Gweedore, IE · trad · folk · Irish

Altan

1 festival played

Donegal's great traditional band — Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh's fiddle and Gaeltacht songs, four decades of setting the standard.

Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh met Frankie Kennedy in Gweedore when she was fourteen and he was an eighteen-year-old from Belfast learning Irish there on his summer holidays. They married in 1981, having already made their first recording together in 1979, backing the singer Albert Fry. Their own debut, a collection of Gaelic songs and Ulster jigs and reels, followed in 1983.

A trip to America convinced the pair there was an audience for Donegal music outside Donegal, and teaching jobs were dropped for good. Bouzouki player Ciarán Curran and guitarist Mark Kelly joined for live work, playing their first show as a quartet in June 1985. The 1987 album that gave the band its name was titled after a lake below Errigal, near where Ní Mhaonaigh grew up.

Kennedy's death in 1994 left Ní Mhaonaigh as the band's constant voice and fiddler, and that same year Altan became one of the first traditional Irish groups signed to a major label, joining Virgin Records. The band has since sold well over a million records.

Albums for Green Linnet, The Red Crow, Harvest Storm and Island Angel among them, carried the sound to listeners well beyond Ireland in the early 1990s. The line-up filled out over time with fiddler Ciarán Tourish, accordionist Dermot Byrne and guitarist Dáithí Sproule, and the group has recorded alongside Dolly Parton, Enya, the Chieftains, Bonnie Raitt and Alison Krauss.

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