Name-dropping part of the plan with Ireland’s Chieftains

Paddy Moloney can’t help being a name-dropper when he discusses the extensive history, and the present-day activities, of The Chieftains. But then, if you had collaborated with the roster of celebrated and stylistically diverse names that the Grammy winning traditional Irish music troupe has just in the last half of its 53 year history, you would crow a bit, too.

Among the titans the band has recorded with: The Rolling Stones, Sting, Van Morrison, Elvis Costello, Madonna, Joni Mitchell, Lyle Lovett, Gillian Welch, Willie Nelson, Ricky Skaggs, Bonnie Raitt, Punch Brothers, Art Garfunkel, Bela Fleck, Alison Krauss, Roger Daltrey, Vince, Gill, The Decemberists, Rosanne Cash, Earl Scruggs and a few dozen others.

For Moloney, the Chieftains’ founder, leader, piper, tin whistle ace and lone original member, recounting that A-list of performers isn’t idle boasting. It’s an unavoidable branch of discussion in detailing the global reach of the airs, jigs and reels native to just a single country.

“I’ve always had great faith in Irish traditional music,” says Moloney, who will lead the Chieftains in a performance Wednesday at the EKU Center for the Arts in Richmond.

“Performers like the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem back in the ’50s made popular all the great Irish ballads and did a great job of it. They played Carnegie Hall. They played the Royal Albert Hall in London and the Sydney Opera House. So I was saying to myself, ‘You know, we have this great music, this great folk art.’ I mean, it’s so melodic. It’s accepted all over the world. You don’t have to know the language. The songs, they just get to the people.”

To what lengths have the Chieftains taken their unspoiled brand of Irish music? Try outer space. Two astronauts have championed the band from the International Space Station. Cady Coleman took one of Moloney’s tin whistles on one voyage (“I got it back in great condition, too”) and Chris Hadfield played guitar live via a video ink with the Chieftains and the Houston Symphony. The tune of choice, aptly, was Van Morrison’s Moondance.

“This has been was my mission, and I think it’s working,” Moloney says. “It’s still working. The audience is still there. We don’t go looking for work. They all come to us now, and are still continuing to do so. There is something in the music that affects people. Susannah York, on one of our albums, wrote, ‘Something about this music gets me in the gut.’ Ah, that’s brilliant.”

The Chieftains — which for touring purposes, consists of mainstay members Moloney, vocalist/bodhran player Kevin Conneff and flutist Matt Malloy — get considerable help in bringing that music to life, whether from auxiliary players the band tours with (guitarist Tim Edey, dancers Jon and Nathan Pilatzke and Cara Butler, fiddler Tara Breen, vocalist Alyth McCormack and harpist Triona Marshall) or the players enlisted from the cities and regions visited on tour. Among the invited Central Kentucky guests at Wednesday’s concert will be Berea College’s Folk Roots Ensemble.

Then there is the repertoire that Moloney and company use to fuel their performances. With more than 50 albums of material to draw from, the Chieftains devise setlists as deep and vast as the history of their homeland, which, not coincidentally, plays heavily into their concerts.

Moloney promises music that runs from The Battle of Aughrim (first cut for The Chieftains 4 in 1973), a traditional piece inspired by the 1691 conflict in County Galway that remains one of the bloodiest confrontations on Irish soil, to The Morning Dew, a document of the Easter Uprising of 1916 (recorded with vocal help from Sinead O’Connor from 1995’s The Long Black Veil). Also likely to be featured at Wednesday’s concert will be pared-down tunes from the 1998 orchestral soundtrack to the PBS series Long Journey Home along with The March to Battle (Across the Rio Grande), a Latin/Celtic work from San Patricio, a collaborative 2010 album with Ry Cooder.

“There are quite a lot of new things and new challenges that we’re going to try out on your audience,” Moloney says. “There are things happening every day. Something new always pops up. Connections are there all the time. I mean, who would have believed Roger Daltrey would have wound up on one of our albums, and the Rolling Stones and Sting and people like that? We’re blessed in that way that we have this great music, this great folk art. That’s what has really kept us together for so many years.”

This story was originally published March 5, 2016 at 1:16 PM with the headline "Name-dropping part of the plan with Ireland’s Chieftains."