Music in the streets

Dubliners are serious about their buskers—I saw a lot of them, especially at the weekend.

On Grafton Street, they seem to be assigned positions and timeslots for their performances. And their stations seem to be just far enough apart that you don’t hear them over one another. I saw this young girl in a couple of places at different times on Saturday:

If you notice the tag on her music stand, it’s her “license”, I guess. All the ones on Grafton had them; presumably official approval to busk. (She was singing C&W; I personally think she’s too young for that—you need to have lived long enough to experience honky-tonks before you get cred in that genre. But props for the effort.)

The notion of a fella out with a piano was quite new to me. I saw him at one end of Grafton Street on Friday:

And at the other on Saturday:

Then there was this one—not technically a busker, but...

And around the corner from the Bank of Ireland, there was this guy:

Not uilleann pipes, but Galician gaita. In one of his intervals he was talking with someone on his mobile in Spanish.

There’s something wonderful about a country that makes official room for buskers of all types.