Black Donnellys

The "Black Donnellys" were an Irish family who emigrated to Ontario. Five of the family were murdered by an armed mob in the township of Biddulph in February 1880 and their farm was burned down, the culmination of long-standing conflict between the family and other residents. No one was ever convicted of the murders, despite two inconclusive trials.

The Donnelly family

The Black

The Black is a rock band from Austin, Texas that formed in 2002 when singer/songwriter David Longoria began collaborating with drummer Andy Morales. The two were later joined by renowned guitarist Alan Schaefer (son of famous guitar maker Ed Schaefer) and Nick Moulos of the Austin band The Crackpipes.

History

The group began playing regularly at Emo's and house parties until Schaefer moved to France to teach English in 2004. Longoria joined major label act ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead during the band's hiatus, his first performance with them on the Late Show with David Letterman in January 2005. Schaefer joined the rest of the band to support Trail of Dead on their European Worlds Apart tour. During the tour Trail of Dead was the band's backing band for a handful of shows.

Their full-length album Tanglewood was recorded in 2004 and released the spring of 2005 on their own record label K Woo.

The band's next release, titled Donna, was released in the summer of 2007.

The Black Donnellys

The Black Donnellys is an American television drama that debuted on NBC on February 26, 2007 and last aired on April 2, 2007. Thereafter, NBC began releasing new episodes weekly on NBC.com until the series was officially cancelled. The Black Donnellys was created by Paul Haggis and Robert Moresco featured in the cast Jonathan Tucker, Olivia Wilde, Billy Lush, Tom Guiry, Kirk Acevedo, and relative newcomers Michael Stahl-David and Keith Nobbs.

The series follows four young Roman Catholic Irish-American brothers in New York City's Hell's Kitchen neighborhood, and their involvement with petty and organized crime. Set in the present day, the show draws heavily upon Irish-American history and iconic themes. The pilot episode illustrates a clear tension and rivalry between the Irish and the Italians. The episodes are narrated by a childhood friend, Joey "Ice Cream", whom the show depicts as an unreliable narrator.

In creating the show, Haggis, a native of London, Ontario, strongly referenced his hometown's local history about the real-life Black Donnellys and the massacre associated with their name. In the pilot episode, Joey says the neighborhood is populated primarily by "Black Irish", whom he calls "a race of dark-haired people" the Celts had failed to wipe out in Ireland. Hell's Kitchen in the series is also a fairly faithful depiction - a traditionally working-class neighborhood with a deeply entrenched ethnic Irish population and an Irish Mob with control over illegal gambling and loansharking, and heavy involvement in the unions. Although set in 2005, Hell's Kitchen is shown to be slowly overtaken by gentrification and development that threatens to displace the Irish population, a fate that Hell's Kitchen actually succumbed to in the early 1990s.