Further Down The Line

Although Seamie O’Dowd’s work as a guitarist often overshadows his fiddle playing, suggestions that he make a recording as a fiddle player and keep his fiddle playing in public view have come from many people who heard his playing including Martin Hayes, Seamus Tansey and Dick Gaughan.And while Seamie was still in his teens, renowned south Sligo fiddler and composer Martin Wynne, whom Seamie was lucky enough to get to play with on a few occasions, was quoted as saying that “the people should hear him.”

Seamie’s first radio appearance at the age of ten was as a fiddle player. He learned to play fiddle from his parents, Sheila O’Dowd (née Regan) and Joe O’Dowd, both fiddle players from the south Sligo region who are deeply rooted in its long renowned music traditions.

By the time Seamie was twelve, he was becoming known through music competition and general word of mouth as one of the top fiddlers of his age in the north-west region of Ireland and placed second at a Connacht Fleadh Cheoil in 1978. At fifteen years of age, he’d appeared on BBC as part of a documentary about Scottish folk artist Dick Gaughan alongside his father Joe and Roscommon musicians Bernie Flaherty and Ciaran Emmett. By the time he was twenty one, he’d begun a six year period of teaching fiddle at South Sligo Summerschool in Tubbercurry. And Seamie’s well known association with Sligo group Dervish started with him temporarily filling in as the band’s fiddle player before he assumed his better known role as a guitarist. His fiddle playing has also been a prominent part of the music of Irish American trio The Unwanted.

In recent years, a few well received performances where Seamie played chiefly as a fiddle player, coupled with the fact that Seamie has composed some new tunes, suggested to him that the time is right to make a recording of fiddle music.

The new recording, entitled “Further Down The Line”, very much a tribute to the tradition that’s inspired Seamie for decades as well as an attempt to put something back in the form of some new tunes, will be celebrated at what should be an enjoyable launch gig.