Mick Moloney, a recording artist, folklorist, concert presenter and professor who championed traditional Irish culture and encouraged female instrumentalists in male-dominated fields, died Tuesday at his home in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. he was 77 years old.
Glaxman Ireland House NYU, New York University’s Center for Irish Studies announced his death. In less than a week, Moloney Appearing at the Main Celtic Festival in Belfast, Maine.
An Irish immigrant, Moloney is a pioneering scholar in the field of Irish-American Studies at NYU, where he was named a world-renowned professor.The university keeps his vast collection of materials in it Irish American ArchivesHe reissued a wealth of music by 19th and 20th century Irish bands, often beyond the commercialized St. Patrick’s Day event, to a wider audience unfamiliar with Irish culture. delivered.
great musician, Mr. Moloney sang and played guitar, mandolin and banjo, with the tenor banjo being his primary instrument.in his 1978 Green Fields of Americais a multidisciplinary Irish touring ensemble whose members include Michael Flatley, founder of Riverdance, a theatrical show featuring Irish music and dance.
Moloney has organized a number of organizations with a passion for exploring the connections between Irish, African, Galician and American roots music. concert and a lecture emphasizing their synergy. In one of his programs in his “Celtic Appalachia” series, held at Manhattan’s Symphony Space by the Irish Art Center in 2012, Malian musician Chek Hamaradiabate performed aboriginal art that predates the banjo. I played an African instrument. Moloney also worked with Filipino vocalist Grace Nono, among other musicians.
Mr Moloney research often extends to problematic relationships between Irish Americans and African Americans in the 19th and 20th centuries.At his death, he was working on a movie called “Two Separated Roads” About how those communities found common ground through music and dance despite their conflicts.
His scholarship also included Irish-Jewish relations.with an interesting recording called “If it weren’t for the Irish and the Jews” Moloney emphasized the collaboration between two groups of immigrants in America: Vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley. (One poem asked, “What would this great Yankee nation really do without Levy, Monaghan, or Donahue?”)
Until the 1980s, most instrumentalists in traditional Irish music were men, but Moloney encouraged women to play as well, and in 1985 he founded “Cherish the Ladies” (the name of the Irish jig) in Manhattan. We held a festival called , and a concert the following year. A year called “Fathers and Daughters”. He is the all-female group Cherish the Ladies’ album “American Irish female musicians”
Moloney hosts a show on folk music on US public television and was awarded the Irish Government’s Presidential Award for Service to Irish People Abroad in 2013. In 1999, her then First Lady Hillary Clinton presented Clinton with the National Her Heritage Her Fellowship, the nation’s highest honor in folk and traditional arts awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Moloney was a mentor to many subsequent NEA Fellows, including Cherish the Ladies flutist Joanie Madden.
in 2002 he “Away from Shamrock Coast: The Story of Ireland-American Immigration Through Song comes with a CD of the songs.and he led Regular tours of Irelandconcerts, studio visits, castle tours and pub visits, shedding light on Irish culture.
Moloney told The New York Times in 1996: pull from across the sea. I feel a deep sense of loss. ”
Michael Moloney was born on November 15, 1944 in Limerick, South West Ireland, one of seven children of Michael and Maura Moloney. His father was the chief air traffic controller at Shannon Airport, west of Limerick, and his mother was the primary school principal in Limerick.
Mick, as he was called, learned tenor banjo, mandolin and guitar at a young age, I am especially attracted to the banjo’s “wild sound” After hearing it for the first time in the 1950s, he said, Lacking the opportunity to hear traditional instrumental music in Limerick, he recalled learning by going to nearby County Clare, listening to songs in pubs, and recording them.
In his youth, he played with the Emmett Folk Group and The Johnstons, a close-knit harmony folk band that recorded and toured in Europe and America. “Much of their personality comes from Mr. Moloney,” critic John S. Wilson wrote in The Times in 1971. Amazing Mephistopheles eyebrows.
Moloney has a BA in Economics from University College Dublin and spent a short time in London working as a social worker helping immigrant communities. In 1973 he left for the United States and received his Ph.D. He received his PhD in Folklore and Folk His Life from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. In addition to NYU, he has taught ethnomusicology, folklore, and Irish studies at the University of Pennsylvania and Georgetown and Villanova.
In 1982 Mr. Moloney Irish/Celtic Week at the Augusta Heritage Center Willie Clancy Summer School is an annual event in County Clare that teaches traditional Irish arts.
For the last 20 years, he has lived in both Manhattan and Thailand, where he volunteered as a music therapist and as a teacher for orphaned children with HIV. Mercy Center in Bangkok.he appeared online from thailand Irish for Biden 2020 presidential election event.
Philomena Murray’s marriage to Judy Sherman ended in divorce. His survivors include his Sangjan Chailungka, a partner with whom he lived in Bangkok. Fintan, the son from his marriage to Mr. Murray. and four siblings, Violet Morrissey and Dermot, Kathleen and Nanette Moloney.
Moloney has devoted much of his career to academia, but never lost his energy in making music, describing himself first and foremost as an artist.
“Tradition has thousands of songs, so when we sit down to rehearse, our job is not to find material, but to filter it out, because we want to play it all if possible. ’” he said in a video. Interview with The Wall Street Journal in 2015. “On my tombstone,” he added.