Paddy O'Brien Waterloo Ice House, Austin, Texas 1997?
I had talked more to him, but found that I'd left the "pause" on my recorder. Paddy said: Oh shit. When did you start playing the accordion? Well, I started when I was about 12 years old, which is about 38 years ago today, 38 years ago this year. We're standing in front of the Waterloo Ice House here and we're freezing...except for Paddy isn't freezing because he lives in Minneapolis. No, Paddy is still vulnerable to cold, I'll tell ya. (Ha ha ha) So you learned it when you were a teenager... Well, I'm still learning it, ya know. Irish traditional music is not something you can say you have learned it, its an ongoing process. Of listening and learning and suffering and loving it....a mixture of all those things, you know. Seamus Ennis, the Irish piper, he was a famous Irish piper, used to say, seven years listening and seven years practicing and seven years playing and then he says you might be a good piper. Now who's the piper in this little band? Michael Cooney and he's from County Tipperary, and Pat Egan is the vocalist, of course we don't use the word vocalist in Irish traditional music, but anyway he plays some great songs and plays guitar accompaniment. Is this the sort of thing you would hear in Ireland? What you're playing tonite? It is, yeh. Very much. So they use guitars. They use guitars as accompaniment, in some cases piano and some cases bouzoukis, but generally there's some people that don't encourage that, they like traditional music played in its own raw instrumental form, you know. I had read a lot of controversary about what was really Irish music and what wasn't Irish music. No, well you'll always have, you know people disputin' other peoples creative activities, then when it's accepted,you know, they'll settle down a little bit, you know. That seems to be generally the way it...you have trends, you know, and opinions. You want to talk about your accordion again? The accordion of course, I think it was made in 1947. So it's a postwar accordion made in Italy, southern Italy called a Soprani Tulo (?) button key accordion and so forth. It came as one of those accordions, they come into Ireland after World War II and it was sort of a novelty in those days because before that we had the melodeons. The melodeons were very cleverly through all the counties, and also concertinas, but nobody had the button key accordion, so when they started importin' accordions such as mine there was a big demand, everybody bought one up that had money, but they used to buy them on the hire-purchase scheme you know. They paid a few shillin's a month. They do that for 3 or 4 years like I did and then they get fed up with it and buy another one and do the same thing all over again. Did you play when you were over in Ireland? Oh yeh, I did. But I been playin' over been now professionally for 18 years. Who have you played with? Ah, well, I played with Martin Hayes and I played with Jamie Gans, he's a fiddle player from Minnesota, Tom Dahill, he's a singer from Minnesota, Sean O'Driscoll, banjo player and singer from Blarney, County Cork. I don't know if I'd remember everybody offhand but the first people I come over here and played with was James Kelly on the fiddle and Daithi Sproule who now plays guitar with Altan and we recorded two LPs for Shanachie records at that time which was 1978 and 79, but we only played together for about a years and so we all went in different directions. Is there much going on in Minneapolis that's... Oh there is. There's a lot of musicians on sessions twice a week and there's a few Irish bars...big demand for dancing, there's lots of dance groups and they're teachin' children to dance up there as well. You play at dances? Yeh, sometimes I play at ceilis, yeh. Is there a...I guess when I went to NTIF Sean O'Neill had a piano accordion. Do they have those up there? I think there's a couple of piano accordion players up there, but I haven't seen them in the recent past, no. But there's a number of good musicians there, includin' a couple of very good flute players that are lovely-Patty Bruson and Laura Mackenzie are very beautiful together. And of course Daithi Sproule lives there as well, also Sean O'Driscoll. And Martin McCue, he's a Roscommon, County Roscommon accordion player, he's up there, there's a number of us. And there's also an organization there that teaches the Irish language, they call themselves Gaeltacht. So I'm gettin' a little bit cold now.