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Transcription: [00:00:29]

{SPEAKER name="Mick Maloney"}
--play Irish music, in that it fulfills a very important part of our lives, and in this particular stage here, unlike the main stage, where we just do concerts,
[00:00:37]

{SPEAKER name="Mick Maloney"}
we're going to play some music, all right, but also open the forum up here to discussion of the various ways in which this music is kept alive,
[00:00:47]

{SPEAKER name="Mick Maloney"}
and um, how it functions in the life of the Irish community, and the history of it, [[cough]] and the time of the various people here.
[00:00:57]

{SPEAKER name="Mick Maloney"}
As I said, some of us are from Ireland, some were born in America, and how we came to the music is a little bit of a different story for all of us individually, but there is a certain--
[00:01:08]

{SPEAKER name="Mick Maloney"}
a slightly different pattern for and the people who come from Ireland, and the people who come originally from America. Maybe talk a little about that.
[00:01:11]

{SPEAKER name="Mick Maloney"}
You can prepare questions if you want, if there's anything you want to ask us about, by all means, feel free to do so.
[00:01:17]

{SPEAKER name="Mick Maloney"}
This is meant to be a very informal discussion area, and you know, if there's any questions you want to know about, the music or about the different instruments that we play here, feel free to ask.
[00:01:28]

{SPEAKER name="Mick Maloney"}
On the right is Brendan Mulvihill, playing the fiddle. Brendan comes originally from Northampton, in England; born of Irish parents who come from Ireland.
[00:01:35]

{SPEAKER name="Mick Maloney"}
His father's a great fiddler. His family plays Irish music, and Brendan grew up in the Bronx. He's been living in this area here for close to ten years.
[00:01:42]

{SPEAKER name="Mick Maloney"}
Then there's Jerry O'Sullivan, who was born in, I don't know, Dublin or New York? Jerry, was it in New York? And he spent a lot of his time going back and forth between Dublin and New York.
[00:01:52]

{SPEAKER name="Mick Maloney"}
He currently lives in Yonkers, and Jerry plays the Uillean pipes.
00:01:56]

{SPEAKER name="Mick Maloney"}
"Uilleann" is the Irish word for "elbow", and it's thought that one of the reasons that they're called that, is because they're inflated by a bellows rather than the blowing into the bag, as in this case - the case of the Highland pipes.
[00:02:07]

{SPEAKER name="Mick Maloney"}
And then there's Joanie Madden, who was also born in the Bronx; also of Irish musicians. Her father, Joe Madden's an accordion player from the County Galway.
[00:02:16]

{SPEAKER name="Mick Maloney"}
And Joanie learned from the man she's sitting beside Jack Coen, who is also from the County Galway; a great place for traditional Irish music. And Jack emigrated to America in 1949.
[00:02:25]

{SPEAKER name="Mick Maloney"}
He's been living in the New York area ever since, and Joanie lived around the corner from him, in the Bronx, for some years, and learned to play the flute from Jack.
[00:02:33]

{SPEAKER name="Mick Maloney"}
You can see they play different kinds of flute. Jack plays the wooden flute, and Joanie plays the silver flute, but they're both used to playing Irish music in some slightly different ways.
[00:02:41]

{SPEAKER name="Mick Maloney"}
Then there's Bill McComiskey here, born in Brooklyn, again, of a very musical family. His uncles were involved in music, and like a lot of musicians here,
[00:02:49]

{SPEAKER name="Mick Maloney"}
Billy learned or, had a major-- a man had a major influence him; a great accordion player called Sean McGlynn, also from the County Galway.
[00:02:58]

{SPEAKER name="Mick Maloney"}
I'm Mick Maloney, from Limerick, and I've been over in Philadelphia for around 11 years now, and I learned most of my music in County Clare, back in the west of Ireland, and southwest of the country.
[00:03:09]

{SPEAKER name="Mick Maloney"}
And also, from just down the road from here, on my left, is Andy O'Brien. And Andy comes from County Kerry. And Kerry has always been a great place for music and dancing and singing.
[00:03:18]

{SPEAKER name="Mick Maloney"}
And Andy has been here, in the Washington area, for upwards of 10 years.
[00:03:21]

{SPEAKER name="Mick Maloney"}
And in fact, Andy, and Billy, and Brendan are a group called, "The Irish Tradition," who have been the mainstay of Irish music here in Washington and the Baltimore-Washington area, for about 10 years, or so.
[00:03:31]

{SPEAKER name="Mick Maloney"}
So, I tell you, we'll start off with a couple of tunes. And when Irish musicians get together, they just like to sit around and play tunes, you know, that have been handed down over the years.
[00:03:40]

{SPEAKER name="Mick Maloney"}
A lot of times we don't know who composed the tunes, but it doesn't really matter now they've all been reworked over the years by the various musicians, who have played them. And these are two old tunes.
[00:03:49]

{SPEAKER name="Mick Maloney"}
The first is called "The Blackthorn Stick," and "Come West Along the Road," and they're reels. And when traditional [[A fiddle note is played]] Irish musicians they mostly tend to play reels, because they're very lively, satisfying tunes to play.
[00:03:59]

{SPEAKER name="Mick Maloney"}
So, here we are: "The Blackthorn Stick", and "Come West Along the Road."
[00:04:03]

[[Musicians tuning up various instruments]]
[[Background noises]]
{SPEAKER name="Jack Coen"}
[00:04:24]

[[Musicians playing Irish music]]
[00:07:32]

[[Applause]]
[00:07:37]

{SPEAKER name="Mick Maloney"}
Two reels there, "The Blackthorn Stick" and "Come West Along the Road," and for those of you who have just wandered into the perimeter there, we're playing Irish traditional music,
[00:07:43]

{SPEAKER name="Mick Maloney"}
and there are various people here from different parts of, uh, the East Coast originally, some of us are from Ireland.
[00:07:50]

{SPEAKER name="Mick Maloney"}
Uh, the most senior musician here is Jack Coen, and plays a very old style of music, which is found a lot in the Eastern part of County Galway, which is in the west of Ireland,
[00:07:59]

{SPEAKER name="Mick Maloney"}
in a county famous for its-- both its sound tradition in Gaelic and in English, and also for its great music and dancing.
[00:08:06]

{SPEAKER name="Mick Maloney"}
And, and now, if Jack would-- If you'd like to say a few words about what-- what the music scene was like in Ireland, when you were growing up, and how-- how people would learn, and who would learn, and what role it filled in the society of County Galway.
[00:08:18]

{SPEAKER name="Jack Coen"}
Well, I-- It was all handed down from father to son, anyway, and grandfather, to father, to son. I don't know how far back it goes. But, usually, it was preserved in the homes.
[00:08:35]

{SPEAKER name="Jack Coen"}
When you're familiar with it from the time you were born, either a relative of you plays it, or a neighbor played, and you grew up learning how to lilt the tunes,
[00:08:47]

{SPEAKER name="Jack Coen"}
even though you had no instrument, you wouldn't be able to play 'em, but you learned how. The music fit into your head just the same as the language or anything else.
[00:08:57]

{SPEAKER name="Jack Coen"}
You just learned it; you just knew it. When you got old enough to get an instrument, my part of the country; I was lucky enough to live in a part of the country that was very musical.
[00:09:07]

{SPEAKER name="Jack Coen"}
There was a lot of flute players, fiddle players, accordion players, who played the music, and when you'd hear them play, you'd never forget it.
[00:09:16]

{SPEAKER name="Jack Coen"}
So, more of it would get into your head that way, by listening to the players.
[00:09:21]

{SPEAKER name="Jack Coen"}
Then when you got old enough to grab some kind of an instrument, the easiest one for me to grab was the tin whistle. And they were sold in the candy stores around Christmas times, and usually it was a present you would get from Santy Claus around Christmas, so--
[00:09:39]

{SPEAKER name="Jack Coen"}
You had to make the most out of that then, until you got old enough to get a flute or a fife or something and keep learning up along.
[00:09:47]

{SPEAKER name="Jack Coen"}
But the music was there, the tunes were there, they were handed down.
[00:09:51]

{SPEAKER name="Jack Coen"}
A strange thing, I asked a man a couple of years ago back there, he was a teacher of mine, Jim Connery. I learned a lot of music from him.
[00:09:59]

{SPEAKER name="Jack Coen"}
I says "It's strange how all this Irish music lived down through the years, when nobody was doing anything to promote it." There were no festivals. There was nothing.
[00:10:09]

{SPEAKER name="Jack Coen"}
So I says "Where did you get all the tunes that I learned from you?" He says "This place was full of great musicians," he says, "who never played an instrument."
[00:10:20]

Transcription Notes:
Reopened to fix.