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Sean Potts, who learned to play the tin whistle from his grandfather in the 1930s and for a time made an international career out of it as a founding member of the traditional Irish band the Chieftains, died on Feb. 11 in Dublin. He was 83.
His death was confirmed by his son Sean.
Mr. Potts was self-conscious as a boy because, unlike many of his peers, he was drawn to the old music his grandfather John would play with friends in the parlor of his house in Dublin. The grandfather, who had moved to the city from County Wexford, in southeastern Ireland, in 1891, favored tin whistles and uilleann pipes.
Sometimes, after tilling the soil of the small plot where the family grew vegetables during World War II, John Potts would play a tune, then insist that his grandson try to match him note for note.
“He’d correct me,” Sean Potts recalled in a radio interview. “He’d say: ‘Play that piece again, play it again and again. Hold on to that note.’ ”
Years later, after the Clancy Brothers found success in the 1950s playing traditional Irish music in the United States, Ireland itself became newly interested in its musical history. When new groups began performing, all that early practice with his grandfather paid off for Mr. Potts. He began playing with a fellow musician, Paddy Moloney, in the 1950s and joined him in 1962 when Mr. Moloney formed the Chieftains.
Over the next 15 years or so, the Chieftains moved from small stages in Ireland to touring the United States. They eventually signed with Island Records and established themselves, counter-intuitively, as crossover artists, sometimes performing with rock groups, including the Grateful Dead.
“They’re about the most unlikely candidates for big-time pop music stardom that have come along in quite some time,” the critic John Rockwell wrote of the Chieftains in The New York Times in 1975, when they played their first major New York concert, at Lincoln Center.
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Reality is your friend, not your enemy. -- Seacrest
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