BIO: Seamus O'SULLIVAN (1879-1958) wrote: "Music so forest wild and piercing sweet, would bring Silence on blackbirds singing Their best in the ear of Spring." The poet could have been referring to Irish traditional fiddler-player and composer Tommy PEOPLES. Tommy, now in his 40s, was born in Killycally, near St. Johnstown, Co. Donegal, a small town on the border with northern Ireland, and was given his first fiddle lessons from his cousin, Joe CASSIDY. In an area that boasted of a fiddler in every other household, and coming, as he did, from a musical family, it was not surprising that the young Tommy soon developed as a player, quickly absorbing the style, tunes and influences of the locality. Since the last century, cultural links with Scotland had served to shape local fiddle styles into a unique blend of Scots-Donegal-Irish styles. Labourers forced to emigrate to Scotland, to find seasonal employment as potato-pickers, usually returned to Donegal with new songs, stories, tunes and dance. This vibrant blending of Irish and Scottish styles can be heard in the playing of the great travelling fiddle player from Glenties, Johnny DOHERTY, and Neil O'BOYLE and the late Frank CASSIDY. On leaving "The Bothy Band," in which his fiddle-playing was described in the 1970s as electifying, Tommy PEOPLES returned to settle in Co. Clare and played under the NY-based Shanachie label. His music has been described as uplifting and joyful, stark, bleak and disturbing, with raw power and poignant emotion - PEOPLES a master fiddler, bending, twisting, shaking each note for its expressive worth, playing with tenderness and frailty, with reckless, impassioned abandon, beauty and haunting sensuality. Should you have the good fortune to witness Tommy play his fiddle in a smoky north Clare pub session, you will see how casually Ireland takes her many master musicians - yet how important they are to Irish lives, their spirit and their culture, for they speak a language which embodies and reflects Ireland's soul. -- Excerpt, "Ireland of the Welcomes"