Dear Friends,
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.
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.
Jim Dooley
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’s Saloon at 11th and Blue Island Avenue on the near southwest side of Chicago. Jim’s 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’s fire department. Jim’s 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’s 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’s Fair of 1933-34 and later became an accomplished landscape artist.
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 “The Group Incorporated” playing the current ‘60s popular songs at local high school dances in the Oak Park area.
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 “The Dooley Boys” 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 “The Dooley Brothers.” This group would go on to play many thousands of performances in the ensuing decades. NPR radio has called them the longest continuously running band in the Chicago area after the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Dooley Band with Jim Dooley (2nd from right)
In the 1970s and 1980s the band performed regularly at music clubs on Chicago’s north side including The Roxy, The Barbarossa, The Bulls, Wise Fools Pub, Orphans, Ratso’s, Holsteins, The Earl of Old Town, Somebody Else’s Troubles and (one of their favorites) The Kilkenny Castle Inn. One of the band’s mainstay nightclubs was FitzGerald’s in Berwyn, where the band played regularly from the club’s opening month in 1980 up to this past March, when the band played at the FitzGerald’s St. Patrick’s 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.
In between these club appearances there were myriad other shows: the brothers were featured on the Emmy Award winning television show “Nightclubbing” on PBS Channel 11; numerous radio appearances; King Richard’s Renaissance Faire in the 1970s; the house band for Marshall Field’s 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’s farm there, auditorium concerts, festivals, and community outdoor concerts.
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’s late son Jimmy who played with the band from 2015 through 2018. Mike’s son Mick joined up in 2015 and Jim’s daughter Claire started singing with the band in 2020.
The band has also recorded critically-acclaimed albums and CDs, including their vinyl album from 1983 entitled A Place in My Heart which features mostly Jim’s original compositions. Subsequent CDs are The Road to Lisdoonvarna, Glad Magic, Black Sunshine and a new album Jim and the band just completed recording, which will be released in the coming months.
Mick, Mike, Claire, Jim
Jim had many musical and varied influences. Some of them were The Kingston Trio, Bix Beiderbecke, Bing Crosby, 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.
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.
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.
“The honor of my life has been performing with my Dad on stage, playing guitar with him at our house, and our voices harmonizing together. As our voices harmonized together, so did we.” - Claire
There will be a Celebration of Life service for Jim sometime this fall. Notification will be sent out.
Love,
The Dooleys
Claire, Mike and Mick
