Ed Reavy was born in Barnagrove, Mudabawn, Co Cavan in 1898. He emigrated to the USA as a teenager with his family in 1912 and settled in the predominantly Irish area of  Philadelphia known as Corktown. Barring visits home in 1922 and much later in 1969, he spent his life there until his death in 1988. A plumber by trade he played the fiddle and composed hundreds of Irish tunes.
“Our house was blessed through the years with visiting musicians who came to hear Dad play and to exchange tunes with him”, his son Joe recalled. “Louis Quinn and Lad O’Beirne, from New York, came often; they were Dad’s closest friends in the music world at that time. Pat Roche, the great dancer from Chicago, would drop in with Frank Thornton whenever they were in town. Michael Coleman, the legendary Sligo fiddler, also visited on occasion. And of course there were our own Philadelphia musicians like Neil Dougherty (and his son John), Frank Hearne, Charlie McDevitt, Mike McIntyre, Tommy Caulfield, John Vesey, and others who came to hear Dad’s music in Corktown.”
Reavy didn’t begin composing himself until the 1930s. Over 40 years, he became one of the most prolific creators of Irish traditional tunes. It is estimated that he wrote between 400 and 500 tunes in all, of which 127 have been preserved in notational form. He recorded a large number of his tunes onto homemade six-inch disks which he stored in his cellar. But heat played havoc with many of them, damaging the disks beyond reclamation. Only in the 1960s, with the interest and aid of his sons Joe and Ed Jnr, were Ed Reavy’s surviving compositions properly collected and put on paper.

In 1971, about 80 Reavy tunes were published in Where the Shannon Rises, a book that Armagh-born fiddler and close friend Louis Quinn (1904-1991) helped to put into print. By that time, many of the tunes in the book had already passed into the active tradition of most players, some of whom were unaware that the Cavan man had written them.

Eight years later, Mick Moloney produced an album, Ed Reavy (Rounder), that featured such instrumentalists as Paddy Cronin, Liz Carroll, Billy McComiskey, Brendan Mulvihill, Martin Mulvihill, Louis Quinn, Maeve Donnelly, and Eugene O’Donnell performing Reavy compositions. Among them were The Hunter’s Purse, arguably Reavy’s most popular tune; In Memory of Coleman, named for the great Sligo fiddler, and Maudabawn Chapel. A hornpipe, The Lone Bush, is about a remarkably resilient shrub outside his family farmhouse in Cavan.
Louis Quinn, once asked how you can tell a Reavy tune, said: “If a tune does not have a good melody, an original good melody, and if it doesn’t have rolls and runs and triplets and double stops that are actually part of the tune, not ornamentation, and it doesn’t play from the E to G string, it’s probably not an Ed Reavy tune.”

According to his son Ed: “He often commented that the basic problem with Irish traditional music is that it’s played on the first two strings of the fiddle and none of his tunes played on just the first two strings of the fiddle. He felt strongly about that and it’s reflected in the tunes he composed. He composed in keys no one else composed in, and would sometimes change keys in the middle of a tune.”
Ed Reavy died in Philadelphia in 1988.

Ed Reavy: For books and audio go to http://www.reavy.us/

Some popular Ed Reavy tunes

– Mudabawn Chapel

- The Dances at Kinvarra

- In Memory of Coleman

- At Reavy’s House

- The Gypsy Girl

Tribute night

A tribute concert for Ed Reavy took place during Fleadh Cheoil, 2010 in Cavan, on Saturday 21st August.