SHORT BIO

Boston-based Irish flute player/singer Shannon Heaton has performed and taught on four continents. In her duo with guitarist Matt Heaton and with her Irish Music Stories podcast, Shannon has made Irish traditional music accessible and welcoming for many. She received a 2016 Artist Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and is a wildly creative teacher, composer, and collaborator.

LONG:

Boston-based Shannon Heaton specializes in Irish wooden flute and traditional style singing. She is deeply involved with her local music community: she co-founded Boston’s Celtic Music Fest with Laura Cortese in 2003; taught for Boston’s CCE Irish Music School for a decade; and was named Massachusetts Cultural Council Traditional Arts Fellow in 2016.

Shannon was exposed to many music traditions on her way to Irish music, travelling extensively throughout North America, Nigeria, and Europe with academic parents. After her first year of college in Suphanburi, Thailand, she studied music performance and ethnomusicology at Northwestern University and attended Irish music sessions throughout Chicago. There she met guitarist Matt Heaton, with whom she spent many winters in Ireland.

When not performing as Matt & Shannon Heaton, Shannon has collaborated with numerous acts including Japanese-based tricolor, Newfoundland native Keith Murphy, balladeer Robbie O’Connell, harpist Maeve Gilchrist, and fiddle player Sam Amidon.

A wildly creative teacher, Shannon has created free resources for Irish traditional musicians, including her long-running “Tune of the Month” video/podcast series. During the early days of the pandemic, she started the Virtual Guided Session with participants from over 50 countries. She is also a prolific composer and arranger. And her original music has been recorded by the Battlefield Band, Allie Robertson, Childsplay, and many others.

Shannon is a world class American performer with Irish roots and universal appeal. She is passionate about making Irish music accessible to players and listeners of all levels and backgrounds. 

BIGGER STORY:

Medford, Massachusetts

February 2021

When people ask me where I’m from, I usually say that Boston is my adopted home, but I started out in Chicago. Chicago is where I first became deeply involved in Irish music. It’s the place I’d lived the longest up to that point. (And it’s easier to say you’re from one place.)

But I didn’t really GET to Chicago until I was 18. Before that I’d lived in:

• Iowa City. (My first two years. Don’t remember it). 

• Then my journalist parents moved us to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. My beloved Garfield Avenue School was open back then. It finally shut its doors in 2006. (Public school deserve more support than they get.)

• We headed to Nsukka, Nigeria when I was seven. My parents taught at the university while I listened to Igbo Highlife music, ate too many cashew fruits with friends, and learned piano and recorder with Huguette Brassine. (I recently tracked down my first music teacher. She had no memory of me.)

• On our way home from Nigeria, we spent time in Scotland and Ireland, where I traded in my recorder for a tin whistle and Matt Molloy’s black album (purchased on cassette).

• On trips around Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma, while my parents researched the history of Native American journalism for their book Let My People Know, my sister and I listened to Free to Be You and Me and Irish music tapes. And we heard flute music all around Navajo Nation. (A few years later, I heard some of those same flutes near Chichen Itza, on a family trip to Mexico.)

• Our next move was down to Southern Illinois, where my 6th Grade Teacher Ms. Normagene Warner encouraged me to write about what I’d seen and heard. Three doors down from Ms. Warner, Ms. Swindell taught me to play the flute I’d inherited from my Aunt Mary Ann. (I loved it even more than the tin whistle.)

There were good, kind people in Southern Illinois. And in rural Wisconsin, where we’d summer with cousins. And in my dad’s homeland of Spokane, Washington, where we’d visit Grandma and Grandpa Murphy and play Kings in the Corners.

But all good things come to an end. And new chapters begin. 

My dad died just before my 13th birthday, and we moved back to the Milwaukee area, just two miles away from where we’d started, in the comfortable town of Shorewood. The local high school had a robust music and drama program. I got to play in the pit band for musicals on the silver flute and alto sax. 

Two years and one more Ireland visit later, a few of my mom’s grad students encouraged me to revisit the tin whistle. Aidan, Chris, and John even arranged a backstage visit with Matt Molloy, whose music had rocked my world since that childhood trip to Ireland. And with that, I was back in Irish music land…

… until my first year of college at Achiwa Seuksa in Suphanburi, Thailand. I played lots of Thai music that year. But it was “Pleng Pae,” not the “Galway Rambler.” Still, it was a social music tradition, and our little tribe got together to learn tunes and have meals together. I knew I wanted to keep that going, even after leaving Thailand.

So after an interlude in rural Wisconsin with my beloved WOAJ (Weird Old Aunt Jane) and an extended Euro backpacking trip, I headed to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. The closest Thai music group was at Wat Dhammaram on the far South side of Chicago. It took over two hours each way on the bus, and I couldn’t keep up the commute. So I ended up in the local Irish pub for my social music fix.

At the Evanston Sunday session, I heard flute players Brendan and Siobhan McKinney, John Creabhan, sometimes Kevin Henry and Larry Nugent. Then my friend Tom Peterson found an old German 8-keyed flute for me. It had a huge crack in the headjoint, and I had to seal it up with beeswax in order to get a sound out of it. But it was my way in.

In between music theory, orchestra rehearsal, and anthropology classes at the university, I’d play tunes at Tommy Nevins. The more I showed up, the more Brendan, Siobhan, and accordion player John Williams brought in albums for me to borrow. As I delved deeper, I learned that some of my favorite flute players were also singers: Josie McDermott, Cathall McConnell, Marcas O’Murchu. I listened to more singers and even learned a few songs on my own (the first ones were from a recording my mom had made of Paddy Tunney, whose son John had helped arrange that Matt Molloy backstage visit back in the day).

I started going to Ireland regularly. And I found singing gatherings and set dance events. I made friends. When I met Matt Heaton back in Evanston, I took him with me for the next trip to Ireland.

Matt and I graduated from college. We got married. We fell into a habit of going to Clare in the winters. And we took trips to Boston and New York. In the late 90s we tried something really different and moved to Boulder, Colorado. We did a lot of mountain biking. There were Irish music sessions there, too. And we started up a tune learning session and formed our band Siúcra with singer Beth Leachman and later fiddle player Sam Amidon. And we kept going back to Ireland, which is where we were on September 11, 2001.

After the Twin Towers attacks, flights were grounded in Ireland for a while. And after our unexpected extended stay in Galway we moved to Boston. Good Irish music town. And I had an Aunt in JP and a cousin in Cambridge.

We started out in Somerville, Mass in October 2001, in a little apartment near the Burren Pub. We played tunes seven nights a week. In 2004 I founded Boston’s Celtic Music Fest with my friend Laura Cortese. And then Matt and I started performing extensively as a duo, including big Fulbright/State Department tours through Thailand and month-long concert tours in Germany. Between trips, we bought an old home in Medford and gradually fixed it up.

Almost 25 years later, we’re still here, with dear friends we’ve made through Irish music, and the Thai temple, and the local public school our son (a Medford native) attends. I’ve never lived anywhere as long as here, and we have no plans to leave. I’ve received support from my community and from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, who awarded me an Artist Fellowship in 2016 (which I used to launch the Irish Music Stories project, a culture and oral history podcast and collection of essays).

So, where am I from? It’s complicated. But the short answer is I started playing Irish music in Chicago and now live in Boston. Ask me again in 25 years.