Mike Dugger

Mike Dugger started his musical career when he and Roger Landes decided to form a group that eventually became Scartaglen, one of America's finest bands playing Irish traditional music, in 1982. With the gifted singer Connie Dover and piper Kirk Lynch, Roger Landes and Mike Dugger toured all the major festivals in North America. This included the Winnipeg Folk Festival, the Milwaukee Irish Festival, the Philadelphia Folk Festival, the Wolf Trap Irish Festival in Washington, D.C., the Calgary Folk Festival and the North Texas Irish Festival in Dallas, Texas. Mike also joined the group on extended concert-touring schedules throughout America.

In the beginning, Mike's with Scartaglen were mainly on guitar providing exciting backing efforts for tunes and ballads. Jim Kelly, reviewing Mike's solo CD 'At Early Dawn' for Irish Music Magazine said ' The man has a fine singing voice...'

In 1983 Mike decided to add tenor banjo to his stable of instruments and proved to be a fine player. Mike pursued studies on the fiddle a couple of years later and has shown remarkable progress on the instrument. He has also taken one-day tutorials with James Kelly and Martin Hayes at the St. Louis Tionol (Irish for a piper's gathering). He attended workshops with Eileen Ivers and Kevin Burke in weeklong tutorials through the Swannanoa Gathering, a music school located in Asheville, North Carolina. Jim Magill, director of the Swannanoa Gathering, was so impressed with Mike's teaching abilities as he aided Eileen Ivers in her beginning fiddle class, he hired Mike to teach intermediate fiddle the next year. Mike has also been employed by Seamus Connolly to run the slow sessions for his students at the Gaelic Roots program in Boston, Massachusetts held within the confines of Boston College and the Irish studies program. Mike currently makes his home in Overland Park, Kansas with his wife Sharon Lynch, a physician specialist in Multiple Sclerosis.

"A fine singing voice and a real feel for the music"
- Jim Kelly, Irish Music Magazine