The dearth of female players may not have made an impression on Ivers, but her example has inspired countless young women to pursue their musical passion.Īs a little girl growing up in Cape Breton, Natalie MacMaster had the best role model possible for a life in music. It was only years later that someone said this is very unusual.” “The fiddle was something I wanted to play as a kid. “The fact that there weren’t really other women out there when we started never entered into my psyche. “It was wonderful, because Joanie and I were childhood friends who went to grammar school together in the Bronx,” says Ivers, 45, who performs with Immigrant Soul on Wednesday at Villa Montalvo and next Thursday at Berkeley’s Freight & Salvage. Ivers helped found the hugely popular group, which boosted her career and set the stage for Immigrant Soul. The County Limerick troubadour, banjo expert and ethnomusicologist had played an essential role in the Dublin folk revival scene in the late 1960s before relocating to the United States, where he was struck by the rising generation of female players.Īlways looking to stir the pot, Moloney created Cherish the Ladies in 1985, an all-female all-star band led by Joanie Madden, the first American to win the senior all-Ireland championship on the tin whistle. Irish-American fiddle star Eileen Ivers is one of the trailblazers, an incandescent player who’s created a turbocharged Afro-Celtic sound with her band Immigrant Soul.īut before she expanded the Irish tradition, she immersed herself in it, first making her mark with Mick Moloney’s Green Fields of America. But in less than a generation, a glorious revolution overturned the old conventions, and nowhere are the results more visible than in the far-flung fiddle community.

For centuries, Celtic music traditions were passed down father to son, a male instrumental confederacy into which few women were welcomed.

Buddy macmaster obit