Dear Friends,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is with very heavy hearts that we inform you of the passing of our beloved Jim – father, brother, uncle and long-time bandmate. He died peacefully at his home on August 8 surrounded by his family after a heroic battle with stage 4 colon cancer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jim was a supremely talented musician, superb vocalist, brilliant guitarist, arranger, and a prolific songwriter, poet, artist, nature photographer, husband and father. Jim formed the original Dooley musical group with his brothers in 1966 and the band has given many thousands of performances from then until this year. The popular group has been a Chicago institution for six decades. NPR radio has called them the longest continuously running band in the Chicago area after the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
He was born into a musical and artistic family. His grandfather, T.W. McMullin, performed Irish music hall ballads in the 1890s on Lake Michigan cruise ships and at Strening\u2019s Saloon at 11th and Blue Island Avenue on the near southwest side of Chicago. Jim\u2019s other grandfather, Tommy Dooley, was a popular fiddler from County Clare Ireland who settled in the Chicago area and was the first captain of Cicero\u2019s fire department. Jim\u2019s father, Thomas Dooley, was a photo engraver at the Chicago Tribune where he composed and set the colors for the Sunday comics. Avis McMullin Dooley, Jim\u2019s mother, was a pastel portrait artist who had an art studio on Michigan Avenue in Chicago with her sister Marion in the 1930s. Avis also exhibited her artwork at the Chicago World\u2019s Fair of 1933-34 and later became an accomplished landscape artist. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jim started out singing at home with his brothers, harmonizing and recording the popular doo-wop songs of the 1950s on a Webcor reel-to-reel tape recorder that our father had given us on Christmas Day, 1956. Sometimes Jim and his brothers would hurry home from grammar school during the lunch hour to make these recordings. Appreciating all kinds of music, Jim and his brothers moved on to harmonizing barbershop quartet music and singing the songs of the Kingston Trio and many other folk music artists of the day. During his high school days, Jim fronted a rock band with some friends called \u201cThe Group Incorporated\u201d playing the current \u201860s popular songs at local high school dances in the Oak Park area.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As he began his college years, in 1966 Jim, along with brothers Joe and Bill, founded the original Dooley musical group known at the time as \u201cThe Dooley Boys\u201d and started playing at colleges and various coffeehouses and nightclubs in and around Chicago especially in the Old Town and Rush Street areas. A few years later, their youngest brother Mike joined the group and the four of them became known as \u201cThe Dooley Brothers.\u201d This group would go on to play many thousands of performances in the ensuing decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the 1970s and 1980s the band performed regularly at music clubs on Chicago\u2019s north side including The Roxy, The Barbarossa, The Bulls, Wise Fools Pub, Orphans, Ratso\u2019s, Holsteins, The Earl of Old Town, Somebody Else\u2019s Troubles and (one of their favorites) The Kilkenny Castle Inn. One of the band\u2019s mainstay nightclubs was FitzGerald\u2019s in Berwyn, where the band played regularly from the club\u2019s opening month in 1980 up to this past March, when the band played at the FitzGerald\u2019s St. Patrick\u2019s Day Celebration for the 40th time. Another regular spot for the band was the Irish American Heritage Center where the band has done over five hundred appearances since the Center opened in 1985 all the way to the present year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In between these club appearances there were myriad other shows: the brothers were featured on the Emmy Award winning television show \u201cNightclubbing\u201d on PBS Channel 11; numerous radio appearances; King Richard\u2019s Renaissance Faire in the 1970s; the house band for Marshall Field\u2019s State Street Store at Christmas and for their other events in the 1980s; summers performing in the pubs of County Clare, Ireland while living at their cousin\u2019s farm there, auditorium concerts, festivals, and community outdoor concerts. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
As a performing band, the Dooleys have played continuously in the Chicago area and Midwest from 1966 to the present day. In more recent years some next generation Dooley family members joined the band, including Jim\u2019s late son Jimmy who played with the band from 2015 through 2018. Mike\u2019s son Mick joined up in 2015 and Jim\u2019s daughter Claire started singing with the band in 2020.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The band has also recorded critically-acclaimed albums and CDs, including their vinyl album from 1983 entitled A Place in My Heart <\/em>which features mostly Jim\u2019s original compositions. Subsequent CDs are The Road to Lisdoonvarna<\/em>, Glad Magic<\/em>, Black Sunshine<\/em> and a new album Jim and the band just completed recording, which will be released in the coming months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jim had many musical and varied influences. Some of them were The Kingston Trio, Bix Beiderbecke, Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole, Donovan, Django Reinhardt, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. Jim was one of those rare persons who was a naturally-talented musician. He was self-taught and never learned to read music. He would just play guitar and sing at home for hours and hours for the sheer pleasure of it. He could hear a song once and just sing it or play it right back on his guitar. He developed a unique guitar finger-picking technique that was all his own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jim simply loved to entertain people and bring a smile to their faces. He always said one of his favorite things about performing was connecting with and talking with all the folks who would come out to a show. When he performed at a show, he never gave less than 100 percent of everything he had, from start to finish, never paced himself or coasted through a show. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Jim was passionate about music and life and love. Over and above everything he loved his family the most: his wife Anna, his daughter Claire, his late son Jimmy, his parents Avis and Thomas, and his brothers Mike, Bill, Joe, Dennis and Tom. There are many others in the Dooley clan that he loved, nieces and nephews, sisters-in-law, uncles and aunts. And his many, many friends were important to him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n