There is a word that carries within it a whole philosophy of commitment, the recognition that some moments are so significant and some causes so worth standing for that the fear of the worst outcome becomes irrelevant, the warrior’s understanding that the thing being defended is larger than any individual life and that defending it fully requires being willing to pay the full cost. Hokahey, the Lakota Sioux chant that broadly means let’s do it or let’s go men and that in modern interpretation carries the resonance of today is a good day to die, is that word, and JP Kennedy has made it the title and the heart of his latest single, released May 19, 2026, built around the story of Chief Red Cloud’s War of 1866 to 1868, the only major war won by Native Americans against the United States military in the nineteenth century.
Kennedy arrived at this subject through an unusual creative route for an Irish folk-rock musician from County Donegal, the Wild West album concept he is developing for Road to Jerome being rooted in family history, specifically the tales handed down from his great-grandfather Con Kennedy who ran saloons in Winslow, Arizona and Gallup, New Mexico in the late nineteenth century before returning to Ireland. An Irish emigrant operating saloons in frontier America in the same era as Red Cloud’s War is positioned, geographically and historically, within the same landscape that the conflict was reshaping, and Kennedy’s decision to include the story from the Native American perspective within an album shaped by that family inheritance reflects a moral seriousness about whose story gets told in the western genre that most cowboy music has not historically shared.
Red Cloud, Maȟpíya Lúta in Lakota, was the Oglala Lakota leader who unified an alliance of Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Northern Arapaho tribes against the United States military’s encroachment on the Black Hills, Pahá Sápa, the sacred mountain range in South Dakota that the Lakota knew as the center of their world. The two-year conflict that bears his name ended with the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, the United States abandoning the Bozeman Trail forts and acknowledging Lakota sovereignty over the Black Hills, an extraordinary outcome in the history of Indigenous resistance to expansion that the mainstream western narrative has consistently underemphasized in favor of the stories of US military triumph. Kennedy finding this story remarkable and worth singing about, being inspired by their story of victory against the odds, is both historically correct and relatively rare in the genre he is working within.
The warm fiddle-infused melody that carries the track connects the Lakota story to the Celtic folk tradition through the instrument rather than through cultural appropriation, the fiddle being the bridge between the Irish musical inheritance Kennedy carries and the American frontier context the story inhabits, both traditions having developed a fiddle culture in their respective landscapes across overlapping historical periods. The upbeat pace gives the song its radio and playlist accessibility while the tribal drums that accentuate the imminent battle on sacred lands bring the specific sonic character of the Lakota tradition into dialogue with the Celtic folk energy, the two musical inheritances honoring each other in the arrangement rather than one being subordinated to the other.
The production from Aisling Jarvis, a fellow Irish artist and member of electronic brother-sister duo BANYAH who is also a touring member of Clannad, brings a musical intelligence to the track that connects it to the Celtic folk tradition at its deepest and most internationally significant. Clannad’s influence on how Irish traditional music intersects with contemporary production is substantial and still audible in how the genre navigates the space between rootedness and accessibility, and Jarvis’s experience in that tradition gives Hokahey a production sophistication that honors the material rather than simplifying it for commercial ease.
The music video, filmed with cultural reenactors from Old West Pioneers in Ludwigshafen am Rhein in Germany, creates the visual world that the song’s story inhabits with the authenticity of a club dedicated to preserving and celebrating the traditional lifestyles and customs of the historical American frontier, including Native American traditions alongside cowboy and trapper culture. The choice to film in Germany rather than in America carries its own irony about how the mythology of the American West has traveled globally and been preserved in unexpected places, the frontier being kept alive in a German city on the Rhine by enthusiasts whose cultural distance from the original might paradoxically give them a cleaner relationship to its complexity than those living inside the American national narrative.
Kennedy’s rebel persona and his blending of punk rock spirit with country folk and grunge influences has found appreciative audiences on tours supporting The Rumjacks and The Mahones, bands whose own Celtic rock identities demonstrate that the intersection of Irish musical inheritance and harder sonic energy generates something with genuine international appeal. Hokahey is the finest demonstration yet of what Kennedy is building toward with Road to Jerome, the debut solo album shaped by Con Kennedy’s saloon-keeping frontier stories now including Chief Red Cloud’s victory alongside the cowboys and the whiskey and the desert dust.
