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Popular World Music Shahriari

Clannad/Enya

Born into a musical family, Enya spent much of her childhood performing Irish folk music together with her eight siblings, parents, and extended family. Her mother taught music at an Irish-speaking elementary school, and her father was leader of a successful band before opening a family pub in 1968 in a small village in northwestern Ire- land. The pub provided a regular venue for the children to develop their performance skills while playing traditional music and pop-song covers. Three of Enya’s older siblings and two of their uncles initiated the Brennan family’s success in the record industry by winning a local folk festival competition and receiving a contract to record an album, which was released in 1973. Calling themselves Clannad, an abbreviation of the Gaelic An Clann As Dobhar (The Family from Dore), the group was strongly rooted in folk performance and recorded songs in both English and Irish Gaelic.