Music travels well. Borders pose minimal obstacles, languages even fewer. Oceans as wide as the Atlantic? None at all, judging by the decision of the National Endowment for the Arts, a US agency dedicated to supporting excellence in the arts, to honour the Irish-American accordion player Joe Derrane with a National Heritage Fellowship. It's a high-octane honour - the highest in America's folk and traditional arts - that has only rarely been given to Irish traditional musicians, reports Siobhán Long

But then this is a man who has played by few of the rules. Derrane is the comeback kid of traditional music. Far from being a typical box player, reared solely on a diet of Irish traditional music, he has sampled everything from west Kerry polkas and slides to jazz, swing, ragtime, rhythm and blues, pop and the occasional gypsy folk tune.

Then, having forged a considerable reputation as a traditional box player back in the 1940s and early 1950s, recording eight seminal 78s, Derrane had the smarts to recognise the shifting allegiances of Boston audiences, which were tiring of traditional sessions. So he sold his beloved button box, invested in a shiny new piano accordion and reinvented himself for a world in which the Top 40 found much larger audiences than tunes with dodgy titles such as The Frieze Breeches and Geese In The Bog.

The 74-year-old, who speaks with the softest Boston accent, says he felt shell-shocked when he heard about his award. "They called me at around 9 a.m., and as I had been out playing the night before I didn't get home until around 2 a.m., so when the phone rang I was sitting in the kitchen with my wife, Anne, drinking coffee, trying to get my eyes open and my heart started. It's an enormous honour. I guess if I were living in England it would be something like getting a medal from the queen. Actually, when I was told I started to shake. I was trembling, and I had to sit down to take it all in."

Derrane isn't the first Irish-American to be honoured. Previous fellows include Michael Flatley, Liz Carroll, Jack Coen and Joe Heaney. With dance, fiddle, flute and song so honoured, Derrane is keen to share the limelight with his beloved accordion, which he says deserves the accolade just as much as he does. "I view this award as a validation of the button box," he says. "The accordion in general has been well respected in Ireland, but in the US that is certainly not the case. There are so many terrible jokes about the accordion. All kinds of accordions - piano, button and continental - have had a bum rap here. There was a period when accordion players couldn't get a job. They were seen as old fashioned and clunky - and now this happens."

Joe's mother, Helen Galvin, a fiddle player from Co Roscommon who is now 101, nurtured his love of music from the time he was old enough to tune in to the Kinsale melodeon player Jerry O'Brien on the radio. "I remember my mother telling me that whenever the accordion was playing, no matter where I was in the house, I would come running and just stand in front of the radio and jump up and down," Derrane says. "And as soon as the accordion stopped, that was it. I had no interest in anything else."

Derrane's parents contacted the radio station and persuaded O'Brien to give their son lessons on the button box. He relished his weekly classes and came to view O'Brien as a second father during their four years of lessons. "I was just enthralled with his playing," he recalls. "My source for the music was very Irish. It wouldn't have been any different if I had been living in Cork and went to Jerry every week for lessons. It was the real thing. Jerry had recorded for Columbia Records, and he played with the most famous Irish band in the Boston area, O'Leary's Irish Minstrels, so these were real top-notch professionals, and one of them was the man that I studied with. He was a wonderful box player."

Derrane's return to playing the music of his parents' home place is the stuff of Hollywood screenplays. Having multitasked his way through jazz, ragtime and pop and formed a Top 40 band with his son, Joe Jr, he then had the pleasure, in 1993, of seeing Rego Records reissue his old 78s on CD and cassette, under the title Irish Accordion. The response was phenomenal, and later that year Derrane was invited to perform at the Wolf Trap festival, in Virginia.

But returning to the music wasn't as simple as it might have seemed to the audience that witnessed Derrane's triumph that day. Even players of his calibre can't expect to be reunited with tunes that hadn't been played in decades without at least a little blood, sweat and tears.

"I was 63 at the time. I hadn't played the button box in 35 years. I didn't even own a button accordion," he says. "So from the time I was asked to perform in October to the time of the festival, in May, I set about practising six to seven hours a day, seven days a week. That's what it took, and the first three to four weeks were painful, using muscles I hadn't used for years. But, you know, after six weeks of that there was no more pain, and I just kept practising. It got easier, I guess. And I knew there was no backing down, anyway."

Despite his prodigious practice sessions Derrane viewed his appearance at Wolf Trap (accompanied by the great piano player Felix Dolan) as a case of once more for old time's sake rather than as the career revival it was. Shortly after, he recorded his first traditional album in more than three and half decades.

"I love reels and slip jigs, but if I have a preference it's probably for hornpipes," he says. "Once in a while I'm lucky enough to get right inside the music. You can let the music take you: it's just an effortless, flowing thing. And then all of a sudden it's over, and you're back to reality. It doesn't happen all that often, but when it does it's wonderful. I think if I didn't have music I'd just wither."

Joe Derrane's CDs include Ireland's Harvest, with Frankie Gavin and Brian McGrath. More details from www.maple shaderecords.com