seamus dubhghaill

Promoting Irish Culture and History from Little Rock, Arkansas, USA

Tag Archives: Irish Traditional Music


by Leave a comment

Death of Cathal Gannon, Harpsichord Maher & Fortepiano Restorer

Cathal Gannon, harpsichord maker, a fortepiano restorer and an amateur horologist, dies on May 23, 1999.

Gannon is born on August 1, 1910, in Harold’s Cross, Dublin, into a craftsmen family of carpenters, many of whom worked in the famous Guinness Brewery. His education, in two local schools, is rudimentary and at the age of fifteen he starts working as an apprentice carpenter in the Guinness Brewery. His apprenticeship involves learning to make office furniture and attending evening classes in nearby colleges, where he is able to improve his education in a more congenial atmosphere. A love of music and the arts had been encouraged by two maiden aunts. His parents subsequently purchase an upright piano and he learns to play it at the Read Pianoforte School. When his apprenticeship is completed and he is on the dole for some years, he spends much of his spare time buying pictures, books, antiques and old clocks and watches in the various auction rooms and antique shops in Dublin.

During the mid-1930s, Gannon becomes a member of several Dublin-based societies, most notably the Old Dublin Society, and there befriends well-known people such as Grace Plunkett (née Gifford), the widow of Joseph Mary Plunkett, who had been executed following the Easter Rising of 1916. At around this time, he is also introduced to Carl Hardebeck, an arranger of Irish traditional music. At a later stage in his life, he meets Desmond Guinness and his wife Mariga, founders of the Irish Georgian Society, which he subsequently joins.

While reading a series of articles about Tibet in a magazine, Gannon stumbles across an article, which, he believes, is by Violet Gordon-Woodhouse, a British harpsichordist and clavichord player of the period. The article is about the revival of the harpsichord, which interests him. He asks permission to examine the harpsichords on display in the National Museum of Ireland, Dublin, but is given no encouragement by the staff. He is finally allowed to see the instruments when he is in his early twenties. Dismayed, he concludes that they are too expensive to buy and too complicated to make.

While on holidays in Glengarriff in the Beara Peninsula of County Cork during August 1936, Gannon meets his future wife, Margaret Key from Harrow, London. They marry in 1942.

In London with Margaret, who is visiting her parents, Gannon goes to the Benton Fletcher collection of keyboard instruments, which is then in Chelsea, and measures a harpsichord by Jacob and Abraham Kirckman. Back home, he makes a copy of the instrument in a tiny conservatory at the back of his house in the Dublin suburb of Rialto. The harpsichord is played by John S. Beckett for the first time in public in 1959 as the continuo for Johann Sebastian Bach‘s St. Matthew Passion and is praised in the national press. Beckett subsequently persuades the authorities in the Guinness Brewery to provide Gannon with a special workshop, in which he makes five harpsichords and restores several antique pianos. The first harpsichord made in the Brewery is donated to the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin. The second is sold to Harrods of London, and the third is sold to Ireland’s national radio and television station RTÉ. This third instrument is used regularly by the RTÉ Symphony and Concert orchestras and also by the well-known composer and performer of Irish traditional music, Seán Ó Riada.

Gannon continues to make many more harpsichords and restore more pianos during the years to come. In all, he completes twenty harpsichords during his lifetime – the final four are completed by a friend, Patrick Horsley, in England. One of the harpsichords made by Gannon-Horsley returns to Ireland and is presented to NUI Maynooth. A piano of note that he restores is a Broadwood square piano owned by the poet and composer, Thomas Moore, which belonged to Lord and Lady Elveden (later Iveagh).

Gannon is the subject of several RTÉ radio programmes, three RTÉ television programmes (including The Late Late Show) and a television programme, Gallery, made by BBC Northern Ireland. He befriends a great many people, including the artist, writer and conservationist Peter Pearson, and regular musical evenings are held at the family home in Bryan Guinness‘s grounds in the suburbs of Dublin. Because of his interest in antique clocks and watches, he becomes a member of the Irish branch of the Antiquarian Horological Society, founded by his friend William Stuart.

In 1978, Trinity College Dublin (TCD) gives Gannon an honorary MA degree for his contribution to the authentic performance of early music in Ireland. Two years later, he is invited to travel with the New Irish Chamber Orchestra to China, where he tunes and maintains one of his harpsichords and celebrates his seventieth birthday. In 1989, a second honorary MA is given to him, this time by NUI Maynooth.

Following Gannon’s 80th birthday, which is attended by fifty people, he finally settles down to retirement. A series of minor strokes follow, which eventually lead to dementia and ultimately to his death, aged 88, on May 23, 1999.

The Cathal Gannon Early Music Room is opened in the Royal Irish Academy of Music in May 2003. It contains a harpsichord and clavichord made by Gannon, a Broadwood grand piano restored by him, and a square piano.

Part of a transmitted RTÉ programme, Nationwide (January 17, 2007), features archive footage of Gannon and his instruments. Three RTÉ radio programmes, Bowman: Sunday Morning, broadcast in November 2006, feature a 1983 interview with Gannon.


by Leave a comment

Birth of James Morrison, Irish Fiddler

James Morrison, a notable south Sligo-style Irish fiddler known as “The Professor,” is born on May 3, 1893, near Riverstown, County Sligo, at the townland of Drumfin.

Morrison grows up in a community steeped in traditional Irish culture especially music and at the age of seventeen he is employed by the Gaelic League to tutor the Connacht style of step dancing at the Gaelic League school in County Mayo.

In 1915, at the age of 21, Morrison immigrates to the United States and settles in New York City. In 1918, he wins the fiddle competition at the New York Feis. He becomes associated with other leading Irish musicians such as Michael Coleman and Paddy Killoran, who are also from County Sligo.

Morrison is one of the leading Irish music teachers in New York in the 1930s and 1940s. In addition to the fiddle, he can play the flute, tenor banjo and button accordion, and teaches hundreds of young Irish American students to play traditional music.

The Sligo style of fiddle music Morrison plays is typically highly ornamented and fast, with a fluid bowing style. Recordings of his playing are imported to Ireland in great numbers, and have an extraordinary impact. In many areas, local playing styles fall into disuse because of the popularity of the style and repertoire of Morrison and Michael Coleman. This repertoire includes predominantly reels, rather than jigs and hornpipes, and are often played by Irish musicians in the same order as on the original recordings. According to Séamus Mac Mathúna, “More than thirty years after Coleman’s death … one seldom hears ‘Bonny Kate’ without ‘Jenny’s Chickens.’ ‘Tarbolton’ is inevitably followed by ‘The Longford Collector’ and the ‘Sailor’s Bonnet.'” The great Canadian fiddler Jean Carignan was is influenced by Morrison. Morrison is well regarded by Frankie Gavin: “the approach he had to fiddle playing and the approach he had to any tune he touched just…can’t be beaten…nobody can play like that today.”

Morrison dies on November 11, 1947, and is interred, like many of his great musical contemporaries, in Saint Raymond’s Cemetery in the Bronx.


by Leave a comment

Death of Walter Beckett, Composer & Music Critic

Walter Beckett, Irish composer, teacher and music critic, dies in Dublin on April 3, 1996. He is a cousin of the writer Samuel Beckett.

Beckett is born in Dublin on July 27, 1914. He studies organ with George Hewson and harmony with John Francis Larchet at the Royal Irish Academy of Music (RIAM), in addition to music at Trinity College Dublin (TCD) where he is conferred with a Mus.D. (Doctor of Music) in 1942. He lives from 1946 to 1963 in Venice, where he teaches English and piano. He also writes reviews from abroad for The Irish Times and makes a series of orchestral arrangements of Irish traditional music for Radio Éireann.

In addition to Beckett’s activity as a music critic for The Irish Times, he also writes biographical articles for dictionaries, in particular for the first edition of Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. His books include studies on Franz Liszt and ballet music.

Beckett’s more ambitious musical works from the 1940s and 1950s are a Suite for Orchestra (1945), Four Higgins Songs (1946), The Falaingin Dances (1958) and a Suite of Planxties (1960) for harp and orchestra.

In 1963 Beckett moves to England, where he teaches music at various schools before returning to Ireland in 1970 to succeed A. J. Potter at the RIAM as professor of harmony and counterpoint. In the 1980s he produces a number of remarkable works such as Quartet for Strings (1980) and Dublin Symphony (1989) for narrator, chamber choir and large orchestra. While he is never a modernist, his later works nevertheless contain some advanced harmony, particularly in the quartet.

Beckett is forced to retire from the RIAM in 1985 after suffering a stroke. In 1986 he is elected a member of Aosdána and an Honorary Fellow of the RIAM in 1990. He dies in Dublin on April 3, 1996. He is buried in Rathnew Cemetery, County Wicklow.


by Leave a comment

Birth of Michael Holohan, Irish Composer

Irish composer Michael Holohan is born on March 27, 1956, in Drumcondra, Dublin.

Holohan receives his primary and secondary education at the O’Connell School on North Richmond Street, Dublin. He then attends University College Dublin (UCD), earning his BA in 1978, and Queen’s University Belfast (QUB). He studies composition with Jane O’Leary, Eric Sweeney and Seóirse Bodley. He also attends master classes by Olivier Messiaen, Iannis Xenakis, Pierre Boulez, Luciano Berio and Helmut Lachenmann in France.

Holohan is chairman of the Association of Irish Composers from 1987 to 1989 and is later appointed chairman of the Droichead Arts Centre in Drogheda, County Louth, where he has lived since 1983.

Holohan is elected to Aosdána in 1999 and later serves as a member and chair of its Toscaireacht, its ten-member steering body.

Holohan has composed for solo instrument, ensemble, orchestra, stage, choir and voice, and has collaborated with poets including Seamus Heaney, Tomas Tranströmer, Ivan Lalić and Paul Durcan.

Holohan’s music has been performed and broadcast in Ireland and internationally. Career highlights in Drogheda include performances of Cromwell (1994), The Mass of Fire (1995) and No Sanctuary (1997).

Holohan’s work has been reviewed in Irish music journalism. Writing in The Journal of Music following a National Concert Hall composers’ showcase, Benedict Schlepper-Connolly describes The Dream of Aengus as demonstrating Holohan’s “orchestrational control,” and characterises Portrait of the Artist as “captivating,” while noting the influence of Irish traditional music within his choral writing.

Regional press coverage has also documented performances and recordings of his work, including reports on the release of the piano album Fields of Blue and Whiteand concerts of his music in Drogheda.


by Leave a comment

Death of Edith Best, Musician & Founding Member of Feis Ceoil

Edith Best, Irish musician and one of the founding members of the Feis Ceoil, dies in Dublin on March 9, 1950.

Best is born in Dublin on July 11, 1865, the youngest of fourteen children of Dublin merchant, Eldred Oldham, and Annie (née Alker). Two of her siblings are Alice Oldham, the first of nine women to graduate from university with a degree in either Great Britain or Ireland, and Charles Hubert Oldham, first professor of national economics at University College Dublin (UCD). She attends the Royal Irish Academy of Music (RIAM), studying under Margaret O’Hea and Robert Prescott Stewart. She wins the Lord O’Hagan’s prize in 1883. She is one of the first three candidates to win a scholarship to the Royal College of Music, London, in 1883, becoming an associate of the College by competitive examination in 1887. She is a close friend and confidante of the College’s director, Sir George Grove, to which his 514 letters to her from 1883 to 1899, now housed in the Royal College of Music library, testify.

Best returns to the RIAM as a piano teacher in 1887, remaining in that post until 1932. She is the first female teacher in the RIAM listed as holding a diploma in music. She is also an assistant to Michele Esposito as a local centre examiner. She is a founding member of the Feis Ceoil, undertaking large responsibility for its organisation, and it becomes an annual event under her leadership. In 1898, she describes the foundation of the Feis in a paper to the Incorporated Society of Musicians as being inspired to “ultimately do more for the art of music in Ireland than anything which has yet been attempted.” Along with Joseph Seymour and Edward Fournier she visits the Welsh Eisteddfod to compare it with the Feis, and hopes it will become as influential as the Welsh festival. She works with Eoin MacNeill and the Gaelic League to promote the Feis, and to organise prizes. Under her influence, the festival broadens its scope beyond purely Irish music. She serves as the honorary secretary of the Feis Ceoil Association from 1896 to 1905, and vice-president from 1905 to 1950. In 1897, Esposito dedicates his cantata Deirdre to her. She is a founding member of the Dublin Orchestral Society in 1899, and she succeeds Esposito as the director of music at Alexandra College, Dublin, in 1927. She is made an associate of the Royal Dublin Societyin 1892, and fellow of the RIAM in 1938.

In 1906, she marries Richard Irvine Best. At the time of their marriage, she is 41, and he is 34. He states that “neither he nor his wife had any illusions about each other.” She dies at the age of 84 at her home in Dublin. She is buried in Dean’s Grange Cemetery in Deansgrange, Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown, County Dublin


by Leave a comment

Birth of David Hammond, Singer & Folklorist

David Andrew (Davy) Hammond, singer, folklorist, television producer and documentary maker, is born on December 5, 1928, in Miss Kell’s nursing home on the Castlereagh Road in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Hammond is the son of Leslie Hammond, a tram driver, and his wife Annie (née Lamont). His parents are not city people; his mother grew up near Ballybogy in the Ballymoney area of County Antrim, and his father, though from a family with roots in south County Londonderry, had lived in Ballymoney as a boy, and had been apprenticed to a blacksmith there. Both have a strong sense of their rural identity and maintain the Ulster Scots dialect of their childhood. They are never quite at home in the Belfast suburb of Cregagh, and in particular do not share the sectarian attitudes that are much more present in 1930s Belfast than they had been in north Antrim, one of the last strongholds of Presbyterian radicalism. Even as a boy, Hammond is interested in the old songs that his mother sang and realises that the traditions in which his parents had been nurtured are disappearing quickly in an increasingly urbanising and modernising world. When he encounters the work of Emyr Estyn Evans in the early 1940s, he is encouraged to document both rural tradition and the street life of the city, and he and a couple of friends, though still just teenagers, ride off on their bicycles to look for folklore in the hinterland of Belfast.

After primary school, Hammond wins a scholarship in 1941 to Methodist College Belfast, where he does well in examinations, and then goes to Stranmillis University College to train as a teacher. In his first job, in Harding Memorial primary school in east Belfast, he proves to be a popular, idealistic teacher, and is remembered by his pupils fifty years later as a fine singer and a teller of ghost stories, who had taken the class on memorable youth-hosteling trips to the Mourne Mountains. Youth hosteling and folklore collecting increases his awareness and understanding of the rich traditions of the whole community in the north of Ireland, and he is never constrained by political or religious barriers. His early career mirrors closely that of James Hawthorne, and their paths are to cross in later life.

Hammond is friendly with many others active in the cultural life of Northern Ireland and makes a name for himself as a song collector and eventually as an expert on all aspects of traditional singing. In 1956, he is awarded a scholarship to travel in the United States to meet the important pioneers of folk-music collecting and performance there. He records his first LP record of Ulster songs, I Am The Wee Falorie Man (1958), in the United States, and becomes friends with Pete Seeger, the Appalachian singer Jean Ritchie, with old blues singers, and notably with Liam Clancy, one of the three Clancy brothers who as a quartet with Tommy Makem are to popularise Irish folk music in the United States and elsewhere.

On returning to Belfast, Hammond takes a job in 1958 in Orangefield secondary school in the east of the city, where the highly regarded headmaster John Malone encourages new approaches to education. Among his pupils at Orangefield is George Ivan “Van” Morrison, who credits him with inspiring his interest in Irish traditional music. Hammond enjoys teaching but is increasingly drawn to folk-song performance and recording. He appears regularly on radio programmes of the BBC and Radio Éireann, and in 1964 joins the school’s department in BBC Northern Ireland. There, with colleagues like Sam Hanna Bell, James Hawthorne and others, he works on programmes such as Today and Yesterday in Northern Ireland, which for the first time introduces pupils (and many adults) to local history and to aspects of tradition. In 1968, with two friends, the poets Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley, he puts on poetry and traditional music events in schools all over the province. The Arts Council funds the Room to Rhyme project, which is immensely influential and inspiring, and is still talked about many years later by those who attended as children.

Hammond is creatively involved with hundreds of hours of broadcasting, in television as well as radio, and eventually for adults as well as children. He writes scripts, produces documentary series such as Ulster in Focusand Explorations, and brings an artistic sensibility to filming, as well as working sympathetically with traditional singers and craftspeople. Dusty Bluebells, a sensitively made film of Belfast children’s street games, wins the prestigious Golden Harp award in 1972. After he leaves the BBC to work as a freelance, and founds Flying Fox Films in 1986, he continues making documentaries on many aspects of Ulster life and heritage. His film called Steel Chest, Nail in the Boot and the Barking Dog (1986), about working in the Belfast shipyards, also wins a Golden Harp award. A companion book of the same name is published. Another book is Belfast, City of Song(1989), with Maurice Leyden. In 1979, he edits a volume of the songs of Thomas Moore. His documentary programmes include films about singers from Boho, County Fermanagh, and about the big houses of the gentry in Ireland. The Magic Fiddle (1991/2) examines the role of the instrument in the folk music of Ireland, Scandinavia, Canada, and the American south, while Another Kind of Freedom (1993) is about the experiences of a former Orangefield pupil, the Beirut hostage Brian Keenan. He also produces and directs the films Something to Write Home About (1998), Where Are You Now? (1999), and Bogland (1999), all of which explore Seamus Heaney’s home region and experiences.

The first poem in Heaney’s collection Wintering Out (1972) is entitled “For David Hammond and Michael Longley.” Their lifelong friendship leads to several other creative collaborations. In particular, after a distressing evening in 1972 when Hammond, affected by the despair and terror unleashed by Irish Republican Army (IRA) bombing of his city, is for once unable to sing, Heaney meditates on the experience in an essay and in an important poem, “The singer’s house” (subsequently included in his 1979 Field Work collection). The poem urges the singer to keep singing, to defend the values of art and friendship in a hostile time. Hammond collaborates with Dónal Lunny and other traditional musicians to bring out an LP also called The Singer’s House(1978), which includes Heaney’s poem on the album sleeve, and features some of the songs that he had made famous, such as “My Aunt Jane” and “Bonny Woodgreen,” from his vast repertoire of songs from Ulster. The album is reissued in 1980.

In 1995, Hammond is one of Heaney’s personal guests at the award of his Nobel prize in Stockholm, characteristically wearing his usual, mustard-yellow, cattle-dealer boots with evening dress. On another formal occasion, when he is awarded an honorary doctorate by Dublin City University in November 2003, he surprises the audience by standing up in his academic robes to sing “My Lagan love,” instead of giving an address. His unique, light mellow voice is an ideal vehicle for the traditional ballads which he knows so well. He records a number of records in the 1960s, including Belfast Street Songs, and publishes the book Songs of Belfast (1978). He also encourages traditional musicians like Arty McGlynn, and collaborates with them on various recording projects. He is well known for live and often impromptu performances at festivals and venues in Ireland and the United States. He also performs at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.

Hammond is also a notable collaborator with poets and dramatists, especially in the important Field Day Theatre Company project, of which he is a director, along with Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin, Seamus Deane, Thomas Kilroy, and the project’s founders, Brian Friel and Stephen Rea. He supports the Field Day search for a “fifth province,” where history and community and culture can intersect, believing that to speak unthinkingly of “two traditions” is to perpetuate superficial political divisions. As he says in an interview in The Irish Times on July 4, 1998, songs can “take you out of yourself” and become bridges to unite people.

Hammond receives many honours. In 1994, he receives the Estyn Evans award for his contribution to mutual understanding, and his work is featured in several major events in his honour: in the University of North Florida (1999), in the Celtic Film Festival in Belfast (2003), and in Belfast’s Linen Hall Library (2005). A Time to Dream, a film about his life and work, is broadcast on BBC Northern Ireland in December 2008.

Hammond dies in hospital in Belfast, after a long illness, on August 25, 2008, survived by his wife Eileen (née Hambleton), whom he marries on July 19, 1954, and by their son and three daughters. His funeral in St. Finnian’s Church is a major cultural event, where friends sing, play and speak in his honour.

In Seamus Heaney’s last collection of poetry, Human Chain (2010), he includes a poignant farewell to Hammond. The poet imagines (or perhaps dreams) of another visit to the singer’s house, but this time “The door was open, and the house was dark.”

(From: “Hammond, David Andrew (‘Davy’)” by Linde Lunney, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, December 2014)


by Leave a comment

Birth of Ciarán Mac Mathúna, Broadcaster & Music Collector

Ciarán Mac Mathúna, broadcaster and music collector, is born on November 26, 1925, in Limerick, County Limerick. He is a recognised authority on Irish traditional music and lectures extensively on the subject. He travels around Ireland, England, Scotland and the United States collecting music.

According to Sam Smyth in the Irish Independent, Mac Mathúna is “on a mission to collect songs and stories, music, poetry and dance before they were buried under the coming tsunami of pop music.”

Mac Mathúna presents the radio programme, Mo Cheol Thú, for 35 years. Upon his retirement in 2005, the managing director of RTÉ Radio, Adrian Moynes, describes him as “inseparable from RTÉ Radio.” Upon his death in 2009, the Irish Independent describes him as “a national treasure.”

Mac Mathúna spends his early years in Mulgrave Street in Limerick. He is schooled at CBS Sexton Street, and later graduates from University College Dublin (UCD) with a BA in modern Irish and Latin. Subsequently, he completes an MA in Irish.

After college Mac Mathúna works as a teacher and later at the Placenames Commission. In 1954, he joins Radio Éireann where his job is to record Irish traditional musicians playing in their own locales. This entails visiting such places as Sliabh Luachra, County Clare and County Sligo, and the resulting recordings feature in his radio programmes: Ceolta Tire, A Job of Journeywork and Humours of Donnybrook.

Director General of RTÉ Cathal Goan later recalls that Mac Mathúna interviewed him for his first job at the station. He assists in the organisation of Mac Mathúna’s music collection for the RTÉ Libraries and Archives.

Mac Mathúna’s long-running Sunday morning radio series, Mo Cheol Thú (You are my music), begins in 1970 and continues until November 2005, when he retires from broadcasting. Each 45-minute programme offers a miscellany of archive music, poetry and folklore, mainly of Irish origin. It is one of radio’s longest running programmes. The last episode is broadcast on November 27, 2005, at 8:10 a.m.

Mac Mathúna wins two Jacob’s Awards, in 1969 and 1990, for his RTÉ Radio programmes promoting Irish traditional music. He receives the Freedom of Limerick city in June 2004. He is also awarded honorary doctorates by NUI Galway and the University of Limerick. In 2007, he receives the Musicians Award at the 10th annual TG4 Traditional Music Awards.

Joe Kennedy in the Sunday Independent in 2007 compares Mac Mathúna to “an amiable rock, rolling gently along, still picking up some moss and morsels of music that he may have missed.”

Mac Mathúna‘s wife, Dolly MacMahon (using the English version of her surname), is a singer of traditional songs. She comes from Galway and meets her husband in 1955. He has two sons named Padraic and Ciarán, one daughter named Déirdre, and four grandchildren at the time of his death: Eoin, Colm, Conor and Liam.

Mac Mathúna dies in St. Gladys nursing home, Harold’s Cross, Dublin, on December 11, 2009. His funeral on December 15, 2009, is attended by hundreds of people, including aides-de-camp of the President and Taoiseach, RTÉ Director-General Cathal Goan, poet Seamus Heaney and others.

Musicians performing at the ceremony include Peadar Ó Riada, Cór Cúil Aodha and members of The Chieftains and Planxty. The corpse is then taken to Mount Jerome Crematorium. Journalist Kevin Myers says Mac Mathúna’s legacy will be the “rebirth of Irish music,” adding, “Well, if Ciarán Mac Mathúna can die, I suppose anyone can. Actually, I had always thought that he was immortal. He certainly appeared to have all the ingredients.”


by Leave a comment

Birth of Mick Moloney, Irish American Musician & Scholar

Michael “Mick” Moloney, Irish-born American musician and scholar, is born in Limerick, County Limerick, on November 15, 1944. He is the artistic director of several major arts tours and co-founds Green Fields of America.

Moloney is the son of Michael Moloney, the head air traffic control officer of Shannon Airport, and his wife, Maura, who works as the principal of a Limerick primary school. He first plays tenor banjo during his teenage years. He studies at University College Dublin (UCD), graduating with a bachelor’s degree in economics. He then relocates to London to be a social worker assisting immigrant communities, before joining The Johnstons. After playing with the group for five years, he immigrates to the United States in 1973. He initially settles in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and eventually becomes an American citizen.

Three years after moving to the United States, Moloney co-founds Green Fields of America, an ensemble of Irish musicians, singers, and dancers which tour across the country on several occasions. He also serves as the artistic director for several major arts tours. One of these is the 1985 festival in Manhattan titled “Cherish the Ladies” to highlight female musicians in the area of Irish traditional music, which had been dominated by men until that decade. He produces an album for the female group by the same name titled Irish Women Musicians in America. The group’s leader, Joanie Madden, is one of several future fellows of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to be mentored by Moloney. He produces and performs on over 70 albums and serves as advisor for numerous festivals and concerts across America, with ethnomusicologist and musician Daniel T. Neely putting the figure as high as 125 albums.

Moloney undertakes postgraduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania, obtaining a master’s degree before being awarded a Doctor of Philosophy in folklore and folk life in 1992. He goes on to teach ethnomusicology, folklore, and Irish studies at Penn, Georgetown University, and Villanova University. He is also global distinguished professor of music and Irish studies at New York University (NYU) until his death. In recognition of his work in public folklore, he receives a 1999 National Heritage Fellowship from the NEA.

In addition to music performance, Moloney writes Far from the Shamrock Shore: The Story of Irish American History Through Song, which is published by Crown Publications in February 2002 with a supplementary CD on Shanachie Records. He hosts three nationally syndicated series covering folk music on American Public Television (APT). He works as a consultant, performer, and interviewee on the RTÉ special Bringing It All Back Home, and is also a participant, consultant, and music arranger for Out of Ireland, a documentary film by PBS. He performs on the PBS special The Irish in America: Long Journey Home.

Moloney is married three times over the course of his life. His first marriage is to Miriam Murphy. His second marriage is to Philomena Murray. Together, they have one child but eventually divorce. His third marriage to Judy Sherman also ends in divorce. He is in a domestic partnership with Sangjan Chailungka at the time of his death. During his later years, he divides his time between Bangkok, where he resides with Chailungka, and his apartment in Greenwich Village. In Bangkok, he volunteers as a music therapist and teacher for abandoned children with HIV at the Mercy Center in the Khlong Toei district, which is founded by the Redemptorist priest Joseph H. Maier.

Moloney dies at the age of 77 on July 27, 2022, at his home in Manhattan, having played at the Maine Celtic Festival less than a week before. The cause of death is not announced.


by Leave a comment

Death of Patrick Michael Clancy, Irish Folk Singer

Patrick Michael Clancy, Irish folk singer best known as a member of The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, dies of lung cancer at home on November 11, 1998. In addition to singing and storytelling, Clancy plays the harmonica with the group, which is widely credited with popularizing Irish traditional music in the United States and revitalizing it in Ireland. He also starts and runs the folk music label Tradition Records, which records many of the key figures of the American folk music revival.

Clancy is born on March 7, 1922, at Carrick-on-Suir, County Tipperary, one of eleven children and the eldest of four boys born to Johanna McGrath and Bob Clancy. During World War II he serves as a flight engineer in the Royal Air Force in India. After his demobilization, Clancy works as a baker in London. In 1947 he emigrates to Toronto, Canada with his brother Tom Clancy. The following year, the two brothers move to Cleveland, Ohio to stay with relatives. Later, they attempt to move to California, but their car breaks down and they relocate to the New York City area instead.

After moving to Greenwich Village in 1951, both Patrick and Tom devote themselves primarily to careers in the theater. In addition to appearing in various Off-Broadway productions and television shows, they produce and star in plays at the Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village and at a playhouse in Martha’s Vineyard. After losing money on some unsuccessful plays, the brothers begin singing concerts of folk songs after their evening acting jobs are over. They soon dub these concerts “Midnight Specials” and the “Swapping Song Fair.” Patrick and Tom are often joined by other prominent folk singers of the day, including Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and Jean Ritchie.

In 1956 their younger brother, Liam Clancy, immigrates to New York, where he teams up with Tommy Makem, whom he had met while collecting folk songs in Ireland. The two begin singing together at Gerde’s Folk City, a club in Greenwich Village. Patrick and Tom sing with them on occasion, usually in informal folk “sing-songs” in the Village. Around the same time, Patrick founds Tradition Records with folk-song collector and heiress Diane Hamilton, and in 1956 the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem release their first album, The Rising of the Moon, with only Patrick’s harmonica as musical accompaniment. However, the Clancys and Makem do not become a permanent singing group until 1959.

In the late 1950s, Clancy with his brothers and Makem begin to take singing more seriously as a permanent career, and soon they record their second album, Come Fill Your Glass with Us. This album proves to be more successful than their debut album, and they begin receiving job offers as singers at important nightclubs, including the Gate of Horn in Chicago and the Blue Angel in New York City. The group garners nationwide fame in the United States after an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, which leads to a contract with Columbia Records in 1961. Over the course of the 1960s, the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem record approximately two albums a year for Columbia. By 1964, Billboard magazine reports that the group was outselling Elvis Presley in Ireland.

The group performs together on stage, recordings, and television to great acclaim in the United States, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia until Tommy Makem leaves to pursue a solo career in 1969. They continue performing first with Bobby Clancy and then with Louis Killen until Liam leaves in 1976 also to pursue a solo career. In 1977 after a short hiatus, the group reforms with Patrick, Tom, and Bobby Clancy and their nephew Robbie O’Connell. Liam returns in 1990 after the death of Tom Clancy.

In 1968, after two decades in North America, Clancy returns to live in Carrick-on-Suir, where he purchases a dairy farm and breeds exotic cattle. When not on tour or working on his farm, he spends much of his time fishing, reading, and doing crossword puzzles. In the late 1990s, he is diagnosed with a brain tumor. The tumor is successfully removed, but he is also stricken with terminal lung cancer around the same time. He continues performing until his failing health prevents him from doing so any longer.

Patrick Clancy dies at home of lung cancer on November 11, 1998, at the age of 76. He is buried, wearing his trademark white cap, in the tiny village of Faugheen, near Carrick-on-Suir.


by Leave a comment

Birth of Kate Thompson, Author & Accomplished Fiddler

Katharine Anna Thompson, British-Irish author best known for children’s novels, is born in Halifax, West Yorkshire, England, on November 10, 1956. Most of her children’s fiction is fantasy but several of her books also deal with the consequences of genetic engineering.

Thompson is the youngest child of the social historians and peace activists E. P. Thompson and Dorothy Towers. She has lived in Ireland since 1981 and many of her books are set there. She trains racehorses in the UK and United States and travels extensively in India before settling in 1984 in Inagh, County Clare, in the west of Ireland with her partner Conor Minogue. They have two daughters, Cliodhna and Dearbhla. She is an accomplished fiddler with an interest in Irish traditional music, which is reflected in The New Policeman (2005).

Thompson wins two major annual awards for The New Policeman (Bodley Head, 2005), set in modern Kinvara and the Irish mythological Tír na nÓg: the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize and the Whitbread Children’s Book Award. It also wins the Dublin Airport Authority Children’s Book of the Year Award for 2005.

Thompson wins the Bisto Children’s Book of the Year Award four times, for The Beguilers (2001), The Alchemist’s Apprentice (2002), Annan Water (2004) and The New Policeman. Creature of the Night (2008) is shortlisted for the 2008 Booktrust Teenage Prize and the 2009 Carnegie Medal.

Thompson holds an MA in Irish traditional music performance from the University of Limerick.