In the world of Irish traditional music, Paddy Cronin from Sliabh Luachra in the southwest of Ireland is regarded as one of the tradition's exceptional fiddle players. Although his music exhibits many characteristics of the Sliabh Luachra tradition, it also has other elements and features, primarily from the Sligo style. A pupil of Pádraig O'Keeffe (the “Sliabh Luachra Fiddle Master”), Cronin emigrated to Boston in 1949 and lived there for approximately forty years. Before he left Ireland, he had been familiar with the music of the Sligo masters, such as Michael Coleman and James Morrison, who had gone to the United States many years before him. In Boston Paddy met and played with many of the great Sligo musicians, and also had the opportunity to hear music in other styles, including that of Canadian musicians, whose use of piano accompaniment he admired greatly. This article considers his music before and after he left Ireland, and compares him to Coleman and Morrison by considering their respective performances of the reel “Farewell to Ireland.”

This article, which builds on research in the fields of Irish traditional music, place, and diaspora, focuses on a community of diasporic musicians from Sliabh Aughty, an upland region of approximately 250 square miles that encompasses the musical storehouses of east Clare and southeast Galway in the West of Ireland. It examines the importance of home for these musicians, who have been resident in the United States for many decades. Their personal music geographies are explored to ascertain how traditional Irish music plays a critical role in transcending their sense of dislocation and reconnecting them with “home.”

The emergence of the compact disc in 1979 was regarded as the likely sales salvation of recorded music, and for many years the CD reigned supreme, generating steady, often substantial, company profits. More recently, however, the music industry has painfully slipped a disc. The CD has been in sharp decline, propelled mainly by young consumer ire over price and format inflexibility and by Internet technology available to skirt or subvert both. Irish American traditional music has not been impervious to this downward trend in sales and to other challenging trends and paradigm shifts in recording and performing. Amid the tumult, Irish American traditional music has nevertheless shown a new resilience and fresh vitality through a greater do-it-yourself, do-more-with-less spirit of recording, even for established small labels. The five recent albums of Irish American traditional music reviewed here—three of which were released by the artists themselves—exemplify a trend of their own, preserving the best of the past without slavishly replicating it. If the new mantra of music making is adapt or disappear, then Irish American traditional music, in adapting to change free of any impulse to dumb down, is assured of robustly enduring.