Danny Carnahan is a northern California writer whose passion for traditional music fuels both his private life as a journalist and novelist and his public life as a performing musician.
Danny’s wide-ranging feature articles, interviews, and columns have appeared regularly in music magazines including Acoustic Guitar, Mandolin Magazine, and Frets since 1982. The first of his several published non-fiction travel stories appeared in Travelers’ Tales: Food in 1997. Danny currently writes reviews and features for web-based publications Acoustic Guitar Magazine and San Francisco Classical Voice.
But Danny is best-known as a songwriter, touring clubs and festivals the length and breadth of North America and as far as New Zealand, having his songs covered by other artists, selling over 140,000 of his own CDs, and earning regular airplay from San Francisco to Sydney and Boston to Buenos Aires.
In 1999, Danny teamed up with six fellow adventurers to form Wake the Dead, weaving together hot Celtic tunes and the songs of the Grateful Dead. An instant hit, the band was picked up by the Dead’s own label and kicked off a steady touring calendar at San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium. Eighteen years on, Danny and the band continue to tour in support of their fourth CD, Deal. Danny's seventh solo album, Sky In Your Pocket, was released in 2011.
In recent years, Danny turned to writing mysteries, featuring two unwilling amateur detectives — Sweeney the Irish fiddler and Rose, his brilliant mythic dreamer of a wife. The pair star in a series of three novels, A Jig Before Dying, Fortune Turns the Wheel, and With His Dying Breath. All three are available in trade paperback and digital form.
When not writing or performing, Danny produces other artists in the studio and hosts songwriting and instrumental workshops at California music camps. He lives in Albany, California with his wife Saundra and son Teddy.
