Celtic Appalachian Celebration 2021

Internationally renowned fiddle player Eddie Bond is from Grayson County, Virginia, a thriving center of Appalachian old-time music. Taught by his maternal grandmother, who played guitar and sang music handed down for generations of musicians well-documented in the Library of Congress’ archival field recordings, Bond has been the lead singer and fiddler for the New Ballards Branch Bogtrotters since 2001. Among the most respected of Virginia’s old-time string bands, the Bogtrotters are frequent first-place winners at the Old Fiddlers’ Convention, where Bond has won numerous fiddle contests and was twice-named Best All Around Performer, one of the highest honors in old-time music. Bond has performed across the country and overseas, including in the Music From the Crooked Road tours produced by the National Council for the Traditional Arts, and remains deeply committed to his local community, where he teaches a string band course at a high school in Grayson County. He was awarded a 2018 NEA National Heritage fellowship.

Photo credit: Joseph DeJarnette

Nora plays old-time traditional music with a particular interest in eastern Kentucky and Tennessee banjo playing. Along with the banjo she’s interested in unaccompanied ballads from the southeast region of the United States. 

She has played at numerous venues and festivals on the east coast including TED Salon in NYC, Joe’s Pub, the Floyd Radio Show, Washington Square Park Folk Festival, Brooklyn Folk Festival, Brooklyn Americana Festival, Oldtone Roots Music Festival, Irvington Folk Festival, Summer & Winter Hoots at the Ashokan Center, and has had multiple month long residencies at famed Barbès in Brooklyn, NY. Nora has taught both beginning and advanced banjo classes at the Ashokan Center’s long standing old-time camp known as Southern Week in Olivebridge, NY. 

Nora continues to travel and learn from old masters and has taken regular trips to eastern Kentucky to visit with 90 year old master banjo player and former coal miner Lee Sexton and master banjo player and historian George Gibson. 

Nora has won numerous banjo and folk song competitions at various fiddlers conventions including the Clifftop Appalachian String Band Music Festival and Grayson County Old-time and Bluegrass Fiddlers Convention. 

In October 2019 Jalopy Records released Nora’s first album of 11 traditional songs and tunes, called Cinnamon Tree. It was produced by the legendary Alice Gerrard and pressed by Third Man Pressing in Detroit. It’s only available on limited edition vinyl with a digital download and liner notes. Cinnamon Tree landed #7 on the Billboard Bluegrass Charts the 2nd week of its release. 

Nora plays solo regularly and also as duet with fiddler Stephanie Coleman and fiddler Jackson Lynch.

Megan Downes (dancer), artistic director of City Stompers, performs improvisational flatfooting in the Southern Appalachian tradition, contemporary Irish sean nós, and American clogging. She is a dance caller, leading Irish sets, Southern squares, and céilí dances. She'll teach anyone who asks how to move and make rhythm with their feet to the music they love. Take class with Megan at Theatre 80 St. Mark's, where they play Irish music late into the night every Monday. Before graduating from Hunter College High School and Smith College, Megan spent her youth training in competitive step dance with National Heritage Fellow Donny Golden. She spent 17 years with Footworks Percussive Dance Ensemble directed by Fiddle Puppets co-founder and Green Grass Cloggers alumna Eileen Carson and Mark Schatz. Fun fact: a member of SAG-AFTRA and ASCAP, Megan is known for co-writing the popular Uncle Earl song “Crayola” with folk phenom Kristin Andreassen.

Liz Hanley (fiddle, vocals), a native of Boston, is one of the top young musicians in the New York Irish music scene. She plays the fiddle with great energy and flair and sings with a repertoire spanning multiple genres, including rock, hip-hop, classical, and Irish traditional. Hanley graduated from New York University with a Bachelor’s of Music in classical violin performance and has toured the United States, Europe, and Southeast Asia. She can be seen playing around New York in seisiúns and with the likes of Mick Moloney and Frogbelly and Symphony. Her debut album, The Ecstasy of St. Cecilia, was released in 2013.

Photo credit: Amanda Gentile

Billy McComiskey (accordion), originally from Brooklyn, has been playing the accordion for over 50 years, studying alongside many of the finest Irish immigrant musicians of the 20th century. He has been hailed as “the best Irish accordion player in America” and sits at the center of the revival of traditional music with the trail-blazing group The Irish Tradition, performing in Washington D.C., the Catskills, and his adopted home in Baltimore, Maryland, where he is considered the Godfather of Irish music. An All-Ireland champion in 1986, he has either taught or deeply influenced many prominent traditional Irish musicians throughout the United States and has performed with Mick Moloney since the late 1970s in The Green Fields of America. McComiskey also plays in the quintessential Irish-American trad band The Pride of New York, a first-generation group of tradition-bearers who have played in Ireland and major festivals in the U.S.

Photo credit: Amanda Gentile

Mick Moloney (musical director, tenor banjo, octave mandolin, vocals), originally from County Limerick, was a member of The Johnstons folk group in Ireland before coming to the U.S. in 1973. In America, he teamed up with the much-loved fiddler Eugene O’Donnell while pursuing a Ph.D. in folklore at the University of Pennsylvania. They played together for over twenty years. He also performed during this time and recorded extensively with Robbie O’Connell and Jimmy Keane. Now a professor of music and Irish studies at New York University, Moloney is also a producer and performer in over 60 recordings and several documentary films, author of Far from the Shamrock Shore: The Story of Irish American History Through Song, editor of Close to the Floor: The Story of Irish Dance in America, and the recipient of the National Heritage Award. He currently plays with a variety of musicians including The Green Fields of America, an all-star group he formed in 1978 which helped launch the careers of young artists such as Eileen Ivers, Seamus Egan, Jean Butler, and Michael Flatley. In 2007, his album McNally’s Row of Flats from Compass Records was awarded the title of Best Irish Traditional Music Album of the Year by the Irish Echo and Top Album of the Year by Irish Livies, the latter awarded again for his 2009 album If It Wasn’t For the Irish and the Jews. Most recently, Moloney was awarded a 2013 Presidential Distinguished Service Award for the Irish Abroad, and a 2014 Gradam Ceoil Lifetime Achievement Award from TG4.

Photo credit: Amanda Gentile 

Niall O'Leary (dancer) is a former All-Ireland and World Champion dancer from Dublin, Ireland. His teachers included Kevin Massey, proclaimed by Michael Flatley to be “the greatest ever Irish dancer,” and Rory O'Connor, the first man to do Irish dancing on radio. The Niall O’Leary School of Irish Dance has been building the Irish dance community and training champions since 1995, and currently has locations in New York City, Miami, and Mexico. Based in New York City for more than 20 years, O’Leary performs regularly as a solo artist, in duet with Darrah Carr, with Mick Moloney’s Green Fields of America, and with his professional company, the Niall O’Leary Irish Dance Troupe. He is a performer, choreographer, master instructor and adjudicator in Irish dance, and most recently a performer and instructor in Celtic Tap Improv, a new genre he created. He is the artistic director of the New York City Irish Dance Festival presented by Irish Arts Center in May each year. O’Leary was honored to be an adjudicator for the 2018 World Irish Dance Championships in Glasgow, Scotland. He has recently recorded a new video, Celtic Tap Improv: Introduction, Instruction and Deconstruction. O’Leary is a regular feis adjudicator and musician, playing piano-accordion and keyboards; he also plays spoons and bodhrán. He was founding chairperson of Úll Mór CCÉ, the first Manhattan branch of Comhaltas (1997), and served as president of the Irish Business Organization of NY Inc. (2010-11). He is founding president of the new Manhattan branch of Conradh na Gaeilge (2017). Additionally, O’Leary practices as an architect. O’Leary has been honored by Irish America magazine as one of the Top 100 Irish-Americans of the Year, and by the Irish Echo as a community champion.

Photo credit: Amanda Gentile

Multi-instrumentalist Jerron "Blind Boy" Paxton’s credits include performing to a sold out audience at the Lead Belly Tribute at Carnegie Hall in 2016, with artists including Buddy Guy, Eric Burdon, Edgar Winter, Kenny Wayne Shepherd; opening for Buddy Guy at B.B. Kings in New York and Robert Cray at the Reading Blues Festival in Pennsylvania; and playing at Woodford Folk Festival and Byron Bay Blues Festival in Australia; Calgary Folk Festival in Canada; Jewel City Jam in Huntington, WV; Freihofers Jazz Festival in Saratoga Springs, NY; Clearwater Festival in Croton-on-Hudson, NY; Fayetteville Roots Festival in Fayetteville, AK; Cambridge Folk Festival in the UK; Harvest Time Rhythm & Blues Festival in Ireland; and the 2017 Brooklyn Folk Festival as headliner.

Athena Tergis (fiddle) hails from a musical family in San Francisco where she released her first album at age 16. She followed her passion for traditional music to Ireland and joined the Sharon Shannon Band. Tergis was also the featured violinist in the production of Riverdance on Broadway. She spent over a year on tour with Bruce Springsteen’s sax player, Clarence Clemmons. In 2001 she joined Mick Moloney and Billy McComiskey in The Green Fields of America, releasing their self-titled album on Compass Records along with her solo album, A Letter Home, and a PBS documentary, Absolutely Irish! Tergis is a regular principal soloist and composer with the Dublin Philharmonic Orchestra.

Photo credit: Amanda Gentile