An inimitable sound filled the summer air in Abingdon last weekend as the Virginia Highlands Festival hosted the Seventh Annual Celtic Weekend, featuring modern and traditional Celtic musicians from as near as Nashville and as far away as County Mayo on the west coast of Ireland.

Ever since its debut as a replacement for a cancelled “Taste of Main Street” event in 2000, the Celtic Weekend has been a big hit at the festival, said Sandra Parker, VHF music committee chairperson.

“I was not prepared for how popular it was,” she said. “The first day of the first festival, I was speechless.” While Parker said it’s difficult to find many local Celtic acts, she said it’s been a pleasure to bring in groups from faraway lands to perform. “The groups we bring are some of the best, nicest, and incredible musicians,” she said.

This year’s event featured a variety of musical genres all linked by the beat of a jig and the solemnity of a battle march.

On the more traditional side, David Munnelly and his band of classically styled musicians from County Mayo, Ireland, made their painstaking electronic setup more than worth the wait, prompting spectators to “get up and move about” during the foot-stomping riot, Munnelly’s accordion coupled beautifully with Paul Kelly’s masterful fiddle and mandolin.

Rich, robust vocalist Shauna Mullin added her own talent to the mix amid the cacophony as she crooned sentimental ballads and off-beat tales of young lads sneaking into bedroom windows.

Adding a modern spark to traditional tunes, the Williamsburg, Va., band Coyote Run offered a refreshingly modern take on traditional pieces, which lead tenor David Doersch called “new Celtic alternative.”

“We take a lot of poetry and find traditionals, but we keep things original,” said Doersch, a former professor of theatre at William and Mary University who said he can’t help but hearken to the classics in his work. The band’s current project is a William Blake retrospective.  Doersch added that this is the band’s first trip to Abingdon. “We love it. It’s a neat mix of arts and crafts in the highlands, and everyone has been really nice,” he said.

Bombastic bagpiper Doug Bischoff kept the crowd on its feet with his energetic renditions of “Scotland the Brave” and other classics peppered into the band’s act, while “drum goddess” Catherine Hauke exerted perhaps the most energy of all behind the skins, ramping up the performance into its pulse-pumping finale.

Similar, though more set to a classic hard rock signature, Hunting McLeod celebrated the release of their third “album, Leod & Proud” – according to guitarist and vocalist Steve Ashley, the “mostly over forty” band still uses the term “album” with pride – with a bone-jarring rock show featuring 16-year-old drum phenomenon Oliver Johnson, the youngest performer of the weekend.

Hailing from Toronto, Canada, Hunting McLeod sprinkled popular riffs from AC/DC and Jimi Hendrix to warm the crowd to the show’s quite literal jumping-up-and-down energy. At the end, they dedicated a somber version of “Amazing Grace” to the armed forces, and rallied back with a high-octane finale of “Scotland the Brave.”

Locally, the weekend welcomed Bristol, Tenn., native Will MacMorran and Slide Show Baby, a modern pop-punk act polished by MacMorran’s piping and Victor Gagnon’s electrifying fiddle.

“We haven’t played locally in over a year,” said MacMorran, who is studying recording arts at Belmont University, “but a ton of friends came out and that was really cool.”

MacMorran said the band was formed as a studio experiment in Nashville, and they released their first album this year. “We’re normally a straight-up rock band,” the 19-year-old MacMorran added of the frayed-jeans-and-T-shirt image surrounded by kilts at the festival, “but we like to come to festivals like this and play the Celtic instruments.”

MacMorran’s musical aptitude shows in his guitar, vocals and bagpipes, and makes for a fantastic show coupled with Gagnon’s blistering fiddle, which could beat the Devil any day in Georgia.

Even though the rains came early Sunday afternoon, this seemed to complete the weekend’s Celtic backdrop, and there was no better place to be than dry under the events tent enjoying upbeat and inspirational Celtic music.