Paddy O’Brien has been an influential and inspiring figure since as far back as I can remember. As a child, I was familiar with his name from my parents, who had played music with Paddy before he departed Ireland for the US in 1980. His iconic recordings with James Kelly and Dáithí Sproule soundtracked much of my teens and early 20s. I listened to the recordings obsessively, often carrying the re-issue in my Discman portable CD player as I rambled around Dublin or sat on long bus journeys to music weekends in far-flung corners of the country. Over the years I learned and shared many of Paddy’s unusual tunes and intricate personal settings, recording quite a few of them with the band Mórga during my 20s and 30s.

In those days I was vaguely aware that Paddy lived in the USA but I had no idea that I would end up following his path so directly. That all changed when I met my wife Anna in 2008, while working here in ITMA. In the early years of our relationship we lived apart and I regularly traveled back and forth from Dublin to Anna’s hometown of Minneapolis, MN. When visiting Minneapolis my father-in-law Nick Lethert would bring us to visit Paddy in his home in the Highland Park neighbourhood of St Paul, where he lives to this day with his wife, Irish-American author Erin Hart. I cherish the memories of those days: Paddy regaling us with stories of musical adventures from his youth over tea and biscuits in his cozy home. Discussing the woes of the Minnesota Twins baseball franchise, and sharing burned CD copies of prank call radio comedy shows, which I remember as a charming and unexpected enthusiasm of Paddy’s.

Anna and I ultimately made our own decision to relocate to the Twin Cities in 2019. Now, following in Paddy’s footsteps, I make my life here in the Twin Cities as a musician and a scholar of Irish music. Although Paddy is less frequently seen out and about on the local music scene these days, his influence is fundamental and formative: influencing the repertoire of our local sessions, the tunes taught in the thriving local Irish music school, the Center for Irish Music, in St. Paul, and shaping central values of scholarship and deep engagement with the music, which are characteristic of the practice of traditional music in the Twin Cities.

It has been a treat to listen through Paddy’s collection to assemble this playlist, triggering a flood of musical memories. The tunes range from interesting twists on common repertoire, such as his Sliabh Luachra version of The Hare’s Paw, to Paddy’s compositions like The Antrim Rose, written for the Co. Antrim fiddler Kathleen Smith, a dear and much-missed family friend who was a formative musical influence during my childhood and teens.

I included some tunes that feel definitive of Paddy’s musical style and sensibility: quirky and complex melodies like James McGetterick’s reel, and inventive personal variations that redefine a tune entirely, as can be heard in his version of The Humours of Kilkenny. The inclusion of the Cape Breton reel The Bird’s Nest acknowledges Paddy’s affinity for North American folk fiddle repertoire, especially tunes from the Cape Breton tradition. Tom Doherty’s reel illustrates Paddy’s deep and long-standing connections to Irish music communities elsewhere in the USA: sharing and collecting tunes in correspondence with friends across long distances, and across many decades. Hurry the Jug honours a life-long affinity for the music of Co. Clare, rooted in Paddy’s formative years in Dublin during the 1960s and ‘70s, where he was deeply influenced both by older musicians like John Kelly Sr. and Joe Ryan, and by peers such as James Kelly and Mick O’Connor. The inclusion of Paddy Conneely’s The Wearied Lad shows Paddy’s deep engagement and knowledge of historical sources of Irish music.

Overall, the experience of assembling the playlist left me taken aback by the breadth and depth of Paddy’s insight into traditional repertoire. When combined with his openness to judicious interventions from other traditions, and with the application of his unique melodic sensibility to subtly remake and add interest to every tune, the outcome is an incredibly well-curated and deeply creative resource. A labor of love and the distillation of a lifetime in traditional music into a generous gift back to the community.

I used to have a physical copy of the collection: a multi-disc CD wallet containing 33 CDs, with a 100+ page spiral-bound book. I remember laboriously ripping every CD to mp3 and labelling track names by hand. The collection certainly is easier to navigate in this new format, thanks to the generosity of Mark Bickford who financially supported the project and the work of the team in ITMA to coordinate its digital publication. Having worked on the project as a developer, building an app for ITMA to process the digital scores, it is pleasing to see the final results online and to be able to make use of them. I look forward to finding many more tunes from Paddy’s collection to learn and share, and I hope many others will do the same.