Sure, there were plenty of musicians who knew the old tunes out in the rural areas, especially in West country counties like Clare. When he began playing the tin whistle and uilleann pipes, back in the 1950s, traditional music wasn't even very popular in Ireland. "This is what I've been hoping for, for so many years."
"Now, like in Albuquerque two or three weeks ago, we had to do two sellout shows to 6,000 people - and you're talking about 10 Irish people in the audience. Moloney remembers that the first time the Chieftains played New York, in 1969, its audience was largely Irish. It's very interesting for me to get the cultural feedback." "Buddhist-y people and all sort of stuff like that. "There were a lot of Asian people who would stop and listen," he says. Davy Spillane, an Irish musician who plays uilleann pipes and other traditional instruments, was surprised at the diversity of the fans who came out to hear him play during a tour of American CD shops in 1998. Perhaps because of its ability to cross musical borders, Irish music in America is no longer just an Irish-American interest. "The Afro Celt album sold 50,000 in this country."
"It was like a melting pot of sounds," says Nick Clift, director of associate labels at Caroline Records, which distributes Real World. One of the most celebrated such crossover efforts was an album called the "Afro Celt Sound System." The result of a chance jam session at rocker Peter Gabriel's Real World studios in England, its music was essentially the spontaneous reaction of traditional Irish and African musicians. Moloney and the Chieftains have even found common ground with musicians from China and Cuba. Sinead O'Connor and the rap group House of Pain have both matched Irish reels with hip-hop beats, while Canadian Ashley MacIsaac has augmented his Celtic sound with touches of punk and techno. It isn't just the music's ties to the past, though another reason Irish traditional sounds have such resonance is that they can easily be absorbed into a variety of contemporary styles.
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