A musician inviting the world into his songhouse [Video]

After retiring from a job with the phone company at age 54, Sean Sullivan mused aloud one day about starting a small business – inviting people into his home for an afternoon of songs and stories. He remembers his wife’s response.

“Sullivan, you might as well,’ she said. ‘This place is already a songhouse,’” Sean says with a laugh. “And she was right about that.”

Sean grew up in Calvert, a community of about 250 people on Newfoundland’s Southern Shore. It’s a stretch of coastline south of St. John’s that bursts with an Irishness you’ll hear the instant you speak to any resident.

“We always sang and played,” Sean says of his youth. “We were singing all the time at the house with our parents, and we always had a keen interest in Irish music, all of us being at least 99 per cent Irish around here.”

Those family musical …