Remembering Mike Rafferty, 1926-2011

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On Tuesday, September 13, the day Mike Rafferty passed away, I received in the mail two invitations: one was for the 2011 National Heritage Fellowships ceremony in Washington, D.C., and the other was for a Sierra Club membership. Whether coincidence or kismet, the two were linked in my mind to Mike Rafferty.

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The NHF invitation from National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Rocco Landesman reminded me that in 2010 Mike Rafferty became just the 11th Irish artist to receive a National Heritage Fellowship in the now 30-year history of the awards. The list of nine honorees for 2011 contained no Irish artist. Rather than register my customary dismay over this absence, I was profoundly grateful for the presence of Mike Rafferty on the list for 2010. To be considered for a National Heritage Fellowship, a nominee must be alive. Last year, in reasonably good health and spirits, Mike went to Washington, D.C., to receive this most prestigious award and the formal adulation he so richly deserved. Finally, the rest of the nation officially woke up to what followers of Irish traditional music already knew: Mike Rafferty possessed--many times over--all the virtues and virtuosity associated with a National Heritage Fellowship.

The invitation from the Sierra Club arrived with a large postcard showing a 3,500-year timeline for the oldest living sequoia, a tree dubbed "Grizzly Giant." The timeline started with the sequoia's sprouting in 1500 BC, marked the tree's flourishing at various milestones (development of the Greek alphabet in 775 BC, fall of the Roman Empire in AD 331, signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, and man's landing on the moon in 1969), and ended with 2011.

Though obviously nowhere near as long as the Grizzly Giant's, a timeline formed in my mind for Mike Rafferty, a giant of Irish traditional music, whose towering stature as a player, instructor, mentor, and companion is readily apparent to his countless admirers.

Mike's timeline starts with Sept. 27, 1926, his date of birth in the village of Larraga in the parish of Ballinakill, East Galway. He was one of seven children raised on a small farm with no electricity, gas, or running water. "I worked with pick, shovel, plow, and horses," he once told me. Influencing his childhood music were Thomas "Barrel" Rafferty, his flutist father nicknamed for the wind and tone he could summon in playing, and Pakie Moloney, an uncle who played flute and whistle and started Mike off on the latter.

"The name of Rafferty was held in high esteem in the Connolly household during my boyhood days," recalled Killaloe, Clare-born fiddler Seamus Connolly. "Pakie Moloney was a regular visitor to our home in Killaloe, and I heard many stories from him about Mike's father and the music in and around Ballinakill. It is difficult to describe how elated I felt when I first met Mike Rafferty in New York in 1972 and had the honor of playing 'The Earl's Chair' with him, a reel that Pakie used to play for me in Killaloe."

Other milestones in Mike Rafferty's timeline include his immigration to New York in 1949, his marriage to Teresa in 1953, the years in which his five children were born, the coaxing he got from Joe Madden, Jack Coen, Mike Preston, and Sean McGlynn to resume playing Irish traditional music after a decade of relative quiescence, his invitation to perform at the Smithsonian Institution Bicentennial Festival of American Folklife in 1976 in Washington, D.C., his retirement from the Grand Union supermarket chain in 1989 that freed him to pursue more fully his passion for music, his induction into Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eireann's hall of fame in 1991, the founding of the CCE branch named after him that he graciously renamed the Mike Rafferty-Joe Madden branch in 2011 to honor his dear departed friend, Lesl Harker's publishing of two books in 2005 and 2008 that together contain 600 tunes learned from Mike, and the years he recorded, especially from 1995 to 2009 when he issued five luminous albums.

In 2003, Mike Rafferty was the Irish Echo's Traditional Artist of the Year, but in reality he gave himself unstintingly to the music in every year I knew him, dating back to 1978, the year I left Philadelphia for Bergen County, N.J. He was an unsecret sharer, openly supportive and encouraging to anyone displaying the slightest desire to play, learn, or listen. Even at an advanced age, his music never lost its grace, pulse, and heart. In 2004, "Speed 78," his sole solo album, was a pun on his age at the time, but it also evoked the era of 78-rpm recordings: no frills, no tricks, no hurry. Just like Mike himself.

With the much younger Willie Kelly on fiddle and son-in-law Donal Clancy on guitar and bouzouki, Mike played flute on his last album, "The New Broom," in 2009. He was 83 years old. The music on that CD is ageless, the gift that never stops giving.

I listen to that album often because it's the musical document nearest to Mike's 84 years of life. But I also listen with endless relish to "Mike Rafferty & Billy McComiskey with Felix Dolan and Special Guest Mary Rafferty," an unreleased, double-CD set of live music privately recorded by Tom Madden, Mike's friend, at the Blarney Star pub in lower Manhattan on March 28, 2003.

 

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