The Limerick-born music collector, historian, and educationalist PW Joyce (1827–1914), in spite of his very many publications, generally has only been represented by one undated photograph. Showing him in his prime, it is presumably one that he commissioned and approved for use. It was widely reproduced during his own life time.

Patrick Weston Joyce (CID158)

In 2013, a second undated Joyce photograph was donated to ITMA by his great-nephew Robert Dwyer Joyce of Dublin; it shows PW Joyce with his wife Caroline at a family meal.

Patrick Weston & Caroline Joyce at lunch (CID18219; Image courtesy of Robert Dwyer Joyce)

Another six photographs of PW Joyce, mostly taken at festive family gatherings in his home at Lyre-na-Grena, Leinster Road, Rathmines, have now been donated to ITMA by actor and singer Éamonn Hunt. They are all dated and are reproduced here in chronological order, ranging from 1896 to 1911. They show a solid prosperous Dublin middle-class family at the end of the Victorian era. At least one was taken by Joyce’s son, Weston St John Joyce, an author and keen photographer. Another proves to be the source for the photograph of Joyce and his wife received earlier from Robert Dwyer Joyce. The final photograph shows an elderly Joyce by himself in 1911, seemingly at 18 Leinster Road West. Joyce moved to the new address, where he was cared for by servants, after the death of his wife and the dispersal of his family.

Éamonn Hunt stumbled upon the photographs about 17 years ago. Although he did not recognise the subjects, he knew that the photographs were of historical interest and preserved them. After ITMA mounted its PW Joyce Microsite, Éamonn identified Joyce from his official photograph, contacted ITMA, and kindly donated his photographs for public use. The many other photographs discovered in the cache have been returned to the Joyce family.

With thanks to Éamonn Hunt

Nicholas Carolan, Treasa Harkin, Rebecca Draisey-Collishaw, 31 May 2018

The Illustrated London News (ILN) was the world’s first illustrated weekly newspaper and was first published on Saturday, 14 May 1842. Published by Herbert Ingram, this Victorian publication reached a weekly circulation of over 300,000 copies, bringing news to life with detailed woodcut engravings depicting personalities and events of the day. Success brought other competitors to the market and in 1869, former ILN engraver William Luson Thomas launched The Graphic. These newspapers now provide the modern reader with a visual record of history including events relating to Ireland, and an insight into Victorian perceptions of the Irish.

We have digitised a selection of these illustrations taken from ITMA’s own newspaper collections.  These were published between 1844 and 1893 and depict or include Irish music, song, dance or musical instruments. Political parades featuring marching bands; banners & flags bearing a symbolic harp; St. Patrick’s Day celebrations; dancers and ballad singers as well as well-known musical figures such as Thomas Moore & George Petrie are among the selected images. Some are of a journalistic nature while others betray a more caricaturist approach to the depiction of the Irish during the 19th century.

The Illustrated London News ceased publication in 2003 and The Graphic in 1932.

John Nicholson of Belfast, last of the substantial ballad-sheet printers of the city, flourished from the late 1880s to the late 1910s. During these decades, he occupied the Cheapside Song House, premises at 24 or 26 Church Lane in the city, from which he also sold songbooks, some of them of his own printing.

Nicholson’s product was sold across Ulster, and especially in counties Down and Antrim. His core market was loyalist and orange but, as will be seen from the sheets reproduced below, he also to a degree catered for nationalist and green sentiment and published songs of general interest.

The Irish Traditional Music Archive has recently been able to purchase an unusual sheet of four uncut nationalist-sentiment Nicholson ballads, and this is presented here as the second of two uncut Nicholson ballad sheets in the ITMA collections. The first, also a purchase, is a sixteen-ballad sheet of loyalist sentiment. The songs on both uncut and undated sheets are also copied as individual items. The final four Nicholson ballad sheets here were donated to ITMA by the late Leslie Shepard. All items are also presented in PDF format for ease of enlargement and printing.

With thanks to Leslie Shepard, Jill Shepard Glenstrup, & Dr John Moulden, who has donated to ITMA a copy of his 2006 Ph.D. thesis The Printed Ballad in Ireland: A Guide to the Popular Printing of Songs in Ireland, 1760–1920.

Nicholas Carolan & Maeve Gebruers, 1 August 2013

Miss Honoria Tomkins Galwey (31 May 1830 – 7 January 1925), an almost forgotten North of Ireland collector of Irish traditional music, edited the varied collection presented here: Old Irish Croonauns and Other Tunes, published in London and New York by Boosey & Co in 1910 and containing 72 dance tunes and song melodies (with some song texts). Many items are Irish and all were ‘written down exactly as I heard them’. Source-notes are included, and the collection was deservedly well regarded in its own time.

Born to Ven. Charles Galwey, a musical Cork-born Church of Ireland Archdeacon of Derry, and Honoria Knox of Prehen, Co Derry, Miss Galwey lived also from childhood in Inishowen, Co Donegal, where her father was rector of Moville, and much of the music she ‘re-collected and collected’ came from the oral tradition of both counties. Although she collected from a range of lilters, whistlers, singers, fiddle, concertina and jews-harp players, and from manuscript, an important source was uilleann piper Tom Gordon of Moville, Co Donegal. A singer and a seemingly self-taught pianist who had played with traditional musicians, she was still playing within a few weeks of her death in Derry. Through her musical interests, she was linked to a turn-of-the-century network of Irish cultural activity in Britain and Ireland: that of the poets Alfred Perceval Graves and Moira O’Neill, the arrangers Charles Wood, R. Arthur Oulton and Arthur Somervell, the composer Charles Villiers Stanford, the singer Plunkett Greene, and the folklorist and founder of the Gaelic League Douglas Hyde – several of these also the children of Church of Ireland clergymen. She made her collections available to the Irish Folk Song Society, founded in London by Graves and others in 1904.

Honoria Galway first appeared in print late in life, as the contributor of seven melodies (also presented here) and some traditional verses to the 1897 Boosey volume Irish Folk-Songs, a collection of mostly original song-lyrics written by A.P. Graves and set to traditional melodies by Charles Wood. Subsequently three of her collaborations were published as sheet music before Old Irish Croonauns first appeared in 1910, to be followed by a later Boosey Co reprint and an American facsimile reprint in 1975, and a later item of sheet music. She was a source of the song ‘Over Here’ (‘Oh, the praties they are small’), which was rewritten by Graves to relate to the Great Famine, and the song ‘Molly Brannigan’ also owes its popularity to her. Following her father, she always held that the famous ‘Londonderry Air’ belonged as much to Donegal as to Derry.

Also reproduced here from the collections of the Irish Traditional Music Archive are a 19 September 1908 postcard from A.P. Graves (1846–1931) to Miss Galwey and a 22 September 1908 letter from her to Rev. Leslie Creery Stevenson (1878–1961), a hymnwriter and a Church of Ireland curate at the time on Rathlin Island, Co Antrim.

ITMA would welcome donations of or the opportunity to copy four known sheet-music items related to airs collected by Honoria Galway: ‘The Blackbird’ (words by Moira O’Neill, music arranged by Arthur Somervell), ‘Molly Brannigan’ (old words, music arranged by Sir C. Villiers Stanford), ‘Slumber Song’ (words by Moira O’Neill, music arranged by R. Arthur Oulton), Two Irish Airs (music arranged by Mary Tomlinson): 1 ‘The Rock on the Shore’ (words by B.F. Stuart), 2 ‘Little Blue Pigeon’ (words by E. Field). All are believed to have been published by Boosey & Co in London.

Nicholas Carolan & Maeve Gebruers, 1 December 2014

The Scottish musicologist Alfred Edward Moffat (Edinburgh 1866 – London 1950) was a highly regarded scholar and editor of music, with a specialisation in early British composers for the violin.

Having studied music in Berlin, he had professional connections with German publishing houses, and also edited for the London publishers Augener & Co. and Bayley & Ferguson, between about 1894 and 1907, some thousand national songs in a Minstrelsy of… series . These volumes typically comprised 200 songs, and represented respectively Scotland, Ireland, England, Wales, and the Scottish Highlands. Most appeared in different undated editions in the 1890s and early 1900s, and were reprinted in the 1970s in the United States.

Moffat’s Minstrelsy of Ireland: 206 Irish Songs Adapted to Their Traditional Airs, reproduced below in its fourth and final edition, first appeared in 1898 (undated but with a preface of 1897) with three further editions produced by the early 1900s. The original edition comprised 200 songs, arranged by Moffat for voice and piano, but six more were added in the third edition.

The particular value of Moffat’s Minstrelsy of Ireland now resides in the pioneering historical notes that accompany each song, and which involved him in original library research in Ireland. They show a wide knowledge of early Irish printed collections of music, and also make connections with early British collections. His preface acknowledges the assistance he received from Irish scholars such as P.W. Joyce, and from British scholars such as Frank Kidson of Leeds and John Glen of Edinburgh. Alfred Moffat also edited in the early 1900s various other undated Irish collections, such as his Gems of Irish Melody and Irish National Songs, and items of Irish sheet music.

For permission to reproduce this digitised edition and for other help, the Irish Traditional Music Archive is indebted to Alfred Moffat’s great-granddaughter Tricia Rawlingson Plant.

ITMA would welcome the donation of other materials of this kind which are not yet in its collections (check our catalogues here), or of their loan for copying.

Nicholas Carolan & Maeve Gebruers, 1 February 2012