It all started sometime during the last year of World War II, in the village of Donneycarney, north of Dublin, when the then six-year-old Paddy Moloney’s mother brought home a tin whistle she’d bought him in the city. And so began – for the knockdown price of a shilling and ninepence – one of the longest, most successful and most seminally influential careers in folk music’s history. Or as the man himself once put it: “I haven’t looked back since.”
In the decades to come, as founder and helmsman of the Chieftains, Paddy was to rub shoulders with Beatles, record with Rolling Stones, perform for presidents and play the uilleann pipes on the Great Wall of China. He would travel over all five continents, bringing Irish traditional music to literally millions of people, meanwhile aligning it with everything from symphony orchestras to Mongolian throat singers, jazz divas to Native American drums.
Yet throughout it all, over forty-plus years and forty-plus albums, the core ethos of Paddy’s music has remained firmly rooted in the many impromptu céilís that took place at home while he was growing up, and during visits to his grandmother in Co. Laois. Above all, he’s stayed true to his faith in the transcendent power of traditional tunes and songs to bring people together, to express affinity over difference, to impart both happiness and solace by distilling the essences of our shared human experience.
Again, Paddy’s own, oft-stated credo puts it somewhat more pithily: “Let the music speak for itself.”
Without Paddy and the Chieftains, the Celtic music world would look radically different today. In forming the band back in 1962, Paddy effectively invented modern ensemble instrumentation, steering a visionary course between the strictly-solo dictates of pure traditional playing and the popular output of Irish showbands. Later, the Chieftains blazed another trail in exploring or forging links between their own and other countries’ traditions, whether with their Celtic cousins in Brittany, Galicia and the US, or as far away as China, where they became the first ever Western band to tour in 1983. And through their collaborations with some of the world’s greatest rock and pop stars – the Stones, Van Morrison, Tom Jones, Sting, Marianne Faithfull – they have triumphantly asserted traditional music’s right to take its place on the very biggest stages, meanwhile introducing legions of new fans to its timelessly potent allure.
Now approaching his 70th year, Paddy remains as irrepressible and inspiring a livewire as ever, constantly a-bubble with fresh ideas and projects – so much so, that we’re still waiting for his long-promised debut solo album. When it does eventually appear, though, it will be amidst a musical landscape and climate in which its creator has been a truly defining force.
