John Dady has seen “A Complete Unknown,” the Oscar-nominated Bob Dylan biopic starring Timothée Chalamet, three times. So far.
“It’s fantastic,” said Dady, the Rochester musician who, with his late brother Joe, became a local institution for blending traditional Irish music with American folk and bluegrass.
As they began playing in the 1970s, the Dady Brothers found plenty of influence in Dylan’s electrified blues and the songcraft of The Beatles, plus the Irish musical legacies of acts like The Chieftains and The Emigrants.
Dady was primed to love the new Dylan film. But he’s got one qualm.
“That scene where Dylan goes into the pub, and [musicians] are singing ‘The Irish Rover’ more in a ‘90s Irish punk version,” Dady said. “That song wouldn’t have been sung that way in 1962.”
He ought to know. Granted, he only turned seven that year, but Dady was a keen pupil.
His time at Charlotte’s Irish Inn with Joe the following decade helped make the Dady Brothers fixtures of the local music scene, essential voices of Irish-American music and eventual Rochester Music Hall of Fame inductees.
It’s why historian Christopher Shannon used the pair to anchor his new book, “Singing From the Heart: The Dady Brothers, Irish Music, and Ethnic Endurance in an American City,” published in December 2024 on local press Starry Night Publishing.
The document weaves the Dadys’ musical contributions into a larger patchwork of the post-World War II experience of Irish Americans in Rochester’s old Tenth Ward neighborhood, where Shannon and the Dadys grew up.
“Originally, they were going to maybe be a chapter,” Shannon said. “But it seemed to me that they needed to be the focus of the story because they bring it all together, the bigger story of the neighborhood and Irish-American culture. They endured.”
Multi-instrumentalist Joe died of leukemia in 2019, ending a decades-long run that spanned several albums, regular treks to Ireland and a network of community that spans continents. It was a blow.
“Joe and I were so connected, I knew what he was going to play before he did,” Dady said.
But as Shannon noted, John endures.
He still leads an annual Ireland tour. He performs at memory-care facilities for older adults. He writes.
At his home near Lake Ontario in Hamlin, Dady and his wife, Carol, live well, surrounded by string instruments and an affectionate adopted cat named Banjo. (It was, in fact, Carol who helped spark his interest in Irish music.) Their five children and seven grandchildren gather for ice skating on the frozen pond out back.
He plays gigs, too. On a winter Tuesday, Dady readied for an upcoming pre-St. Patrick’s Day show at 75 Stutson Street in Charlotte, a half-mile from the former Irish Inn. Also on the program? Irish dancing courtesy of his granddaughter, and fiddle from his grandson.
“I watch him play and I see flashes of Joe,” Dady said. “He’d stick his tongue out, a little bit like the Michael Jordan thing. Whenever Joe got intense, the tongue would come out.”
Backdropped by a mountain dulcimer, a 10-string Brazilian tiple made by the storied C.F. Martin & Company and “the oldest Gibson mandolin you’ll ever see,” Dady can tell stories. About the provenance of his instruments. About his and Carol’s wedding in 1975. About leaving the Aquinas Institute of Rochester after two years due to its strict men’s hair guidelines (and finishing up at Edison Tech).
One of the best stories involves playing with folk hero Pete Seeger, which John and Joe did in 2011 in Beacon, New York, where Seeger lived. After, John walked Seeger, then 92, down a steep alleyway to the parking lot.
“We got to his car, and he pulled out a banjo and goes, ‘John, can I sing you a song?’” Dady recalled. Seeger performed “When I Was Most Beautiful,” begun as a poem inspired by the liberation of women in Japan after World War II.
“It slayed me. I had tears in my eyes,” Dady said. “It was a very ethereal kind of ballad. I was paralyzed.”
Along with Seeger’s influence, the young Dadys also found models in Tommy Makem, an Irish folk singer who regularly hit the New York City club circuit with countrymen The Clancy Brothers in the ‘60s.
One of their stops was on “The Ed Sullivan Show” on March 12, 1961 — a slot that, Shannon writes, helped them become “overnight sensations” and contributed to the burgeoning Greenwich Village folk scene. Dady has since befriended and performed with Makem’s son Rory, as well as Liam Clancy’s son Donald.
Just as the Dadys had their idols, a new generation of Irish-American musicians looks up to them. One is John Ryan, chair of Rochester’s branch of the Irish Musician’s Association, who now plays squeeze box, flute and penny whistle in Dady’s band.
“The Dady Brothers, to us, were the Clancy Brothers of Rochester,” Ryan said. “I listened to them when I was growing up and I sort of played the music that they played. But I never quite did it the way they did it. While they were an influence on me before, now it’s a renewed interest as I learn their music more closely.”
Dady spoke with graciousness about every opportunity he’s had, though he was admittedly reluctant to assume the mantle of an elder statesman. He mentioned playing a festival in Livingston County in the mid-2010s with several younger acts on the bill.
“I looked around and said, ‘Joe, what’s going on? We’re the oldest ones here,’” Dady recalled. “He goes, ‘John, we’re the old dudes now.’ From being the Dady Brothers, the young up-and-comers, to all of a sudden we’re the seniors? That seemed to happen so fast.”
On stage, musicians called Dady a selfless collaborator who knows how to give his all to a crowd.
“He leaves blood on the stage, meaning he pours everything out,” said mandolin player Perry Cleaveland. “Despite how many people are there, despite the context of the show, whatever the particulars are — he doesn’t leave anything left when he’s done.”
“He’ll listen to what everyone puts in,” said bassist Gary Holt. “We can rely on each other, and I can trust him.”
Perhaps most crucially, the Dadys managed to stay local even as they expanded their reach across the ocean. Shannon writes of the brothers’ intentions of forgoing an itinerant life of music — and perhaps being complete unknowns themselves — in favor of planting local roots.
“When most other people like me are going to college, they didn’t follow that path toward upward mobility,” he said, “but at the same time, didn’t reject it all in the name of Bohemian rebellion. What they do is the dream.”
Patrick Hosken is CITY’s arts reporter. He can be reached at patrick@rochester-citynews.com.
This article appears in Dec 1-31, 2024.
