Paddy O'Brien (musician and author)


Paddy O'Brien is an Irish accordion player and memoirist, author of The Road from Castlebarnagh: Growing Up In Irish Music and creator of the Paddy O'Brien Tune Collection: A Personal Treasury of Irish Traditional Music, the first published oral collection of Irish traditional music.

Life and career

Paddy O'Brien was born in Castlebarnagh, a small townsland outside of Daingean, County Offaly, in the Midlands of Ireland. He is the son of Christopher and Molly O'Brien, who had a small farm in Castlebarnagh. He attended National School in Daingean, and Tullamore Vocational School, and then became an apprentice for Bord na Mona at Boora, where he worked from 1961 to 1969. From an early age, he was interested in traditional music, and played in competitions and on television for RTE. In 1969, O'Brien moved to Dublin and became involved in the Irish traditional music scene there.
Paddy O’Brien is a collector of Irish traditional music; in a musical career that spans more than sixty years, he has collected more than 3,000 compositions—jigs, reels, hornpipes, airs, and marches, including many rare and unusual tunes. He was named Oireachtas champion four times, and All-Ireland senior accordion champion in 1975. In Ireland, he played and recorded with the Castle Ceili Band and Ceoltoiri Laighean.
In 1978, Paddy O'Brien began recording and playing in the United States, in Washington D.C., Saint Louis, Saint Paul, San Francisco, Boston, and New York. He has been featured on six recordings with Shanachie Records since 1978, and in 1988 released his first solo album, "Stranger at the Gate," on the Green Linnet label. His second solo recording, "Mixing the Punch," was released by New Folk Records in 2011, and his work has been included on live recordings and compilations of Irish traditional music.
O'Brien has taught at the Swannanoa Gathering, the Goderich Celtic Week, and the Catskills Irish Arts Week, and at the Willie Clancy Summer School held in Milltown Malbay, County Clare, and has served several times as a master artist in the Minnesota State Arts Board Folk Arts Apprenticeship Program. He has played and toured with other Irish traditional musicians, including James Kelly, Martin Hayes, Susan McKeown, Tommy Peoples, Peter Ostroushko, Patrick Ourceau, and others at concerts and festivals in North America, Ireland, and Europe. In 2007 he was invited to play Irish traditional music for audiences in Moscow.
In 1994, O'Brien embarked on an Irish traditional music project, to record and assemble background information on 500 jigs and reels from his repertoire of traditional melodies. The result was Volume One of The Paddy OBrien Tune Collection: A Personal Treasury of Irish Traditional Music. In 2011, he released The Paddy O'Brien Tune Collection, Volume Two, featuring another 500 tunes, including jigs, reels, hornpipes, slip jigs, and polkas. A third volume of the Paddy O'Brien Tune Collection, Volune Three. containing another 500 tunes, was released in 2013.
O'Brien currently tours nationally and internationally as a solo musician and with his trio Chulrua, and also plays dances and concerts around the American midwest with his seven-piece Irish traditional music group, O'Rourke's Feast. He lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota with his wife, crime novelist Erin Hart.

Discography