Who is Burke Ingraffia?
Hey y’all. Burke, here. Thanks for visiting my website – I built it myself. I hope you enjoy my music as much as I enjoy writing and performing it.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with me, I am an adequately educated singer/songwriter who grew up in New Orleans in the 1970’s, brought up on the early days of FM radio and whispers of Professor Longhair blowing in the breeze. My first favorite songs I heard on the school bus were Paul Simon’s “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” and “They All Asked for You” by The Meters. As a teenager I got into the Grateful Dead, CSN&Y, and all of the other hippie rock that envisioned a hope for a better world.
As a young adult I started listening to the “New Folk” songwriters such as David Wilcox and John Gorka who transformed my mind and my heart to write songs in a very intimate and intellectual way. I studied jazz for awhile at the University of New Orleans, but never finished that degree. Eventually I finished my undergraduate studies in Steubenville, OH where I learned the ins and outs of Catholic theology and started combining my music with my faith.
At that time I thought seriously about becoming a Catholic priest. But God had other plans for me. I wound up receiving a Master of Humanities degree from the University of Dallas, another great Catholic school. It was there I learned what Athens has to do with Jerusalem.
I taught Church History at Archbishop Rummel High School in Metairie, LA for a couple of years, and then moved to Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana for awhile to live with my 96 year-old (at that time) grandfather. I was getting ready to move back to New Orleans in 2005, but Hurricane Katrina blew me to Austin for a year.
After that year in Austin, I got engaged to my beautiful wife, Melanie, and moved back to New Orleans for the following year. But after having gun fights in our neighborhood and 160 murders in the first 10 months of 2007 and a City Hall who ordered us to take down our hurricane shutters just one week into the 2007 Hurricane Season (a whole story of stupidity altogether, which I will share at a later time), we decided to relocate to her roots in Baldwin County, AL where we now are embarking on our second year of marriage, the happiest time in my life.
Please enjoy the website and feel free to contact me with any good messages and news of hope in the world.
What is Catholic Music?
The word, “Catholic,” comes from the classical Greek word katholikos which means “throughout the whole,” or “universal.” In this more general sense, I think my music is truly Catholic. The music can be enjoyed universally by all; the sound and form of the music is appreciated by both musicians and non-musicians, and the content of the lyrics is accessible to both Christians and non-Christians.
The true music of the Catholic Church is the music of the liturgy, the Mass. It comes from the Psalms, Gregorian Chant, and the Classical Masses (i.e. Mozart and Handel ). In the modern English-speaking world, much Church music is borrowed from the Methodist Church (Charles Wesley), folk spirituals, and (unfortunately) modern pop music.
What I write and perform is not liturgical music. It is not “praise and worship” music either, at least in what that phrase has come to mean.
There were a group of 19th and 20th Century writers who tried to achieve literarily what I am trying to create musically and lyrically. These artists include G.K. Chesterton, Flannery O’Connor, Evelyn Waugh, Hilaire Belloc, and Walker Percy to name a few. Through their fiction they revealed something of the Catholic worldview without being preachy or excluding non-Catholics from their audiences.
My music is not religious enough for some, not secular enough for others. It doesn't fit into any one (or four) genres, so it is hard to sell to mass markets. It attempts all at once to reflect the arts of our time and the truth of timelessness. Universal, I would hope so.