions. In true Irish tradition, a meandering bit of talk will be on the table too. “I’m a master of sidetracking,” says Kennedy. “It’s a gift I discovered onstage. I’m a storyteller.”

The guitarist and singer — and, yes, storyteller — will also gift audiences with some unusual guitar tuning, in which the strings are tuned to D,A,D,G,A, and D. Called “DADGAD tuning,” the method is one favored by Pierre Bensusan, a gifted French-Algerian guitarist whose music often evokes the Celtic flavorings of the British Isles. 

Kennedy calls Bensusan “the godfather of DADGAD,” and says the tuning suits Irish music. “There’s an ambiguity built into the tuning,” says Kennedy. “You get the drones you’d play on pipes. It makes it easier to play open chords.”

The rest of the band performs on traditional Irish instruments: whistles, flutes, fiddle, tenor banjo, mandolin, bodhran (Irish drum) and bass, with various members joining Kennedy on vocals.

The Petoskey show is a revival of the Robert Emmet Society’s annual Irish Hoolie, a term for an Irish party with music, dance, great food “and even better blarney.” After a two-year hiatus brought about by the pandemic, the organization is hosting this hoolie with a special mission in mind: to raise funds to send a student at North Central Michigan College to study at the Galway-Mayo Institute in Galway, Ireland, for a semester.

The Robert Emmet Society was founded in Emmet County to promote awareness of its namesake, Robert Emmet, an Irish patriot executed by the British in 1803 for leading a revolt against Ireland’s longtime foreign rulers. Tickets for the show, at City Park Grill, are $20 in advance and $25 at the door. Renewing and current society members and students are $15. Seating is limited. For tickets or more information, call the Robert Emmet Society at 231-838-6239 or City Park Grill at 231-347-0101.

Tickets for the 4pm performance in Suttons Bay are $25, $20 for Premium and Sustainer Bay Theatre members. They are available at the Bay Theatre box office and the website, www.thebaytheatre.com; click on Schedule and Tickets.