Dan Sullivan's Shamrock Band

A successful dance-hall, gramophone and radio band in Boston from the mid-1920s, Dan Sullivan’s Shamrock Band specialised in the playing of Irish traditional music and popular songs. Known as Sullivan’s Shamrock Band on its earliest discs, it recorded extensively in New York and Boston for the Columbia, Victor and Decca companies, from 1926 to 1934. Dan Sullivan was a classically trained piano player, the American-born son of a Cork-Kerry professional fiddle and flute player of the same name, and he worked for the Steinway Piano Corporation in Boston before himself becoming a full-time professional. The earliest lineups of his recording band featured a core of Kerry musicians: Michael C. Hanafin on fiddle, Daniel J. Murphy on uilleann pipes, and Daniel P. Moroney on whistle. Later lineups included Sligo, Galway and Irish-American musicians such as Tomas Senior, Neil Nolan and Larry Griffin.