Celtic music in the United States

Irish traditional music in the United States has a long and varied history, both in recording culture and by live performances.

Chief O'Neill in Chicago was a major promoter of musicianship and tune collection, greatly impacting the tradition beyond his own day and place of re-settlement.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the classic recordings of Irish traditional music were made in New York by Michael Coleman, Packie Dolan, Hughie Gillespie, Jim Morrison and many others.

In the wake of the Depression and World War, Irish traditional music in New York was belittled by showband culture, and performers like Jack Coen, Paddy O'Brien of Tipperary, Larry Redican, and Paddy Reynolds kept the tradition alive in the United States, and were teachers of the music to Irish Americans.

These were usually "sad laments, steeped in nostalgia, and self-pity, and singing the praises... of their native soil while bitterly condemning the land of the stranger" [3].

He was a flautist, fiddler and piper who was part of a vibrant Irish community in Chicago at the time, one that included some forty thousand people, including musicians from "all thirty-two counties of Ireland", according to Nicholas Carolan, who referred to O'Neill as "the greatest individual influence on the evolution of Irish traditional dance music in the twentieth century" [4].

It was later joined by a roots revival in Ireland and the foundation of Mick Moloney's Green Fields of America, a Philadelphia-based organization that promotes Irish music [6].

Freedom, a foundational principle of American society, was encouraged by the Celtic influence in Appalachia through their contribution to Union forces during the Civil War.

The Union was a more democratizing entity and more willing to accept pluralism in American society compared to their Confederate counterparts who were more bent on maintaining a separatist identity According to Benedict Anderson, “nationality” was formed from the accumulation of cultural artifacts that were able to be transplanted to an array of environments and societies and merge with a wide variety of political and ideological frameworks.

The cultural diaspora from the British Isles, specifically Scotland and Ireland, landed primarily in the Appalachian region of the United States.

Layered regional and national identities were assembled over time in the Celtic-speaking world, centered on practices of both modern and historic Celtic instruments.

This concept of nation building in America is particularly true for the Scots and stems in part from the vast territory that led to development of family autonomy, or Clans, in Scotland and influenced the role of the individual.