“The Irish came early and often to America,” quipped musicologist Charles Hamm in his landmark book Yesterdays: Popular Song in America. Although the largest waves of immigration occurred during the years of the potato famines in the 1840s and 1850s, the process began long before then and continues to the present day, albeit with many ebbs and flows in the stream. Today nearly 36.5 million people in the United States claim Irish ancestry.

Ryan's Mammoth Collection is a compendium of fiddle tunes assembled by William Bradbury Ryan. Originally published in Boston in 1883 by Elias Howe, Jr., it has remained in print in one form or another ever since. It has been used as a source of tunes by many generations of fiddlers in different stylistic traditions, but its value as a descriptive document of the repertoire of late-nineteenth-century Boston, particularly the Irish community in that city, has largely been overlooked. Ryan, rather than Capt. Francis O'Neill of Chicago, should be regarded as the first great documentarian of Irish traditional music in the United States.

Francis O'Neill, one of the towering figures of Irish traditional music, was among the first to collect and publish Irish dance music. His compilations form the most complete glimpse into Irish musical practice at the turn of the twentieth century and are still regarded as the definitive source for traditional tunes. Three recent publications on O'Neill and his times throw light on his life, his passion for the music, and his legacy among today's traditional music community.

At the dawn of the twentieth century and the height of the Recording Age, Irish American musicians began to record Irish traditional music on both commercial and subcommercial recordings. Circulated within the diaspora during a changing sense of Irish identity and sent home to a nationalist revival, these recordings had a profound impact on both traditional performance practices and modes of transmission. Quickly accepted by many at the heart of the tradition, these recordings were used by practitioners to bridge vast geographic distances and solidify vital lines of communication, allowing the diaspora to engage actively with the larger tradition.

The McNulty Family was known as the royal family of Irish entertainers. They were the hottest Irish entertainment act on the East Coast, and perhaps in all of North America, from the 1930s through the 1950s. Ann “Ma” McNulty was the leader; her son Peter played the violin and piano, sang, and danced; and her daughter Eileen sang and danced. They also acted and performed skits to accompany their songs and comedy routines. Their shows were a high-energy, fast-paced type of vaudeville event. Ann Burke was born in Kilteevan, County Roscommom, Ireland, in 1887 and emigrated to the United States in 1910. She married John McNulty in 1914 and was a widow by 1928. This emigrant, who played the melodeon, and her two talented children started to entertain people to make a living. At the height of their career in the early 1940s, in addition to appearing at several venues every week, they had two radio shows, wrote a weekly column for the Irish Advocate newspaper, and had released about eighty recordings. Their vaudeville style was an excellent compliment to their talents, where acting and dancing were part of the delivery of a song or comedy routine.

In the world of Irish traditional music, Paddy Cronin from Sliabh Luachra in the southwest of Ireland is regarded as one of the tradition's exceptional fiddle players. Although his music exhibits many characteristics of the Sliabh Luachra tradition, it also has other elements and features, primarily from the Sligo style. A pupil of Pádraig O'Keeffe (the “Sliabh Luachra Fiddle Master”), Cronin emigrated to Boston in 1949 and lived there for approximately forty years. Before he left Ireland, he had been familiar with the music of the Sligo masters, such as Michael Coleman and James Morrison, who had gone to the United States many years before him. In Boston Paddy met and played with many of the great Sligo musicians, and also had the opportunity to hear music in other styles, including that of Canadian musicians, whose use of piano accompaniment he admired greatly. This article considers his music before and after he left Ireland, and compares him to Coleman and Morrison by considering their respective performances of the reel “Farewell to Ireland.”

This article, which builds on research in the fields of Irish traditional music, place, and diaspora, focuses on a community of diasporic musicians from Sliabh Aughty, an upland region of approximately 250 square miles that encompasses the musical storehouses of east Clare and southeast Galway in the West of Ireland. It examines the importance of home for these musicians, who have been resident in the United States for many decades. Their personal music geographies are explored to ascertain how traditional Irish music plays a critical role in transcending their sense of dislocation and reconnecting them with “home.”

The emergence of the compact disc in 1979 was regarded as the likely sales salvation of recorded music, and for many years the CD reigned supreme, generating steady, often substantial, company profits. More recently, however, the music industry has painfully slipped a disc. The CD has been in sharp decline, propelled mainly by young consumer ire over price and format inflexibility and by Internet technology available to skirt or subvert both. Irish American traditional music has not been impervious to this downward trend in sales and to other challenging trends and paradigm shifts in recording and performing. Amid the tumult, Irish American traditional music has nevertheless shown a new resilience and fresh vitality through a greater do-it-yourself, do-more-with-less spirit of recording, even for established small labels. The five recent albums of Irish American traditional music reviewed here—three of which were released by the artists themselves—exemplify a trend of their own, preserving the best of the past without slavishly replicating it. If the new mantra of music making is adapt or disappear, then Irish American traditional music, in adapting to change free of any impulse to dumb down, is assured of robustly enduring.