San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Piper preserved Irish traditions with Chieftains
Paddy Moloney, the playful but disciplined frontman and bagpiper of the Chieftains, a band that was at the forefront of the worldwide revival of traditional Irish music played with traditional instruments, died on Monday in Dublin. He was 83.
His daughter Aedin Moloney confirmed the death, at a hospital, but did not specify the cause.
For nearly 60 years the Chieftains toured extensively, released more than two dozen albums and won six Grammy Awards. They were particularly known for their collaborations with artists like Van Morrison, Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, Nanci Griffith and Luciano Pavarotti.
“Over the Sea to Skye,” the Chieftains’ collaboration with flutist James Galway, peaked at No. 20 on the Billboard classical album chart in 1996.
“Our music is centuries old, but it is very much a living thing,” Moloney told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1989. “We don’t use any flashing lights or smoke bombs or acrobats falling off the stage.” He added, “We try to communicate a party feeling, and that’s something that everybody understands.”
In 2012, when he was vice president, President Biden told People magazine that his desire was to sing “Shenandoah” with the Chieftains “if I had any musical talent.” He invited them to perform at his inauguration this year, but COVIDrelated restrictions kept them from traveling. Moloney was a master of many instruments: He played the uileann pipes (the national bagpipes of Ireland), the tin whistle, the bodhran (a type of drum) and the button accordion. He was also the band’s lead composer and arranger. Asked in 2010 on the NPR quiz show “Wait, Wait ... Don’t Tell Me” what he thought was the sexiest instrument, he chose the pipes.
“I often call it the octopus,” he said, “and so, I mean, that’s something that gets every part of you moving.”
The Chieftains performed at the Great Wall of China, in Nashville, Tennessee, and in Berlin to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990, joining with Roger Waters of Pink Floyd to play “The Wall.”
Their best-known recordings included “Cotton Eyed Joe,” “O’Sullivan’s March,” “Bonaparte’s Retreat” and “The Long Black Veil” (with Jagger). Their 1992 album “Another Country,” a collaboration with country artists like Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson and Chet Atkins, won the Grammy for best contemporary folk album.
Their other Grammys included one for best pop collaboration with vocals for “Have I Told You Lately That I Love You?,” a collaboration with Morrison from their album “The Long Black Veil,” released in 1995, and one for best world album, for “Santiago” (1996), consisting of Spanish and Latin American music.
Patrick Moloney was born on Aug. 1, 1938, in Donnycarney, in northern Dublin. His
Paddy Moloney, the frontman and bagpiper of the Chieftains, plays a whistle in New York City during a 1999 visit.
father, John, worked in the accounting department of the Irish Glass Bottle Co. His mother, Catherine (Conroy) Moloney, was a homemaker. Paddy came from a musical family: One of his grandfathers played the flute, and his Uncle Stephen played in the Ballyfin Pipe Band. Paddy began playing
a plastic tin whistle at 6 and began studying the uileann pipes shortly afterward, under the tutelage of a man known as the “King of the Pipers.”
He took to the pipes easily, gave his first public concert when he was 9 and performed on local streets.
“There were five pipers around the Donnycarney area,” he told Ireland’s Own magazine in 2019. “I’d go around the cul-de-sac playing like the pied piper, and my pals would be following behind me.”
After leaving school in the 1950s, he started working at Baxendale & Co., a building supplies company, where he met his future wife, Rita O’Reilly. He joined the traditional Irish band Ceoltóirí Chualann in 1960 and formed the Chieftains in 1962; the name came from the short story “Death of a Chieftain” by Irish author John Montague.
In the 1960s and ’70s, Moloney was an executive of Claddagh Records, of which he was a founder, and produced or oversaw 45 albums in folk, traditional, classical, poetry and spoken word.
The Chieftains — who hit it big in the mid-1970s with soldout concerts at the Royal Albert Hall in London — were strictly an instrumentalist ensemble at first. But in the 1980s the band pivoted from their early purism, and Moloney emerged as a composer, writing new music steeped in Irish tradition.
The Chieftains began to blend Irish music with styles from the Celtic diaspora in Spain and Canada as well as bluegrass and country from the United States. They collaborated with well-known rock and pop musicians and with an international assortment of musicians as far-flung as Norway, Bulgaria and China.
On his own, Moloney branched into writing and arranging music for films, including “Barry Lyndon” (1975), “Babe: Pig in the City” (1998) and “Gangs of New York” (2002).
In addition to his wife and daughter, he is survived by two sons, Aonghus and Padraig; four grandchildren; and a sister, Sheila.