Tin Whistle - Well-known Performers

Well-known Performers

In Irish traditional music

See also: List of All-Ireland Champions

In 1973, Paddy Moloney (of The Chieftains) and Sean Potts released Tin Whistles, which helped to popularise the tin whistle in particular, and Irish music in general. Mary Bergin's Feadóga Stáin (1979) and Feadóga Stáin 2 (1993) were similarly influential.

Other notable players include Carmel Gunning, Micho Russell, Joanie Madden, Brian Finnegan, and Seán Ryan. Many traditional pipers and flute players also play the whistle to a high standard. James Galway, the classical flautist, is also an outstanding whistler. Festy Conlon, often considered the best slow air player.

In Scottish traditional music

Award winning singer and musician Julie Fowlis recorded several tracks on the tin whistle, both in her solo work and with the band Dòchas.

In kwela

Aaron "Big Voice Jack" Lerole and his band recorded a single called "Tom Hark", which sold five million copies worldwide, and which Associated Television used as the theme song for the 1958 television series The Killing Stones. But the most famous star of the kwela era was Spokes Mashiyane. Paul Simon's 1986 album Graceland draws heavily on South African music, and includes pennywhistle solos in the traditional style, played by Morris Goldberg.

In popular music

As a traditional Irish musical instrument, the Irish rock bands The Cranberries and The Pogues (with Spider Stacy as whistler) incorporate the tin whistle in some of their songs, as do such American Celtic punk bands as The Tossers, Dropkick Murphys, and Flogging Molly (in which Bridget Regan plays the instrument).

Andrea Corr of Irish folk rock band The Corrs also plays the tin whistle. Saxophonist LeRoi Moore, founding member of the American jam band Dave Matthews Band, plays the tin whistle in a few of the band's songs.

Bob Hallett of the Canadian folk rock group Great Big Sea is also a renowned performer of the tin whistle, playing it in arrangements of both traditional and original material.

Icelandic post rock band Sigur Rós concludes their song "Hafsól" with a tin whistle solo.

Barry Privett of the American Celtic rock band Carbon Leaf performs several songs using the tin whistle.

Lambchop uses the tin whistle in the song "The Scary Caroler."

The Unicorns use the tin whistle in the song "Sea Ghost".

In jazz

Steve Buckley, a British jazz musician is known to have used the penny whistle as a serious instrument. His whistle playing can be heard on recordings with Loose Tubes, Django Bates and his album with Chris Batchelor Life As We Know It. Les Lieber is a celebrated American Jazz Tinwhistle player. Lieber has played with Paul Whiteman's Band and also with the Benny Goodman Sextet. Lieber made a record with Django Reinhardt in the AFN Studios in Paris in the post Second World War era and started an event called "Jazz at Noon" every Friday in a New York restaurant playing with a nucleus of advertising men, doctors, lawyers, and business executives who had been or could have been jazz musicians. Howard Johnson has also been known to play this instrument. Musical polymath Howard Levy introduces the tune True North with a jazz and very traditionally Celtic-inspired whistle piece on Bela Fleck and the Flecktones' UFO TOFU.

In movie music

Howard Shore called for a tin whistle in D for a passage in his "Concerning Hobbits" from The Lord of the Rings film trilogy. The tin whistle symbolizes the Shire, together with other instruments such as the guitar, the double bass and the bodhrán. The tin whistle also plays a passage in the main theme in the same trilogy.

The tin whistle is heard (most notably during the introduction) in the song "My Heart Will Go On" by Celine Dion in the movie Titanic.

The tin whistle also features prominently in the soundtrack of the film How to Train Your Dragon, and is connected to the main character, Hiccup.