Remembering Irish Musician Paddy Moloney
NPR
Thursday, October 14, 2021
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Paddy Moloney, the frontman for the Irish band The Chieftains, died Tuesday at the age of 83. For more than 50 years, his band brought the musical traditions of Ireland to a worldwide audience.
Transcript
(SOUNDBITE OF CHIEFTAINS' "LOTS OF DROPS OF BRANDY")
A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Let's now remember someone we lost as the week began - the front frontman for the Irish band The Chieftains, Paddy Moloney.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHIEFTAINS' "LOTS OF DROPS OF BRANDY")
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Paddy Moloney circled the globe with his tin whistle, sharing the sounds that he grew up with around Dublin.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
PADDY MOLONEY: What we're playing is soul music. It's the music of the soul. It's something that's inside you. You inherit it.
INSKEEP: That's Moloney in a 1976 interview on All Things Considered. He often pointed out what Irish traditional music shares with the folk music of other countries.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
MOLONEY: I was at an Indian concert. There was a Bangladesh girl singing a song. I just could not believe it. The first eight bars of it was a tune that we have called "Eibhlin A Run," "Eileen My Love," and just a little bit of it on the tin whistle (playing tin whistle).
MARTÍNEZ: In an effort to drive home how universal Irish music is, Paddy Moloney and The Chieftains often covered songs from other traditions, and they welcome collaborators from a wide variety of backgrounds. Elvis Costello, Luciano Pavarotti, Los Tigres del Norte and Mick Jagger are just some of them.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE LONG BLACK VEIL")
CHIEFTAINS: (Singing) Nobody knows love, nobody sees, nobody knows but me.
INSKEEP: Up until the pandemic stopped it, Moloney and The Chieftains were in the middle of a world tour that they called The Irish Goodbye. He died on Tuesday at 83.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE LONG BLACK VEIL")
CHIEFTAINS: (Singing) She walks these hills in a long, black veil. She visits my grave... Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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