Saturday, March 10, 2007 7:00 p.m.
Connie Dover and Glen Road
Buy tickets onlineConnie Dover
"Connie Dover is the finest folk ballad singer this country has produced since Joan Baez... Her soprano is shimmeringly pure, her phrasing pristine, her evocations of angient Anglo-Scottish, Irish and American cowboy ballads melodically exquisite and utterly believable." - Boston Globe
Connie Dover is an accomplished interpreter of the traditional music of Great Britain and Ireland. Her soaring, crystal clear voice and inspired arrangements display a depth and breadth of range that have earned her a rightful place among the world's finest Celtic singers.
Connie began her Celtic music career as a lead singer for the Kansas City-based Irish band, Scartaglen. she has toured extensively, performing on radio, television, in concert and at nearly every major folk festival in North America. Notable among her broadcast performances have been guest appearances on NPR's Weekend Edition, A Prairie Home Companion, Thistle and Shamrock, Mountain Stage and E-Town.
Dirty Linen magazine has a nice article about her online here: http://www.dirtylinen.com/92/dover.html
Members of Glen Road
Turlach Boylan grew up on a farm in County Derry, the oldest of seven children. After studying various instruments including piano and trumpet, he abandoned classical music and began playing Irish music in earnest on the flute at the age of 16. He studied for a couple of years with County Antrim flute master John Kennedy before moving to Belfast to pursue an engineering degree.
Like all the members of his family he was active in competitions, reaching the All-Ireland finals several times and winning the All-Ireland Senior Flute Slow Airs competition in 1986. For a few minutes he was the only All-Ireland champion in his family until his sister Maeve won a Junior piano accordion title. Since then Maeve has won the All-Ireland Senior Piano competition. Sister Clodagh has a Junior fiddle title, brother Ruairi has Junior Flute and Flute Slow-Airs titles and sister Sheila placed 2nd in the Senior fiddle contest. In addition, Turlach has reached the All-Ireland finals of the Scor competition as a part of a trio with Maeve and oldest sister Caitriona on banjo.
After graduating from Queen's University in Belfast with a Masters in Engineering, Turlach was employed by a company which transferred him to Houston for a 2 year training program. After a year, his position in the Belfast division was eliminated and so he opted to stay in Houston. After six years with that company, Turlach left to start a computer programming business which has been his main source of income since then. In 1999 he has founded Big Plain Records, a record label aimed at promoting Irish Traditional Music in the United States and Canada. He is also a founding partner of Bandstore, an internet business selling music recordings by independent artists.
Mike Dugger started his musical career when he and Roger Landes decided to form a group that eventually became Scartaglen, one of America's finest bands playing Irish traditional music, in 1982. With the gifted singer Connie Dover and piper Kirk Lynch, Roger Landes and Mike Dugger toured all the major festivals in North America. This included the Winnipeg Folk Festival, the Milwaukee Irish Festival, the Philadelphia Folk Festival, the Wolf Trap Irish Festival in Washington, D.C., the Calgary Folk Festival and the North Texas Irish Festival in Dallas, Texas. Mike also joined the group on extended concert-touring schedules throughout America.
In 1983 Mike decided to add tenor banjo to his stable of instruments and proved to be a fine player. Mike pursued studies on the fiddle a couple of years later and has shown remarkable progress on the instrument. He has also taken one-day tutorials with James Kelly and Martin Hayes at the St. Louis Tionol (Irish for a piper's gathering). He attended workshops with Eileen Ivers and Kevin Burke in weeklong tutorials through the Swannanoa Gathering, a music school located in Asheville, North Carolina. Jim Magill, director of the Swannanoa Gathering, was so impressed with Mike's teaching abilities as he aided Eileen Ivers in her beginning fiddle class, he hired Mike to teach intermediate fiddle the next year. Mike has also been employed by Seamus Connolly to run the slow sessions for his students at the Gaelic Roots program in Boston, Massachusetts held within the confines of Boston College and the Irish studies program. Mike currently makes his home in Overland Park, Kansas with his wife Sharon Lynch, a physician specialist in Multiple Sclerosis.
Mason Brown grew up in Michigan in a musical family and began studying guitar at the age of five. A fine singer with a lifelong interest in folk music, he has also mastered the 5-string banjo and the viola da gamba. His 1999 release "Am I born to die?" with partner Chipper Thompson blended traditional influences from Appalachia, Ireland , Scotland and England, and was critically acclaimed.