Joe Heaney

Joe Heaney (AKA Joe Éinniú; Irish: Seosamh Ó hÉanaí) (1 October 1919 – 1 May 1984) was an Irish traditional (sean nós) singer from County Galway, Ireland.

He spent most of his adult life abroad, living in England, Scotland and New York City, in the course of which he recorded hundreds of songs.

Heaney was born in Carna, a village in Connemara, County Galway, along the west coast of Ireland.

This is an Irish-speaking district.

He said he started singing at the age of five, but his shyness kept him from singing in public until he was 20.

He learned English at school in Carna.

When he was 16 years old, he won a scholarship to attend school in Dublin.

While there he won first and second prizes at a national singing competition.

Most of his repertoire (estimated to exceed 500 songs) was learned while growing up in Carna.

In 1949, he went to London where he worked on building sites and became involved in the folk-music scene.

He recorded for the Topic and Gael-linn labels.

He was married for six years until his wife died of tuberculosis.

He was recorded by Pádraic Ó Raghallaigh for Raidió Teilifís Éireann, and by Peter Kennedy for the BBC in 1959.

The BBC recordings were assembled on a BBC LP, not commercially issued, as BBC LP 22570.

He visited America in 1965 at the invitation of the Newport Folk Festival.

After singing at Newport, he decided to move to America and settled in New York City.

In 1981, Australian folk historian Warren Fahey brought Heaney to Australia, where he filled the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall.

From 1982 until 1984, Heaney was an artist-in-residence at the University of Washington in Seattle, and previously had taught at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.

Heaney was a recipient of a 1982 National Heritage Fellowship awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts, which is the United States government's highest honor in the folk and traditional arts.

That year's fellowships were the first bestowed by the NEA.

The Joe Heaney Collection of the University of Washington Ethnomusicology Archives was established after Heaney's death in 1984.

The entirety of the collection was transferred to the National University of Ireland at Galway, where it is freely available online.

The Féile Chomórtha Joe Éinniú (Joe Heaney Commemorative Festival) is held every year in Carna.

In 2007, an Irish-language biography of him titled Seosamh Ó hÉanaí: Nár Fhágha Mé Bás Choíche by Liam Mac Con Iomaire was published.

In 2011, Bright Star of the West: Joe Heaney, Irish Song-Man, co-authored by Sean Williams and Lillis Ó Laoire, was published.

The 2011 biography discusses his work in the larger context of Ireland and the United States, and it won the 2012 Alan P. Merriam Prize for best monograph from the Society for Ethnomusicology.