WRITING in New Spotlight magazine in early 1967, Joe Dolan recalled the setting up of Sweeney’s Men and the . . .
Rocky Road to Success
In May 1966 Johnny Moynihan and Andy Irvine met Joe Dolan in Galway. They had played together before around the country, but never as a group. Moynihan suggested they form a [...]

Sarah Keane, the last surviving member of her generation of the famous musical family from Caherlistrane, Co Galway, died on December 21, 2010. She was aunt of singers  Dolores and Sean Keane.
Sarah, who was 92, died at the family home at Carragh, Caherlistrane. Along with her sister Rita she had a store of rare folk [...]

Irish traditional music has gone into space with the US/Russia joint space station mission which tooks off from Kazakhstan.
Astronaut Catherne ‘Cady’ Coleman has packed a traditional Irish concert flute given to her by Chieftains musician Matt Molloy.
Cady is a committed Irish traditional musician and told a press conference on December 14 that she intended playing [...]

Following up on the success of An Jig Gig, TG4 is preparing another talent competition.This time the Irish language TV channel’s show will search for Ireland’s most entertaining family.
From The Clancy Brothers and the Fury Brothers to Clannad, or the sean-nós dancing of the Cunninghams, the Irish family has entertained us down the decades with [...]

Irish wedding songs and tunes
Here is the selection at Ramblinghouse. Corn is what we feed to the chickens!

1. Eileen Aroon
A song from the old Gaelic order. Most apt sentiment. It was written by the Clare poet Cearbhall O Dálaigh (c.1590–1630) to woo his beloved, Eibhlin Caomhánach, daughter of a chieftain. It worked – they [...]

Details of 2010 Willie Clancy Week in Miltown Malbay, Co Clare

Click on a flag for details and directions

Sean nos dancer Emma O’Sullivan hails from from Renvyle in Connemara. She took up sean nos dancing in 2005 while a business and marketing student at university in Galway and by 2009, at the age of 24, had won the All-Ireland Sean Nos Dancing title at Oireachtas na Samhna in Letterkenny.
She has danced in the United States, [...]

Slide will be at the Savannah Irish Festival in February

Gundagai festival shows how its done

Though now out of favour among musicians and listeners, the melodeon has had a huge influence on the playing of Irish music. The one row melodeon gained popularity in Britain from 1850 onwards and was a cheap and efficient adaptation of earlier French and English designs. By the early 1900s nearly all melodeons played in [...]

THE harmonica, more popularly known as the mouth organ, got left behind in the Irish music revival of the late 1950s. In the session it lacked volume and created something of a rattling effect. However, it gained a new profile in 1994 when the mastery of Brendan Power gave the instrument a new prominence with [...]

By Ronan Nolan
THE bodhran evolved in the mid-20th century from the tambourine, which can be heard on some Irish music recordings dating back to the 1920s and viewed in a pre-Famine painting. However, in remote parts of the south-west, the “poor man’s tambourine” – made from farm implements and minus the cymbols – was in [...]

THE credit of recording the first Irish music on banjo goes to James Wheeler. With Edward Herborn accompanying him on the box, they made their first recordings in 1916 and 1917.
Mike Flanagan of the famous Flanagan Brothers played banjo. Born in Waterford in 1898, he started out playing the mandolin. His lively technique can be [...]

Caroline Duggan teaches Irish dancing to Afro American and Hispanic children …

Nickey English writes that it is shaping into a fine campaign for Galway with a decent performance against Kilkenny followed up by beating Clare in Ennis and Cork