Brothers hit right note at home and in the US

Lifestyle – Award winning folk and bluegrass group We Banjo 3 are making waves on both sides of the Atlantic with their unique sound and high-energy shows. Back from a five-week American tour, Enda Scahill of the group tells LAURA VARLEY about life on the  road, being home and giving back to society.

Galway trad and bluegrass group, We Banjo 3, who have just landed home from a five-week US tour will barely have a chance to let the dust settle from that trip before they’re heading Stateside again.  The band, made up of brothers Enda and Fergal Scahill from Corofin and Martin and David Howley from Ardrahan, are hugely popular across the Atlantic, having worked hard at honing their considerable talent here and abroad.

The four play a mix of traditional Irish and bluegrass music, colloquially called ‘Celtgrass’, as We Banjo 3 founding member Enda Scahill explains.

And, as one of the biggest Irish folk bands in the US, the four have played to more than 150,000 people in the last five weeks on their US tour, which started in New York and finished in Milwaukee.

“We headline at Milwaukee Irish Festival and we have between 10,000 and 15,000 people each night,” says Enda. “We’ve been doing that for eight years so we have built up a huge US following.”

Enda’s earliest musical influences include banjo and fiddle player Gerry O’ Connor and accordion player Máirtín O’ Connor of De Dannan and Riverdance fame. He can recall them playing sessions in his family home in Corofin when he was a child.

He began learning music at school, taking up and loving the banjo at the age of eight.

While working as an Environmental Health Officer with the HSE, Enda gathered together fellow banjo-players Martin and David Howley – who have engineering backgrounds – and they gigged when they had time, playing a blend of Irish, old-time and bluegrass music.  Enda’s brother, multi-instrumentalist Fergal joined them for their first ever Milwaukee performance.

Since then, success for the band has included five critically-acclaimed albums. Their first, The Roots of the Banjo Tree, was one of the most praised albums of 2012, winning the Irish Times Trad Album of the Year award, while their most recent, Haven, enjoyed top billing on the bluegrass Billboard charts in US. At home, it won the Best Folk album in RTÉ Radio 1’s inaugural Folk Awards last year, as voted by listeners to the station.

While the banjo was and remains central to the group, other musical layers have been added, with fiddle, mandolin, guitar, percussion all featuring while David Howley’s talent as a singer and songwriter has also revealed itself.

The group tour for five months of the year, but Enda and the lads show no signs of slowing down. And they won’t be resting on their laurels while at home.

“We have an Irish tour which will include a night in Dublin, two nights in Cork, a night in Galway and a night in Derry. Then we will have a few weeks off and it is back to the US,” he explains.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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