Born into a music-playing family, Joe Cooley evolved into one of the great traditional Irish accordion players from the southern county of Galway, a musician who could inspire knowing nudges and glances among members of a crowd simply by dribbling his fingers on his instrument's keyboard. Well, it is really wasn't that simple -- the digital maneuver would always result in some beautiful phrase or variation from the Irish musical lexicon. While both his mother and father both played the melodeon, and his brothers musicians as well, it was no surprise that Cooley began playing accordion at the age of ten. In his late teens, he was playing music around the midland area and in 1945, he wound up in Dublin where he joined the Galway Rovers Band. In his first year in the big city, he met up with future musical accomplices Sonny Brogan, also a squeezebox man, and Johnny Doran. He became one of the youngest members of the Tulla Ceili Band and helped the group win a contest for best amateur band the next year. This led to the group's first broadcast on Radio Eireann in 1948. He then went off to England for several years and was replaced in the Tulla band by another accordion master, Paddy O'Brien. When Cooley returned to the mother country in 1950, the band would sometimes feature both men on dueling accordions, a delight for fans of Irish music that was still a talked-about event half a century later. Cooley also worked frequently with fiddler Joe Leary, the duo making it to gigs riding tandem on the back of the fiddler's motorbike. Like some kind of Irish musical version of the stalwart postman, the duo roared down all manner of dusty, icy, or rainy roads, the fiddle slung over Cooley's back and the accordion tied to the fuel tank. In 1954, Cooley left for the United States, later joined by his brother, Seamus Cooley, a flutist. He was part of the Tulla tour of the U.S. in 1958, but stayed on after the gigs were finished. Joe went to New York City, where he established the Joe Cooley Ceili Band and the Joe Cooley Instrumental Group, both regularly working combos around the Big Apple's enthusiastic but always dwindling Irish music scene. Eventually things must have looked better for their music in the Windy City of Chicago, because the brothers wound up reuniting there to form a new Ceili band. Finally, they moved to San Francisco, the accordion player's final U.S. base prior to his returning home, and a city where he helped create a lingering following for Irish music. There were performing and recording trips home throughout the U.S. stay, allowing a chance for a reunion recording session with fiddler Leary, as well as a recording with Bridie Lafferty, pianist with the Castle Ceili Band. He finally went home for good in 1973, but it was not a homecoming that was basking in good feelings as he had found out he was dying of cancer. He lasted out almost until the end of the year, during which time a brilliant recording session was set up in a pub in Peterswell. The album Cooley was the result, considered by many Irish music fans to be one of the masterworks of accordion playing and group interplay in this genre. The other musicians included another of his brothers, Jack Cooley, on the bodran and banjo player Des Muckere. The legend of Joe Cooley lives on not only in terms of technically accomplished, musically inventive playing, but more because of the deep feeling and understanding he had for each of the traditional songs he played. ~ Eugene Chadbourne