The Chieftains

Celebrate 50 Years

Six time Grammy Award winners and international ambassadors of traditional Irish music, The Chieftains are back with a nationwide tour to celebrate 50 definitive years.

Whilst continuing to inspire, The Chieftains remain loyal to their roots and after half a century of making some of the most beautiful music in the world, they remain as fresh and relevant as when they first began. They have performed with many symphony and folk orchestras worldwide and have broken many boundaries by collaborating and performing with some of the biggest names in rock, pop and traditional music in Ireland and around the world.

In June 2012 they are commemorating this exhilarating career with a nationwide UK tour.

The Chieftains are a Grammy winning Irish musical group founded in 1962, known for performing and popularizing Irish traditional music. The band has recorded many albums of instrumental Irish folk music, as well as multiple collaborations with popular musicians of many genres, including Country music, Galician traditional music, Cape Breton and Newfoundland music, and rock and roll. They have performed with Van Morrison, The Rolling Stones, Sting, Roger Daltrey, Elvis Costello, Tom Jones, Sinéad O’Connor, James Galway, Jackson Browne, Nancy Griffith and numerous country-western artists. In 1975, the group won praise for their playing of “Women of Ireland” for Stanley Kubrick’s movie Barry Lyndon.

They have won six Grammy Awards and have been nominated eighteen times. In 2002 they were given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the UK’s BBC Radio 2. The front covers of the first four albums were designed by Edward Delaney.

Paddy Moloney is the band’s leader, and composes or arranges most of the band’s music. While the band’s members changed numerous times in the band’s early history, the membership solidified in 1979 when Matt Molloy replaced Michael Tubridy. From then until 2002, members included:

Paddy Moloney (uilleann pipes, tin whistle, button accordion, bodhrán)
Matt Molloy (flute, tin whistle)
Kevin Conneff (bodhrán, vocals)