Dropkick Murphys — Quincy, Massachusetts

The Dropkick Murphys formed in Quincy, Massachusetts — the working-class city south of Boston that is the birthplace of two American presidents (John Adams and John Quincy Adams) and the home of a substantial Irish-American community whose cultural identity the band has made central to their music for nearly three decades. Ken Casey, the band's bassist and primary organiser, is from Quincy and ran a barber shop there in the band's early years. The city's landscape — its proximity to the water, its blue-collar neighbourhoods, its Irish Catholic traditions and Red Sox allegiance — runs through Dropkick Murphys songs as directly as Liverpool runs through the Beatles.

The Dropkick Murphys are the inheritors of a specifically Boston-Irish musical tradition that extends back through the Pogues' influence and the Celtic punk genre they created in London in the 1980s. But the Murphys' version is distinctly local: their use of uilleann pipes, tin whistle, and mandolin alongside hardcore punk guitars is filtered through Fenway Park and the South Boston waterfront rather than through the Pogues' King's Cross bedsit origins. 'Shipping Up to Boston,' 'I'm Shipping Up to Boston,' 'Rose Tattoo,' and 'The State of Massachusetts' locate the band's music in a specific geography and community identity that has made them one of the most regionally rooted bands in American rock.

Quincy is accessible from Boston by the MBTA Red Line. The city has no formal Dropkick Murphys heritage markers, but the band's association with Quincy — and with the broader South Shore working-class Irish-American community — is fundamental to their identity and their audience's loyalty. The band plays annual St Patrick's Day shows in Boston that draw tens of thousands of people and have become one of the city's defining annual events.