With Mick Moloney's Folklore Tour of Ireland I got much more than I imagined possible with none of the horror stories sometimes associated with coach tours. What Moloney provides is total immersion into the history, culture, traditional music, and contemporary realities of Ireland. Imagine the best history or literature teacher you ever had leading you on a personal journey to the places where the historical events and great stories and poetry actually occurred, and you have the idea.

When he's not teaching Folklore at Villanova University, or performing his own concerts, Moloney leads summer tours of Ireland. In its sixth year, the program features seven itineraries spread out in ten-day chunks from May through September. My wife and I were rookies among a large contingent of repeat tour participants on this mid-July trek through the west of Ireland.

Ayelet Hacohen , from Israel, counted this as her third tour with Moloney, and for her, it's joyous research in the wonders of Irish music. "Fifteen years ago," she says, "I went to see an Israeli group who plays Irish music and fell in love with it." Three years ago she got the birthday gift of a lifetime, a friend bought her a tour with Mick Moloney. "Today I have my own radio show about Irish music and I promote the music in Israel as much as I can through my own website on the internet."
Mick's influence? Ayelet explains, "I learned a lot from him and he has been very encouraging and a good friend. On Mick's tours you get to learn so much about archeology, history, folklore, and politics, and yet you don't feel like you are being educated. Mick's personality and humor has a lot to do with it; the atmosphere is very spontaneous and relaxed. You visit places that the regular tourist never sees and listen to sessions that are the real genuine stuff, not something made for tourists."

But these ten-day tours are not for the casual traveler. The typical day begins with an 8:45 departure after breakfast and doesn't let up until the last ringing notes of Moloney's banjo fade into the night around midnight or later. Each night ends with a concert featuring Moloney and a variety of incredible Irish musicians or a session in a local pub.

During the day you're likely to visit an ancient abbey or two where you'll get the history of monastic Ireland. You'll probably take a nature walk; in our case, it was the famous Burren in County Clare in the west of Ireland. And at least once, you'll be immersed in the literary history of a country rich in storytelling, mythology, and theatre. On this tour poet W. B. Yeats was the one major emphasis and along with other locations associated with his poetry, we visited his grave in Drumcliff in Sligo. Moloney read several of Yeats' poems in the church Yeats attended during his summer stays in Sligo.
Other day excursions include stops at megalithic stone-age tombs, explained by experts in the archaeological digs taking place in Ireland, an afternoon in the Aran Islands exploring a massive, pre-Christian ring fort, and a look at a bog with analysis of what bogs have meant to farming people over the centuries. We even take a couple of hours off schedule at a paradise of a beach in County Donegal under a hot Irish sun and achingly clear-blue skies.

And the music is always present. Even on the bus the tape machine always plays music from each county we travel through. And it is accompanied with expert and often witty commentary on the styles and histories from the various performers from Moloney. Not surprising, since he has played a huge role in the resurgence of Irish traditional music in both Ireland and in the states since the 1970s.

Philadelphia in 1973 after a few years as part of the London folk renaissance, including a stint in the folk group The Jonhstons. Earning a doctorate in Folklore from the University of Pennslyvania in 1992, he has successfully merged careers in music and academics.

He has been the hub around which much of the Irish-American traditional music scene revolves. He has encouraged and produced a generation of young musicians that reads as a "who's who" of the genre, including Eileen Ivers,Jerry O'Sullivan, Seamus Egan, and the groups Cherish the Ladies & Solas. This, in addition to making his own records on the Green Linnet label, doing field work in researching Irish music in America, and being a participant/consultant/musical producer for various television productions, the latest being the PBS documentary "Out of Ireland."

Moloney's musical connections in Ireland are wide and deep as well, and for us it means extraordinary evening concerts with virtuouso musicians. One evening Galway piper Tommy Keane and his wife Jackie McCarthy, who plays concertina, invite all fifty of us into their kitchen for a fine display of reels, jigs, and hornpipes.

Another evening Moloney participates in a "closed session," meaning invitation only for musicians, in Matt Malloy's (of the Chieftains) pub in Westport. The four young musicians are musically accomplished in their playing far beyond the usual standard for the open sessions in which anyone can sit in. But later that evening Moloney goes out to another pub and sits in which several musicians who differ widely in skills. Those of us who are not musicians get a quick lesson in how sessions work and note the humility of the musicians involved; Moloney in particular accepts and encourages the efforts of the less skilled players.

The tour begins with three days at the Willie Clancy School in one of the seedbeds of Irish traditional music, Miltown-Malbay in County Clare. Here musicians and dancers come from all over the world for a week of skill-honing with teaching from experts. The informal pub sessions run nearly around the clock and the whole affair comes to a grand climax with a four-hour traditional music concert on the last night, and we are there. All performers here are treated equally, granted the same performing time, and there are no headliners, though such famous names as Paddy Keenan and Martin Hayes, and Moloney himself, are present. We get back to the hotel after midnight satiated with music, but I hear no complaints.

The purely musical highlight for many of us on the tour comes near the end when Moloney and Derry fiddler Eugene O'Donnell collaborate on two consecutive evening concerts held in the cafe of the folk village of Glencolumcille in remote County Donegal. The two masters perform a dazzling array of ballads, airs, and dance tunes with a musical rapport that comes from a twenty-year musical association.

For myself, the summarizing moment of the entire ten days occurs when Moloney leads us onto an ancient road in remote County Mayo that was especially hard-hit by the famine of the 1840s.
We trudge up the hillside on the pathway known as the Famine Road and at one point Moloney stops us and sings a song. It's called "Skibbereen" and it relates the story of an Irishman who has emigrated to the states during the famine years and realizes that he can never return to his beloved Skibbereen in Ireland. The day is gray and misty, fitting for the thoughts on our minds as the song ends and we walk back down the hillside.
Moments like this, when history, humanity, and music merge as one make this a most unordinary tour. A bus is still a bus, and a schedule is still a schedule, but there is only one Mick Moloney, and the experiences he creates are impossible to duplicate.

POSTSCRIPT: Let me offer a special thanks to Willie Ryan and Dierdre Cronin without whose expert help Mick surely would not survive the summer tours, and a hearty thanks as well to Michael Gibbons, Martin Enright, and Jimmy Carr who share their specialized knowledges with such enthusiasm. And thanks once more to that Mighty Man himself, Mick Moloney, who in only 10 days enriched immeasurably the lives of myself and my wife Irene.

Bill Compton
Lacey, Washington

This article appeared in an edited version in
The Olympian, Olympia, Washington, August 10, 1997