Episode 2.23 (Rita Lally): Teaching Tunes: The Irish Music Academy of Cleveland

In season two of the "Finding Home" podcast series, Irish American Archives Society Executive Director Margaret Lynch interviews an array of Clevelanders with specialized knowledge and stories about the history of the Irish in Cleveland. This episode features an interview with Rita Lally. As a generation of immigrant musicians began to pass away in Cleveland in the 1970s and 1980s, the question of how the next generation would learn to play traditional music became an urgent one. With the goal of creating structured classes, Rita Lally, musician Dermot Somerville and others worked to launch the Irish Music Academy in 1993. As Lally recalls, in its five years of existence, IMAC did nurture a talented young group of traditional musicians who perform, teach, and enliven Cleveland’s Irish music scene to this day.