Michael McGoldrick (b. 1971, Manchester, England) is an Irish flute and tin whistle player. He also plays the Uilleann pipes and low whistle.

McGoldrick has been a member of several influential bands. In 1994 he was awarded the BBC Young Tradition Award, and in 2001 he was given the Instrumentalist of the Year award at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards.

McGoldrick was a founder-member of the Celtic rock band Toss the Feathers while still at school. He also competed at that time in the Fleadhanna with Dezi Donnelly (fiddle) and John-Jo Kelly (bodhrán), whom he had met at local Comhaltas meetings. He made appearances at various local and national festivals and ran whistle/flute workshops at the Cambridge Folk Festival and for Folkworks on their "Flutopia" concert tour.

McGoldrick formed the band Fluke! (later renamed as Flook) with Brian Finnegan and Sarah Allen in November 1995. After one tour, he left to pursue other projects.

He was an early member of Lúnasa from 1997 until roughly 2000 and played on their first two albums. He also joined Capercaillie in 1997, playing on two albums.

John McCusker (born 15 May 1973) is a Scottish folk musician, record producer and composer. An accomplished fiddle player, he had a long association as a member of the Battlefield Band beginning in the 1990s and was later a band member and producer for folk singer Kate Rusby. He has served as producer and arranger for artists in a range of genres and also has several solo albums to his credit.

McCusker was born in Bellshill, 15 May 1973 near Glasgow, Scotland, to an Irish mother who encouraged him to learn to play the fiddle beginning at age seven. He became a regular in local youth orchestras and ceilidh bands and formed the band Parcel O'Rogues (named from Robert Burns' Rogues In A Nation) with some schoolmates when he was 14. A couple of years later he gave up a place at the Royal Scottish Academy in Glasgow to go on the road with the Battlefield Band.

McCusker spent eleven years as a member of the Battlefield Band. By the time he left he had composed a catalog of songs, and had become a highly regarded traditional musician. McCusker also guested on albums with many musicians including Ocean Colour Scene, Paul Weller, Teenage Fanclub, Danny Thompson, Eddi Reader, Tim O'Brien and Linda Thompson. By then he was already involved with folk singer Kate Rusby. He joined her band, became her producer and married in August 2001. They later divorced.^[when?]

Dónal Lunny (born 10 March 1947) is an Irish folk musician. Lunny has been at the forefront of the evolution of traditional Irish music for more than thirty-five years and has participated within the renaissance of traditional Irish music in that time period. He is the brother of musician and producer Manus Lunny.

Born in Tullamore, then moved to Newbridge, County Kildare, as a teenager he joined a band called Rakes of Kildare, with Christy Moore. Lunny's Emmet Folk Group and Michael and Brian Byrne's Spiceland Folk Group joined forces to form The Emmet Spiceland -- what now would be described as his first "boy band". Their debut album The First was released in 1968. As a vocal harmony group, they had a #1 hit in Ireland with the single "Mary From Dungloe" which had earlier been popularised in Dublin's folk clubs by Donal and his Emmet Folk group confrere Mick Moloney (The third Emmet Folk Group member Brian Bolger remains a 'Syd Barrett'-style mystery, although some internet observations claim he runs a pub in southern France. Others say he still teaches in his native Gorey). In 1971 Donal played on Prosperous, the second album by Christy Moore.

Fred Morrison is one of the world's leading pipers and is a globally renowned composer of music for the bagpipes.

Morrison is known for his unique, powerfully exuberant, virtuosic and highly improvisational style which combines the Gaelic piping tradition of South Uist with contemporary and eclectic influences. One of the few pipers to have achieved success in both the competitive piping and folk music scenes, Morrison is a virtuoso of the Great Highland Bagpipes, the bellows-blown reel pipes, the Irish Uilleann pipes, and the low whistle.

Fred Morrison was born in 1963 near Bishopton, Renfrewshire, Scotland where he grew up, regularly visiting his paternal family home in Geirinis, South Uist. Taught piping by his late father - also named Fred - from the age of nine, Fred Morrison Junior became immersed in the rounded-out, driving piping style of the Outer Hebrides. His father taught him through the traditional method of canntaireachd, the sung vocables used to convey pipe music before notation came on the scene, and Morrison attributes much of his approach to that. "I hear that singing in my head every time I play," he told one interviewer.

John Patrick McSherry (September 11, 1944 — April 1, 1996) was an American umpire in Major League Baseball who worked in the National League from 1971 to 1996. Although McSherry originally wore uniform #9 when he entered the National League, he switched to #10 in 1979 when the league reorganized the umpires' numbers and he wore that number for the rest of his career. A respected arbiter, he was one of several umpires who were noticeably overweight. The 6'-2" (188 cm) McSherry was officially listed at 328 pounds (149 kg), but some sources place his true weight possibly close to 400 pounds (180 kg); it was generally accepted to have been a major factor in the massive, fatal heart attack he suffered on the field during the opening game of the 1996 major league season in Cincinnati, Ohio on April 1, 1996.

Born in New York City, McSherry umpired in the World Series in 1977 and 1987. He also officiated in the National League Championship Series in 1974, 1978, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1988, 1990, and 1992, and in the National League Division Series in 1981 and 1995.