February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Originally from the village of Larraga in the parish of Ballinakill in East Galway, he released “The Dangerous Reel” in 1995 with his daughter Mary, and the two followed up with “The Old Fireside Music” in 1998 and “The Road From Ballinakill” in 2001. Mike also guested on Mary Rafferty’s 2002 solo CD, “Hand-Me-Downs,” and two Cherish the Ladies’ albums, “At Home” in 1999 and “The Girls Won’t Leave the Boys Alone” in 2001.
He has done all this since turning 69 years old, and now Rafferty caps an extraordinary nine-year output with something more extraordinary still: a refreshingly frills-free, utterly transfixing solo debut, “Speed 78” (Larraga Records MOR 1302).
The title refers to the old 78-rpm recordings on which so many of the Irish traditional musicians Rafferty admired first appeared. They include his own locale’s Ballinakill Traditional Dance Players, one of the greatest ensembles ever, who formed around 1926, the same year Rafferty was born, and recorded 78s from the early 1930s through the early ’40s. The inside of Mike Rafferty’s CD booklet is a reproduction of that famed c