Tommy Sands

"Growing up, I heard songs all around me, songs of emigration and things that were very meaningful to those who wrote them, traditional songs. Then there were things happening around me, and I felt, as a songwriter, that I wanted to write about what was going on around me. I don't know how historical Fionn mac Cumhaill was exactly," said musician Tommy Sands, "but sometimes mythology is truer than factual stuff."

Drawing from the wells of history, mythology, and what happens around him has led Sands to write and perform songs all over the world. Sands and his songs have often been voices of peace amid anger and healing in the midst of conflict. Early on, he saw and experienced both sides of those situations. Sands grew up in County Down, Northern Ireland, during a time of escalating (and often violent) conflict between political and social divisions in the north, where the political future of the six northern counties was unclear. The area where he lived, near the Mountains of Mourne, looks out across the water at another set of mountains on the Cooley Peninsula, across the border in the Republic of Ireland. Though the violence of the times struck close by and was daily in the news, Sands also saw another side. "When my parents played music -- my father played the fiddle and my mother played accordion -- people would come into the house, and it didn't matter what religion you were, what politics. Soon I'd see their feet tapping in time, all to the same tune," Sands recalled.

The music called to him, too. First he took up the fiddle, but then was drawn to the guitar. He also picked up banjo and whistle along the way. Brothers Colum, Eugene (known as Dino), Tommy, and Ben and their sister, Anne, began playing music while they were all still teenagers, performing around the local area and then further afield -- as far as Dublin and Belfast. Tommy was writing songs, too. He left the family band to enter seminary, but hearing the Brian McCollum Group play a song he'd written on the radio provided a turning point. Sands decided his place was in music rather than the study of theology. He resigned from the seminary and set out to walk home, more than a hundred miles away. Before he'd gone far, by coincidence his brothers and sister appeared driving by on their way to perform a concert, and he joined up with them again.

The Sands Family's mix of lively traditional music, ballads, and original songs and the growing popularity of Irish music -- fueled by the success of the Clancy Brothers in Ireland and elsewhere -- enabled them to make albums, win competitions, and tour not only in Ireland, north and south, but also the United States and Europe. By 1985, Tommy had begun to work on a solo career in addition to performing with the family group.