Seamie O'Dowd was brought up by parents steeped in the musical traditions of South County Sligo,his mother Shiela,a highly respected musician and teacher whose father and brothers all played fiddle,and his father,Joe,who was renowned as a fiddle player among musicians and music lovers worldwide.
Seamie himself began playing fiddle at about eight years of age.Making his first radio broadcast when he was ten years old,he established himself in competition and elsewhere as one of the finest fiddlers of his age in the west of Ireland.
He began to cut his teeth in the local session scene alongside his parents and by eighteen,he was playing guitar,mandolin,bouzouki,banjo,bodhran and fiddle,as well as starting to gain a reputation as a singer.
He soon immersed himself in the extremely vibrant local rock and alternative music scene that existed in Sligo in the mid to late 1980s becoming quite a talking point as an electric guitarist.His first rock band, "Peel The Grape" gained national airplay and local notoriety before breaking up in the late '80s.
He subsequently played with musical neighbour Gerry Grennan in a few acoustic and electric folk/blues outfits around Ireland as well as the theatre/folk pub circuit in Germany until the early nineties.
After a spell playing mainly around the north-west of Ireland,he was approached by a few friends who had established a band called "Dervish" and become one of Ireland's major musical exports.They asked him to join and they toured world-wide playing to some of the biggest audiences that any band of any genre has ever played to.Seamie devised a new tuning for guitar and,along with Brian Mc Donagh and Michael Holmes,created a three-way rhythm section that became a hallmark of the band sound for the next six years.The line-up recorded two award-winning albums "Midsummers Night" and "Spirit".
The last while has seen Seamie working with a number of renowned musicians including accordion legend Mairtin O'Connor, renowned flute player Matt Molloy,piping legend Liam O'Flynn,Waterboys fiddler Steve Wickham and many others.He has also begun to earn a name in production and arrangement.
Tracklist :
1. Crooked Jack
2. Gergeous and Bright
3. The downfall of Paris
4. Thirteen Valleys
5. Visions
6. Loanshark Blues
7. Man Alive
8. Silver Dollar
9. Well Past Midnight
10. Going To My Hometown
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