Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Mick Moloney (1944–2022)

2023; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 136; Issue: 540 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/15351882.136.540.05

1535-1882

Nancy Groce, Stephen D. Winick,

Cultural Industries and Urban Development

The career of the Irish American musician and scholar Michael “Mick” Moloney, who passed away unexpectedly on July 27, 2022, serves as a model for how to excel as a public sector folklorist. His talent and eloquence set the standard for thoughtful mediation between academic folklore and public understanding of traditional arts. Enormously successful and hugely influential as a researcher, university professor, public educator, musician, fieldworker, event organizer, media producer, and humanitarian, he was the creative force behind innumerable concerts, workshops, university courses, tours, documentaries, and innovative cultural programs on three continents.Born November 15, 1944, in Limerick, Ireland, Moloney began playing music in his teens. Eager to learn as many songs and tunes as he could, he acquired a tape recorder to bring to homes and pubs in County Clare, where some of the greatest musicians in Ireland routinely gathered to play informal sessions. Moloney inadvertently became a fieldworker while intentionally becoming a virtuoso tenor banjo player and an excellent singer. He also took up guitar, mandolin, and bouzouki, and was soon in demand as a professional musician. His early bands, the Emmett Folk Group and the Johnstons, were important trendsetters, and his bandmates from those groups, including Dónal Lunny and Paul Brady, went on to transform Irish music during the 1970s in revolutionary groups like Planxty, the Bothy Band, and Moving Hearts.Moloney's path instead led him to the United States. In 1973, when the Johnstons played at the Philadelphia Folk Festival, Moloney met Kenneth S. Goldstein, who was both one of the founders of the festival and a folklore professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Always on the lookout for students who could bridge the divide between the folk music scene and academic folklore, Goldstein recognized Moloney's talents as a scholar and fieldworker, and persuaded him to move to Philadelphia and enroll in the Folklore Program at the University of Pennsylvania.While working on his PhD on traditional musicians in Irish immigrant communities, Moloney himself became one of the foremost Irish musicians in the United States. He founded the popular group The Green Fields of America, established a long-standing partnership with fiddler Eugene O'Donnell, and toured as a trio with the renowned piano accordion player Jimmy Keane and famed singer and guitarist Robbie O'Connell (who had been the lead singer for his famous uncles, the Clancy Brothers, since 1977). Mick mentored, contributed ideas to, and produced recordings for dozens of important Irish American musicians such as Joanie Madden (Cherish the Ladies) and Seamus Egan (Solas), and facilitated concerts and US tours by Irish-based traditional artists and ensembles.Moloney was also one of the foremost documentarians working in the field of folklore. In 1976, he was one of the fieldworkers for a special bicentennial edition of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, bringing Irish musicians from across the country together for the first time. The following year, he worked for the Library of Congress's American Folklife Center on its first large field project, the Chicago Ethnic Arts Project, for which he made early recordings of such soon-to-be-legendary performers as Liz Carroll and Michael Flatley. The private field recordings he made over many years, along with his collected sheet music, songbooks, commercial recordings, videotapes, papers, and ephemera, are housed at New York University's Tamiment Library.Moloney did significant work in the nonprofit arts sector to promote folklife and Irish culture. In Philadelphia, he founded The Folklife Center at International House, which he directed from 1977 until 1980, and again in the early 1990s. The center produced traditional arts and educational programming for over 20 years, employing and presenting artists from a wide range of traditions, and Moloney worked there on projects and annual events throughout its existence. Beginning in 2007, he worked with New York's Irish Arts Center on more than 50 projects and 120 performances—including an ongoing residential “Masters in Collaboration” series and a beloved annual Christmas/Winter Solstice show, which was primarily Irish but included performers from other traditions as wide-ranging as Filipino chant singing, Yiddish jazz, Mexican son jarocho, and Appalachian clogging. He established the Irish Week at the Augusta Heritage Center's summer music camp and founded the Philadelphia Ceili Group and The Washington Square Harp and Shamrock Orchestra.Moloney drew on his training as a folklorist to bridge cultural divides while broadening audiences’ cultural knowledge. For example, his 1996 Concert for Peace, produced with the World Music Institute at New York's Symphony Space, was one of the first public events since the beginning of Northern Ireland's “Troubles” to present Northern Irish musicians and Protestant musical traditions to the City's largely Catholic Irish audience. Moloney's careful curation and superlative skills as a presenter made even the onstage appearance of a lambeg drum—often seen as a symbol of belligerent Protestantism—a success. His deep interest in highlighting historical ties between Irish and African American traditions was also notable, and was reflected in his frequent collaborations with dancer, choreographer, and dance historian Lenwood O. Sloan.Moloney earned his PhD in Folklore and Folklife from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. At the time, he didn't intend to seek academic employment and told his friends he finished the degree mainly to avoid letting Kenny [Goldstein, department chair] down! Nevertheless, he went on to a distinguished academic career teaching folklore, ethnomusicology, and Irish studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Georgetown University, and Villanova University, before being named a Global Distinguished Professor at New York University, a position he held for nearly 20 years.Moloney didn't limit his teaching to the academy. He became a pioneer of folk culture tourism, leading groups to sites important in traditional Irish culture, where they were joined by local experts who could explain the biology of a peat bog, the cultural significance of the pilgrimage to Croagh Patrick, or the folklore surrounding the Burren. He expanded his offering of cultural tours to include Scotland, Galicia and Asturias in Spain, Cuba, and Southeast Asia.Moloney authored and edited several books, including one drawn from his doctoral research, Far From the Shamrock Shore: The Irish-American Experience in Song (2002), which had an accompanying CD of songs by the same name. Moloney was interested in the intersections of Irish folk music with vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley, which led to several CD-based research projects, including McNally's Row of Flats: Irish American Songs of Old New York, which revived public interest in the nineteenth-century songwriting team Harrigan and Braham; and If It Wasn't for the Irish and the Jews, which highlighted early twentieth-century Jewish-Irish songwriting partnerships, and which was the subject of Moloney's Benjamin Botkin Lecture at the Library of Congress in 2009. He also produced over 60 albums of Irish music, including compilations of classic 78s, recordings by prominent Irish musicians and bands, and selections from field recordings.In 1999, Moloney was awarded the National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, considered the highest official honor a traditional artist can receive in the United States. In 2013, he received the Distinguished Presidential Service Award from the President of Ireland, and in 2014, he received the Gradam Ceoil Award from TG4, considered the highest honor a traditional Irish musician can receive in Ireland.In recent years, Moloney had developed an interest in Southeast Asia and began spending part of each year in Bangkok, using it as a base for touring, researching, and lecturing in Thailand, Vietnam, and neighboring countries. Caught there by the COVID-19 pandemic, Moloney worked online with the Irish Cultural Center in New York to produce a delightful series of 31 short videos on his favorite songs entitled By Memory Inspired: Mick Moloney's Songbook, which presented “Stories, Tunes, and Songs from Ireland and Irish America.” He also began work on a book summarizing his research on Irish American music, which, sadly, remained unfinished at the time of his death.Throughout his career, Moloney was always generous with time, music, and social activism, playing frequent benefit concerts for charity and the progressive causes in which he believed. During his time in Thailand, he became heavily involved in raising support and awareness of The Mercy Center, a shelter in the slums of Bangkok that teaches traditional Thai arts to orphans and street children living with HIV/AIDS.Michael D. Higgins, the President of Ireland, noted of Mick: “His passing is a loss to the musical heritage of Ireland, to Irish America, and to Irish music worldwide.” We note that it is also a great loss to folklore. As his friends, we would also add that he was a wonderful colleague, mentor, and friend; a world-class conversationalist; and endlessly curious about the world around him. He was proud to be a folklorist, but often told friends that he wanted people to remember him as a “banjo driver.” Having sat with him in sessions and on concert stages as well in classrooms and lecture halls, we are happy to do so.