Mike Clem – a Cullman, Alabama native – began guitar lessons at age nine and has had some sort of stringed instrument in his hands ever since.  A veteran of various  Rock ‘n Roll bands, jazz combos, big bands, pit orchestras and a brief flirtation with Bluegrass, he first took the stage in 1966.  For the last several years, Mike has focused his musical attention solely on the study of traditional Irish music and packs a mandolin, guitar, Irish tenor banjo, bodhrán and a bag of whistles to SlipJig performances.  He generally does not sing, as several southeastern states have enacted laws prohibiting this.  Mike says, “In this part of the country, Celtic music is not very common.  It’s not on the radio, in the music stores or on MTV, so a huge number of people have never heard anything like it.  People will show up to a SlipJig performance not knowing what to expect and it’s great fun to watch their faces light up when they hear the stuff we’re playing.”

Andy Kruspe has been playing various orthodox and unorthodox percussion instruments since the fifth grade.   He went to college to major in Music Education and has spent time teaching high school, middle school, a drum corps, and a platoon of private students.    He is now a freelance teacher and performer in greater Huntsville.   Celtic music is a fairly recent obsession, and he just loves it: "Great tunes, great people, great beverages, less gear to move."

He is happily married to Rachel. They have no kids,
no pets, no worries...

Special thanks to Stephen Babin for the photo.

Andy Kruspe

Mike Lyon

Garrett's parents made the tragic mistake of letting him have a tiny violin when he was only 5, thus instigating a series of events that would only be described as a musical career by the most generous of biographers.  Violin was Garrett's only instrument for quite a few years, in fact, it took a semester in the music school of Indiana University before he realized that a career in this sort of stuff wasn't really what he wanted.  The following year, Garrett picked up guitar because someone told him this would help him meet girls.  Sadly, the originally anticipated social repercussions  failed to materialize.  With SlipJig, Garrett plays mandolin, fiddle, and guitar.

A job with Dynetics helps support the instrument-buying habit.  When he's not playing Celtic music with SlipJig, he can typically be found puttering around on a variety of aviation-oriented activities (building an airplane, for example), looking for microbreweries, or losing at tennis.

Garrett Smith

Phil began performing music as an early teen playing lead guitar in a series of rock bands. After about 10 years he was ready for a change and made his move to acoustic folk music and the fiddle in the mid 1970's. He played fiddle, mandolin, and guitar with folk and bluegrass bands for another 10 years before he "discovered" traditional Celtic music.  “I immediately loved this music … its passion, variety and beauty.”   Since the mid-1980's, Phil has focused his musical energies on Celtic-style fiddling and has performed throughout the area in popular traditional Celtic bands including “Calliope”, “Jig Masters”, and “The Wild Hares”.  Phil is a regular at the weekly (Thursday night) sessions at Finnegan’s Pub in Huntsville.  With SlipJig, Phil primarily plays the fiddle with occasional side-trips to other instruments.