Series II: Public Performances, 1965-1997, Jun 25, 1965-Feb 22, 1997, inclusive

Public Performances include concert performances, sessions, ceilis, competitions, lectures and broadcasts.

Informal music sessions from New York, Washington DC, Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee, and San Francisco and many in Mick Moloney's homes in Philadelphia in the 1970s are included in this series. The earliest is a 1965 home recording from the Bronx with traditional musicians Ed Reavy, Johnny Cronin, Mike Preston, Paddy Murphy, Denis Murphy, John McMahon and J. McAulliffe. There are two rare pub session recordings from early 1976: an evening at the Bunratty in the Bronx, NY with Paddy Reynolds, Andy McGann, Johnny Cronin (fiddles), Patty Moriarty (accordion) and Mick Moloney (guitar, banjo, vocals); and one with the John Glynn Branch of the Irish Musicians Association at the Breffni Inn in Queens, New York. Glynn, an accordion player, had an influential school of music in Brooklyn at the time.

Mick Moloney recorded the tradition as it was being taught as well as played. Tapes of Martin Mulvihill's School of Irish Music in the Bronx, Father Charlie Coen's Children's Choir on Staten Island, and the 1978 Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann Fleadh Cheoil competition at Manhattan College in the Bronx (a.k.a. New York Fleadh) are included. He seized the opportunity to document young musicians who later blossomed into traditional Irish music stars, including twelve-year-old fiddler Eileen Ivers and fifteen-year-old Seamus Egan (mandolin, flute, whistle, uilleann pipes, banjo). Ivers (now a nine time All-Ireland fiddle champion) can be heard playing in 1977 with a youth ceili band for the Green Linnet album Irish Music, the Living Tradition. Egan was recorded in 1984 playing banjo at a Philadelphia session with Liz Carroll, Jimmy Keane and Mick Moloney, as well as in two pub sessions that same summer in Miltown Malbay, Co. Clare. Moloney later showcased both Ivers and Egan in his touring ensemble, Mick Moloney and Friends, and this part of the collection features many examples of their playing in the 1990s. A twenty-year old Michael Flatley was recorded playing the flute in Chicago in 1978; the following year he performed with Mick Moloney as part of the pioneering touring ensemble, The Green Fields of America.

Concert performances include Moloney's own ensemble The Green Fields of America; the first American concerts by the Irish traditional supergroups the Chieftains (1974), De Danann (1978) and Clannad (1979); and performances at such legendary venues as the Eagle Tavern in New York City, the Cherry Tree in Philadelphia, and Godfrey Daniels in Bethlehem, PA. In 1983 Moloney helped organize the ensemble Cherish the Ladies, represented here by recordings with sean nós singers Treasa Ui Cearuil and Bridget Fitzgerald as well as by a 1988 performance in Woodside, New York during the height of undocumented immigration from Ireland. That concert featured the young Irish American musician Joanie Madden (1983 All-Ireland gold medalist on tin whistle and flute). Of particular interest is the three-hour February 1990 benefit concert for Joe Doherty, an Irish political prisoner held by American authorities while fighting extradition to the United Kingdom, which was the occasion for a historic gathering of a veritable "who's who" of Irish traditional musicians at Symphony Space in New York City. Only excerpts from this concert were included on the 1991 Green Linnet record The Rights of Man.

Two foreign tours funded by the United States Information Agency are represented here by a September 1983 concert performance at the Hotel Ivoire, Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire, in Africa with Mick Moloney (banjo, guitar), Liz Carroll (fiddle), Donny and Eileen Golden (dancing); and by a May 1985 concert performance at the ruins of the Grand Hotel (Casa Grande) in Managua, Nicaragua with Susie Goff and the Green Grass Cloggers, Mick Moloney (mandolin) and Robbie O'Connell (guitar, vocals). The former was part of the Festival of Traditional American Dance; the latter part of the Festival of Mountain Music and Dance.

In 1975 Mick Moloney also began to document outdoor festivals in the United States at which Irish traditional music was featured, beginning with a concert in Philadelphia's Lenape Park that became the genesis for the Philadelphia Ceili Group Festival. The collection documents several years of this festival as well as the 1976 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, whose Irish segment was curated by Moloney. He travelled to Leeds in New York's Catskill mountains where, in 1978, he recorded Billy McComiskey (accordion), Andy McGann (fiddle), Maureen Doherty (flute) and the Clancy Brothers with Tommy Makem, among others. By the 1980s Moloney was a regular at the Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area in Cleveland, OH; at the Augusta Heritage Center, in Elkins, WV and at Milwaukee Irish Fest in Milwaukee, WI. All of these festivals are well documented here.

In addition to numerous academic lectures presented by Moloney in Ireland and America, this part of the collection features many interesting Moloney-related radio broadcasts. Of particular historic interest is Across the Western Ocean: The Story of Irish Traditional Music in America, a National Public Radio series written, hosted and produced by Mick Moloney in 1978. Its thirteen episodes are a musical snapshot of Irish America in the wake of the twelve part Roots phenomenon, aired just one year earlier.

Among items in this series inherited by Mick Moloney are tapes uilleann piper and radio host Thomas Standeven made of the John Vesey Trio in 1974. Vesey (1924-1995), one of Philadelphia's finest fiddlers in the Sligo tradition, only made private recordings between 1954 and 1974. Inherited as well is a recording made by Irish broadcaster Ciarán MacMathúna for his Sunday morning radio program Mo Cheol Thú on Radio Telefis Éireann (RTE), which captured a ceili led by Larry Redican at the Commodore Barry Club/Philadelphia Irish Center in the early 1970s. Three short interviews (two in the Irish language with recent immigrants from Falcarragh, Co. Donegal) conducted by MacMathúna can be found in this series because they precede the ceili; the one in English with Nancy McCahill concerns the creation of the Philadelphia Irish Center.