Eileen Ivers has enough chops to play most Irish fiddlers under the table. And in the rare moments when she sticks her blue fiddle under her chin, she does the same to most Jimi Hendrix wannabes.

At Sunday’s concert at the Southern, she got sounds out of that electrified beast that Paganini wouldn’t have recognized, much less have been able to reproduce.

Whichever fiddle Ivers was playing, she and her band mates did irreparable damage to Sunday’s reputation as a day of rest. They put on a show and a half, packed with medleys that built to insanely paced reels and raucous clap-alongs. There wasn’t a loser to be found—unless you count the horses that will have to give up their tails to re-hair Ivers’s overworked bows.

The rest of her band, Immigrant Soul, proved up to the task of accompanying the fiddling virtuoso.

Accordionist Buddy Connolly was her chief collaborator, his fingers flying over the keys as the two shared duets at tempos approaching the speed of sound. For his part, Greg Anderson plucked eloquently on the guitar and bouzouki, while Leo Traversa kept the bottom line intact on the bass guitar. The final band member, percussionist Tommy McDonnell, was introduced by Ivers as the “blue-eyed soul of Irish music,” and his efforts justified the title. A member of the original Blues Brothers, McDonnell knew exactly when to stand on his skins and when to lay off.

But it was as a vocalist that McDonnell left the most indelible impression. His rich baritone voice was featured in one of the evening’s few ventures into the mournful side of Irish music, a medley that began with a poem about a lad leaving Ireland for America. A bit later, McDonnell sang (and led the audience in the chorus of) a tune about a far rarer topic: an Irish émigré who returned to his homeland.

Ivers first bowed her way into the world’s consciousness as the official fiddler for Riverdance, so it wasn’t surprising that Sunday’s concert included a few of Bill Whelan’s tunes from the show. You wouldn’t think they’d be as fun without step dancers tapping and skipping to the intricate rhythms, but they were.

To be sure, the evening also had its share of step dancing. A quartet of girls from Granville’s Ni Chiara School of Irish Dance sometimes graced the stage with their bouncing curls and precision choreography.

But the real excitement came from watching Ivers and her band have their way with a plethora of Irish and Irish-like tunes. If St. Patrick’s Day were celebrated in coffeehouses rather than pubs, this is what it would sound like.