This month’s playlist offers an unique opportunity to hear rare recordings made by the late Tom Davis. Tom was a familiar figure at Irish music events for over 50 years since the 1960s, recording music, song and conversation at fleadhs, concerts and private houses. His recording equipment was high quality and over these years he amassed thousands of tapes featuring both well known figures and lesser known musicians and singers. Tom’s widow Eleanor has generously donated Tom’s large collection to ITMA, where work has commenced on exploring and cataloging what is an invaluable resource for the Irish music community. This playlist just offers a glimpse of the breath and quality that Tom’s life’s work has made to Irish music.  – Pádraic

Uilleann piping was a relatively niche pastime in Ireland of the 1970s and, by and large, men more than women, played the instrument. However, as children learning the pipes back then from Mícheál Ó Riabhaigh in the Cork Pipers’ Club, we had no awareness of these statistics. It seemed to us all, both boys and girls, to be the easiest thing in the world to acquire a practice set and get started. Mícheál made sure that anyone who showed an interest was given every opportunity and encouragement to play. Of the eleven musicians in the above photograph, seven were pipers, four of them females: Mary Mitchell, Rosaleen O’Leary, Mary McCarthy and me. The male pipers were Mícheál himself, his son Eoin and my brother Conal, who played for a few years and would have been a fine piper had he not eventually opted for the flute.

The group of young musicians, seen above with Mícheál in 1975, were on a celebratory day out in Killarney when fiddle player and photographer, Domhnall Ó Máirtín, got us to pose with our instruments. We had just won the Ceol na nUasal category of the All Ireland Slógadh finals for the third year in a row and Mícheál was very proud of our achievement. A lot of time and effort had gone into practising for each round of the competition. Our main piece that year was The Fox Chase, with all the sounds of the hunt, barking dogs, galloping horses, horns, bugles and the crying and lament of the poor fox. To mark our victory, the club commissioned a silver medallion from the well-known Cork silversmith, Fred Archer, and presented one to each member of the group.

Looking at this photograph, taken so many years ago in glorious sunshine and with the flowering glory of the Muckross Park rhododendrons in full bloom, I realised with a start that Mícheál Ó Riabhaigh died just one year later in 1976, beannacht Dé lena anam uasal. His unexpected death was a sad blow to all of us who had grown up learning music from him at our Saturday night session. The Cork Pipers’ Club struggled to continue its activities without Mícheál’s guiding passion and commitment, though it did get back on its feet some years later.

Despite its title, the Cork Pipers’ Club was home to traditional musicians of all shades. The weekly Saturday night session in Dún Laoi on Cork’s North Mall was always a hive of musical activity, with pipes, mandolins, whistles, button accordions, piano accordions, bodhráns and fiddles in the mix. This weekly gathering was the centre of our musical lives and all generations met up and played, sang and danced together there.

Certain families had a strong presence and the mammies and daddies were as active as their children in club activities; Ó Riabhaighs, Ó Grádas, Mitchells, McCarthys, Ó Cathasaighs, O’Learys, Guinevans, Ryans and Twomeys. This was probably a factor in why the club was so good at organising excursions, outings and parties, like the one to Killarney mentioned above. One of our most enjoyable club trips was to Captain Francis O’Neill’s birthplace in Tralibawn each summer. We held a concert on a lorry in the middle of a field and it seemed to go on forever because everyone and anyone who wanted the gig got it! Afterwards we would repair to nearby Bantry town, where we would have a meal and a night of music.

I would like to thank Deirdre Ó Máirtín for kindly permitting the use of her father’s photograph for this blog. The above image is taken from Domhnall’s fascinating photographic record of Cork’s musical life in the 60s, 70s and 80s and which the Ó Máirtín family has generously bequeathed to the Irish Traditional Music Archive. It captures a proud moment for Mícheál Ó Riabhaigh, Chairman of the Cork Pipers’ Club, and for all of us lucky enough to have known him and to have benefitted from his great generosity.

The Domhnall Ó Máirtín Collection at ITMA contains 335 black and white, and colour photographs of Irish traditional musicians taken in Cork 1960s–1980s by the late Domhnall Ó Máirtín. The Collection has been generously donated to ITMA by the Ó Máirtín family.

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Robert Samuel (Robin) Morton

24 December 1939 – 1 October 2021

Listen here to a playlist of music associated with Robin

Robin Morton was among my oldest friends; almost sixty years; that is my first thought, before I think of him as an important figure in twentieth-century Irish song research, or as a significant promoter of the ‘pure drop’ before the term was coined. Yet, it’s possible that, outside of Ulster, he is little known in Ireland.

He certainly was better known in Scotland, where, as a founder member of The Boys of the Lough, the producer of award winning albums by Dick Gaughan, Artie Tresize and Cilla Fisher, founder and principal sound engineer of Temple Records, “The Scottish Record Label”, manager of The Battlefield Band, pioneering producer of records of Scottish harp playing, unaccompanied Gaelic singing, kitchen pipers, fiddle groups and more, Director of the Edinburgh Folk Festival, Chairman of the Scottish Record Industry Association and all round defender of musicians’ right to a decent living and fair treatment, he had a very high profile. Accordingly, in 2008 his achievements were recognised by his being inducted into the Scottish Traditional Music Hall of Fame as the seventh recipient of the Hamish Henderson Award for Services to Scottish Traditional Music.

He is remembered differently in Ireland, especially the ten years he spent in Belfast, from 1962. There Robin was a friend, singer and musician, club organiser, song collector who issued his work in books, on albums and in broadcasts, and who promoted traditional music and song, and mentored its practitioners. He was also a ‘media personality’. I’m inclined to think that it was during those years he discovered and developed the qualities that were to serve him later.

He was born in Portadown, (Co Armagh) where his father, John, was an electrician – and a jazz lover. Thus, after a go at the cornet while at school at Portadown College, Robin gravitated towards Leadbelly and then, like almost everybody of his age, Woody Guthrie. That’s what he was singing in 1962 when we first met.

However, his mother, Mary’s, influence soon told. Her brother, Tom McCreery, hearing of Robin’s interest in singing took him to a pub, ‘The Head o’ the Road’ at Tartaraghan, almost the centre of the Orange universe and only a few miles from the place of its founding. On Fridays, there was singing, all men and all protestants and mostly Orangemen; Orange songs dominated; The mysterious seven, The Maghery riots (Maghery’s the adjoining Catholic Parish), The first creation, The battle of the Boyne, The crimson banner, Derryad flute band, The Orange maid of Sligo, Annie Moore, Cromie’s Orange buck, Shall we from the Union sever, The siege of Derry, Lisnagade. Other songs were sung too, Scottish ones – like The lad in the Scotch Brigade, The harbour of Dundee and The road and the miles to Dundee; Irish songs – Portadown’s a pretty place, The factory girl, The bonny bunch of roses, Sweet Loughgall, Johnny Harte, The wild rover, Rafferty’s pig, Dafferty’s duck, Ellen O’Connor, My bonny Irish boy, The Irish carman, Dobbin’s flowery vale; recitations like “I’m livin’ in Drumlister and English songs too – all the elements of the song corpus of the north of Ireland but with an unusual bias – unionist-centred but, nevertheless, Irish in form and performance style. Some of these songs had seldom been collected from traditional singers, and some never at all – Sam Henry had actively avoided sectarian songs and the BBC’s recording scheme of the 1950s had steered clear too – further, these men would have been suspicious of collectors called Seán (O’Boyle) or Séamus (Ennis), but Robin was with his uncle who was known and accepted, and Robin was too. He went and he listened and he took part – singing Woody Guthrie songs – and he went back, again and again, and eventually he recorded. He also recorded Frank Mills from Benburb in hospital – Robin had, as he said,, “got a kicking” playing rugby for Portadown against Dungannon and got stuck there for a week. That week he recorded ‘Old Arboe’ from an old man who was too shy to be recorded but was caught as he sang behind a screen sitting on a bed pan.

That would have been 1962/3 when Robin was studying for a diploma in Social Work at Queen’s University Belfast. The next year he spent in London – another diploma – in Psychiatric Social Work at the London School of Economics. He met Ewan MacColl and went to Cecil Sharp House to get copies of the songs (like the ones he’d heard among friends, at The Head o’ the Road) that had been collected in Ulster by the BBC, and was disappointed that they could only be transcribed; Ewan to the rescue, he had copies and was happy to allow them to be recopied. Robin came back to Belfast, started work with the families of children who needed psychiatric help and brought those songs with him but, influenced by MacColl, sang Cosher Bailey and Join the British Army. In 1964 he started a club on the lines of the London Singers’ Club, The Ulster Folk Music Society, very well remembered by a generation.

Belfast was full of fine musicians, many of them migrants from the country, some of the Queen’s students, like Henry O’Prey and Seán Quinn played with them in the McPeake’s Ceili Band and so Robin and the rest of us were introduced to fiddler, Tommy Gunn, piper Seán MacAloon, the ivory flute player, James McMahon, mandolin player Jimmy Grimes and John Rea, hammer dulcimer (that unkind people called ‘the bicycle wheel’, unable to musically reconcile the ringing of its undamped strings). There were many more and they were persuaded to play at the club and they became friends. They introduced Cathal McConnell and our network, and Robin’s began to expand.

The Head o’ the Road led to introductions too – like Sam Higginbottom and Arthur Whiteside, a rabid Orangeman (Vivian Molloy who was a neighbour as a child, will testify), who sang some of the most contentious songs in the Orange repertory – The Protestant Maid who introduced arsenic into the Communion bread and, having informed the celebrant priest, challenged him to consume it and prove Transubstantiation – or about The ladder into Purgatory that led from every popish altar and whose descent was each priest’s last act – but he also sang The darling baby, that Robin took over and loved – about a husband’s inability to quieten a child when its mother was away and which subsided as soon as she returned – ‘the wretch’! These were prizes but the best was to come.

I mentioned the legendary ivory flute – its owner, James McMahon (there’s a Facebook page devoted to memories of him) had an older brother, also living in Belfast, Paddy. Paddy was a singer – The shamrock boys from Kill, Edward Boyle, On board the Victory, Mary Neill – not many songs but among the best. Paddy told of a great singer from near where the McMahons were from, Roslea in Fermanagh – John Maguire and introduced him and Robin. He was a great singer, not a shade of doubt. He was a spellbinder – but that was not all, the fields around his farm at Tonaydrumallard held a whole exultation of singers – more of the family, Biddy, Brian, another sister (probably Ellie) – Robbie Doonan – and Nellie and Peter Mullarkey – outstanding singers and outstanding songs – the wonderful love song, Erin the green, now a staple, is owed to Nellie.

There were other recordings made but these two centres, Tartaraghan and Tonaydrumallard provide the bulk. Robin used them to compile Folksongs Sung in Ulster – and showed another side of his character. He mentioned the idea of putting the songs in a book to a more experienced collector and was advised against it – people will just spoil them, he was warned. This may have been a typical attitude, Robin told of showing the first results of his collecting to the Director of the Ulster Folk Museum. He suggested that he could be lent a decent tape recorder – “… but, Mr Morton, what qualifications do you have for this work?” Robin had none that were acceptable, so he went and bought his own machine – a Uher 4400 Report Stereo – the best at the time. And he published the songs because he thought that people needed to know about them.

Folksongs Sung in Ulster issued in 1970, fifty-two songs (including one from his Aunt Sally, Tom McCreery’s wife) of which twenty appeared on two LPs that came out the following year. It was a unique combination and unique for another reason. Most song collections up to then had concentrated on the texts and tunes, most of the discussion was about other versions of the song. Robin’s focus was on the place the songs occupied in the lives of the singers, and the ways they reflected the lives of the people and the history of Ireland – he did include references but they were relegated to an appendix – and I compiled it.

[We are delighted to learn from Alison Kinnaird that Folksongs Sung in Ulster will be re-published in December 2022 accompanied by a CD featuring 22 tracks of the original singers from Robin’s field recordings].

Perhaps this was because Robin had found a new academic direction. He’d given up his work in social psychiatry to begin a degree in Social and Economic History. Without a regular income he put his tape recorder to work as a freelance broadcaster conducting interviews for BBC Northern Ireland Radio, as Robin Morton. A bit later, Cathal McConnell was puzzled to hear someone called Robert Martin, sounding very like the Robin he knew, interviewing for Radio Éireann. Sometimes Robin sold the same interview, differently edited under three different names to those two outlets and the BBC World Service.

At the same time, he had recognised that John Maguire was a genius, not just as a singer, he certainly was that – there was a concert at Belfast’s Whitla Hall, where John held an audience breathless for the entire first half – he seemed to bring his life onto the stage as if in his kitchen – his part is remembered and the headline act has been forgotten – and, again when, singing a song over to himself before a television appearance, he stilled a studio full of hard-boiled sound and lighting technicians, cameramen and floor managers who applauded when he’d finished. But another aspect of John’s genius was conversation. Robin decided he was worth a book. Come Day, Go Day, God Send Sunday: The songs and life story, told in his own words, of John Maguire, traditional singer and farmer from Co. Fermanagh, was published to acclaim in 1973. It was among the folklore books of the year, narrowly failing to win the Chicago Folklore Prize. It was reissued in 2017, by Routledge at a massive £76.00 in hardback but, much more reasonably, £23.11 paperback. An accompanying LP was published by Bill Leader, Leader Records rather later, 1975, I think. It contained 12 songs and is another gem. I had half a dozen that I’d bought for £1.00 each about twenty-five years ago and gave them away to friends last year. It’s time for a CD reissue.

However, that was almost the end of Robin’s work as a collector though he did pursue an interest in issuing a similar book about the fiddler Tommy Gunn and interviewed him extensively but eventually decided it would not have held the same interest. In any case, by that time his life had changed utterly.

It was his own fault. He had such a range of abilities, he could have been a broadcaster, even a Television Personality – for a while he was a continuity announcer for BBC Northern Ireland – or an academic historian or ethnographer, indeed, when he finished his degree in Social History he started a PhD in Edinburgh, comparing the history of the concept and treatment of ‘madness’ in Ireland and Scotland, but the music won out.

In 1967, he’d formed a group with Cathal McConnell (flute, whistle and songs), Tommy Gunn (fiddle, lilting, dancing and songs), and himself (concertina, bodhrán and songs). They’d ‘done’ festivals across Britain under their three names until a promoter in Aberdeen demanded something easier and they became The Boys of the Lough, after the reel. Tommy, then in his sixties, eventually found it too much but not before Robin and Cathal, who’d made an album, An Irish Jubilee, together, in 1971, had met, and enjoyed instant friendship with Aly Bain, a brilliant young Shetland fiddler, and singer-guitarist Mike Whellans who were playing as a duo. The Boys of the Lough was reborn and with Robin and Cathal, Aly and Mike, and when Mike was replaced by Dick Gaughan and then he by Dave Richardson, enjoyed unparalleled success – the first professional folk band – before Planxty, Altan or Dervish – until Robin left in 1979.

That meant another new beginning. He had met and married Alison Kinnaird, an exceptional artist in two fields – harp playing and in engraving on glass – in 1974, and in order to live and work in one place on their very various pursuits, had bought and were converting a disused church at Temple in Midlothian, in the hills to the south of Edinburgh.

Touring with the ‘Boys’ didn’t occupy all Robin’s time and, having produced the LPs for his books and An Irish Jubilee, he recorded Alison’s Harp but none of the existing ‘folk’ labels, Topic, Leader, Transatlantic would take a risk on the, up to then, unheard, sound of a solo Scottish harp. Temple Records was born – The Harp Key: Crann Nan Teud was published in 1978, their first issue. Robin had met the Battlefield Band in 1972 and had produced their first album, in 1980 he became their manager, which he remained until his death. Temple Records enjoyed over a hundred releases, many of them pioneering efforts, scoffed at by others because, like harp music, they were unfamiliar or uncommercial – unaccompanied Gaelic singing, ceol beag (dance music on highland pipes) and piping recitals, groups of fiddlers, early Scottish music. The unifying feature was quality; on which Robin refused to compromise. He loved music but it had to be good music.

In parallel with Temple releases he produced albums for other labels, in many cases launching careers. Some of the Scottish ones were mentioned at the outset but his contribution to Irish music was also of substance. He produced Cathal McConnell, Len Graham, Kevin Mitchell and Geordie Hanna & Sarah Ann O’Neill’s debut albums. Records of fine musicians followed John Rea (Dulcimer), Seán MacAloon (pipes), flute players, Packie Duignan, Séamus Tansey and Josie MacDermott and fiddlers, Séamus Horan and Vincent Griffin, all for Topic.

Seamus Tansey (1943–2022) especially was a labour of love. He and Robin had met in the 60s but hardly again until they encountered one another at the great first “Crossroads Conference” of 1996, when Tansey delivered a blistering attack on the forces of ‘innovation’ in Irish music, and Robin was astonished to learn that this, among the greatest of Irish flute players, had not made a record in twenty years. That was soon rectified and the result is still in the Temple Catalogue.

This led to his, lending his recordings to be digitally copied by ITMA , and later giving them to the Archive where every song or tune, every person mentioned here, may be heard to the benefit of, as Robin always hoped, musicians, singers and researchers alike; untold riches await!

Robin Morton was a pioneer, with Sam Henry and Hugh Shields, among the most important song collectors and disseminators in twentieth century Ulster. His collection is small but his treatment and assessments of the songs and their singers was exemplary. He thought of them as friends, and the mutual respect was palpable.

As a student of song, I appreciate all that, but, as I said, he was my friend – for almost sixty years and his death brought me great sadness but it’s also a matter of great joy that, in his life, my friend made such a difference, to so many and in so many ways!

John Moulden

ITMA would like to thank all those who have contributed to this blog especially Robin’s wife Alison Kinnaird for her generous permission to use the sound recordings in the playlist. We extend our continuing sympathy to Alison, her family, and all Robin’s friends and admirers.

With thanks to Pete Heywood for permission to use images of Robin Morton.

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I knew of Liam O’Flynn before I ever met him, of course. As a young boy in the early 1970s starting to play a few tunes on tin whistle, Mo Cheol Thú and The Long Note on RTÉ Radio 1 were very important in the weekly schedule. Mo Cheol Thú was often listened to in my parents’ bedroom, us children huddling in and Ciarán Mac Mathúna’s soft tones easing us all into a Sunday morning. I have a memory of hearing the clean, clear lines of O’Flynn’s piping on the programme – naturally, I could not have described back then the majesty of his uncluttered flow and the purity of his tone – but his piping did make some sort of impression on that young boy.

I started playing cello when I was seven or eight, and at eleven I got a practice set of pipes and duly phoned the uncle Tomás in Cork to ask where I might go for lessons. He gave me an address for Francie McPeake, “Middle Francie”, as he was known, and there I went for lessons every week for a few years. I was mad keen on pipes by now, absorbing as much as I could, listening and learning at every opportunity.

In August 1976, having competed successfully in the Ulster Fleadh the previous month, I got the chance to attend the Scoil Éigse in Buncrana, Co. Donegal and the uilleann pipe teacher was none other than my hero, Liam O’Flynn. It was a life-changing week…we all – and I remember others in the class included Máire Ní Ghráda, Marion McCarthy and Patrick Mollard – learned tunes and technique, but also in my own regard, Liam convinced me to change how I was holding the chanter with my upper hand – he indicated that as things were, there would be problems further down the road, that I was limiting myself technically. I was using the tips of the fingers on my left hand rather than the “flats” of the fingers. This trait I inherited from Francie McPeake, he in turn having picked this up from his own father who, before taking up pipes had played flute and fife, where tips of the fingers would have worked fine. I spent the best part of the next year re-educating my left hand and incorporating into my playing what I had gleaned from Liam that transformative week.

Apart from attending his concerts whenever I could, including various performances of The Brendan Voyage – and indeed one in Derry in which I was a cellist in the orchestra – the next time I saw Liam was in Dublin in 1988, in Slattery’s of Capel Street. Alongside Seán Corcoran and Dessie Wilkinson I was performing there in Cran and playing a good deal of cello as well as pipes. I remember being on stage and seeing Liam at the back of the room, that mixture of surprise, pleasure and trepidation coursing through my veins.

One afternoon a few months later, the phone rang and it was Liam on the other end, asking if we might meet up as he was thinking of starting a group and wondered if I’d be interested in joining him – he wanted to bring cello into his musical world and was keen to see where that might lead. You can imagine my sheer glee and excitement. We met up in Dundalk and agreed that we would give it a go and there began thirty years of friendship and collaboration.

Soon thereafter, Arty McGlynn and Nollaig Casey came onboard and the four of us toured occasionally together over the next few years. One of the first gigs was at a festival in France, performing to two thousand people in the grounds of a chateau. We played ‘Táimse im’ Chodladh’ that night – to be there in that setting, playing that piece, in that company – the memory still gives me goosebumps.

Liam and I continued to perform on and off during the 90s in various set-ups, occasional gigs, the odd skite into Europe, trips into studios (notably making the album The Fire Aflame in Ballyvourney in 1991) and of course some social gatherings too, with a goodly dollop of rascality and diversion thrown into the mix.

The Wheels of the World, reel; The Pinch of Snuff, reel; Micho Russell’s Reel. From: The Fire Aflame / Seán Keane; Matt Molloy; Liam O’Flynn (Claddagh Records, 1992)

The Planxty reunion in the early years of the new millennium was very important to Liam – after all, it was with that magical combination of himself, Christy, Donal and Andy that his life as a professional musician began in the early 1970s. Liam, like his father, had been a schoolteacher and it was no small gamble for him to leave that secure world behind and to head out into the great unknown. So when Planxty reformed for those few years, the sense of coming full circle was of considerable comfort and joy. Their concerts sold out everywhere, generations of adoring fans flocking in their droves to catch them. I was too young to have managed to see Planxty perform in their initial years, so getting the chance to see them live in 2002 carried with it something of history being recreated. They did a long run of gigs in Vicar Street and I remember phoning Liam as I drove into Dublin, asking him if ‘Little Musgrave’ was on the setlist – it was, and at one level, my life was now complete.

We got to co-operate at a different level in 2004 when I was commissioned to write a large-scale orchestral piece for Liam, ‘No Tongue Can Tell’, a work that opened the Belfast Festival at Queens. That marked a deepening of our relationship on both a professional and a personal level – collaborating at every stage during the composition of a substantial work specifically for him, writing to his strengths to acknowledge his music that I knew so well, but also writing in other ways to push the parameters and challenge us both. We became interdependent over the work’s creation and the trust and bond between us strengthened. A fascinating time that really was and I’m sorry we didn’t get to perform the work more often.

No Tongue Can Tell. Fourth movement. Sheltering Sound / Neil Martin, composer; Liam O’Flynn, uilleann pipes; Ulster Orchestra, instrumental music

Music finds outlets in various ways, and across 2008–9, a number of us found ourselves playing within a short enough timeframe at the funerals of some close friends and family – David Hammond, Liam’s father and Ciarán MacMathúna. We enjoyed, if one can say that, celebrating the lives of those wonderful people through music and decided that there should also be a few outings outside of funerals. We nonetheless and rather wonderfully called ourselves The Funeral Band and had a few most enjoyable gigs. In that posse were Seán Keane, Shaun Davey, Rita Connolly, Arty McGlynn, Noel Eccles, Rod McVey, Seamus Begley, Liam and myself – and Steve Cooney and Dónal Lunny sat in a few times too.

And then there was the quare trip Liam and I, inter alia, made to Romania in the summer of 2009. It was the premiere of a new work by Shaun Davey, Voices from the Merry Cemetery. The overnight train journey from Bucharest up through and over the Carpathian Mountains and almost as far as the Ukrainian border was quite something, the performances themselves unforgettable. We also laughed a great deal on that trip, the exhilaration and enjoyment of it all. But I knew that Liam was hating travel by then – it had become a necessary evil. He’d seen enough of airports and hotels.

We had a close mutual friend in Seamus Heaney, Liam and himself of course performing together over more than two decades as The Poet and The Piper. They were two men very much at ease with each other, both on and off the stage, two masters respecting and delighting in each other’s craft, two outstanding artists, volleying on a stage. Seamus’s sudden death in 2013 set the world reeling and Liam and I were to play at his funeral. I travelled the day before to Liam’s home near Athy to rehearse, and as we sat in his music room, we played music for almost an hour without speaking a single word. No words. Just music. That was enough. Liam had lost a very dear friend and a lot of the music we were rehearsing he’d played a mere ten days earlier when Seamus and himself had shared a stage in Derry. The power and emotion of music were never stronger for me than in that rehearsal and at the funeral the next day.

Not long after Seamus’s funeral, Liam was asked to bring together a group to perform a concert in the Abbey Theatre for ITMA, the essential and glorious archive of traditional music in Dublin. The other three he asked were Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, Paddy Glackin and myself, and after the pleasure of the Abbey gig, we gave some more concerts and the more we played, the more we enjoyed the whole experience. We had all inter-collaborated in different ways over many years, knew each other well and it was nothing other than a great pleasure to be sitting making fine music together. The last concert this all too short-lived quartet played was in November 2016 in Armagh, in the cathedral there. Liam was not himself backstage … he was very subdued and his weight loss was most noticeable. Paddy and I shared our anxieties and sadly within a few months, his terminal illness had been diagnosed. And shockingly, around the same time, Mícheál became gravely ill too.

Liam bravely faced into his illness in the full knowledge that there was no road back, and when I visited him at home, he talked a number of times about his childhood days and how happy they were. Liam’s father, also Liam, was from Kerry and the O’Flynn family would often head there for a summer break. Liam’s father drove a motor-bike and this was their mode of transport on those trips back west – Liam senior up front, his wife Masie riding pillion, and in the side car Liam and his siblings, Maureen and Mícheál. An essential stop on the way there was at Gleann na nGealt (The Glen of the Mad People), a magnificent and expansive glen out towards Dingle. There, Liam senior would recount the local lore and myth of the place, of the healing powers of the water and the watercress in the glen, and young Liam found this mesmerising. As Liam then in his illness recounted this to me, his eyes were dancing with happiness and delight at the memory. The very finest and happiest of days, he would say.

I wanted to write a piece of music for Liam at that time, not to write something afterwards to mark his death as such, but rather to celebrate him in life, and I felt it essential that he got to hear it. So, armed with the image of a young Liam stepping out of the side car, standing there in his short grey-flannels, agape at the beauty and power of Gleann na nGealt, I wrote ‘The Boy in the Glen’. I composed it with Paddy Glackin in mind to play it and one Sunday a few months before he died, we visited Liam and his wife Jane and Paddy played the air over a few times for Liam. Sadly, his health deteriorated sharply not long after that and I only got to see Liam again a few times before he died.

Liam died on 14th March 2018 – and Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin on 7th November. As Paddy Glackin said to me – “half our quartet died this year”

The Boy in the Glen, air / composed by Neil Martin ; West Ocean String Quartet, instrumental music

There was an aura, a forcefield to his music, the piping of Leo Rowsome, Wille Clancy and Seamus Ennis funnelled down through him and out to us. He was influenced by fiddle players and singers and flute players too, and indeed by any musician who moved him. And his passions didn’t lie solely within traditional music either – he enjoyed Bach and Haydn and Vivaldi and Elgar and a whole broad cross-section of genres.

He loved horses all his life and was a most able rider – Jane and himself kept a beautiful yard with some very fine mounts indeed. In his day, Liam was a great steady golfer to boot, a low single-handicapper at one stage. (Himself, Paddy Glackin, David Brophy and I had a most wonderful four-ball at Rosses Point in 2015 – it took us days to recover).

Liam was of a curious nature and read widely, often winnowing what he read into short quotes that he would write on cards and place in his music room, condensed reminders that would offer a way to consider certain things afresh. He took his role in life seriously – he was always prepared and he took pride in his craft.

Like gazing up into a clear starlit winter sky, Liam’s music is boundless and in hundreds of years, people will still marvel at it. There was a consistency to it all, a great hallmark of O’Flynn’s that – consistency. The steady piper, the true friend, the golfer who could shoot three or four pars in a row, the reliable collaborator … always there. After Liam died, his occasional musical partner of more than thirty years, the organist Catherine Ennis, along with Paddy Glackin and myself, played some concerts and Liam’s presence was there still, on stage every time we played, his mark indelible on all three of us. Tragically, Catherine died on Christmas Eve, 2020.

My almost whole-life encounter with Liam, stretching out now over five decades, was deeply enriching at many and various levels and it significantly helped me shape my own way of going. I learned a great deal from the man about music itself, and also about the profession of music – about life, really. We shared many great times and I believe we made some decent music. I consider myself very fortunate to have been in his orbit.

Written by: Neil Martin

Blog Editor: Grace Toland

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First for some background. I am a student in Paris, studying both history (early medieval ages) and archival science in the École Nationale des Chartes. This internship is part of my studies, students must spend two months abroad during the first semester of their 4^th year. How did I find myself in ITMA? Above all, I wanted to do my internship in Ireland as I am writing a thesis on early medieval Ireland. Secondly, I have chosen Dublin because I wanted to meet one of my teachers in TCD (and because I really needed the library for the first reason). And thirdly, I have played the harp for 10 years as an amateur musician. In France we do not have a dedicated institution where music is solely archived. For a while now I have wanted to link my passion of history, archives, and music. So, if you mix all these reasons together, the result could only be ITMA. And I am really happy to have landed here!

So what do I do in this gorgeous Georgian building every day? My main task is to describe, catalogue and organise the Irish music manuscripts in the Derek Bell Collection. During my first week in ITMA, I familiarised myself with this eccentric genius. I delved into the archives which had already been processed, listened to interviews given by him and to his music. I also catalogued and scanned the photographs in his collection. It was really nice to put a face to the name, and to really get a sense of his character, how he spoke and how he performed… everything that makes a simple name come alive. As I usually work with early medieval materials, it is a nice change to be able to see and hear the person you are researching.

Once I had got a sense of who Derek Bell was, I was able to move on to processing the actual manuscripts. This work is a continuation of work done by Orla Dillon, a student from Maynooth University. (Read Orla’s blog here
for more information on Derek Bell and his collection.) Orla was dealing exclusively with Derek Bell’s classical compositions. My work concentrates on the traditional music manuscripts in Bell’s collection. Firstly, I had to separate music manuscripts relating to Derek Bell’s solo career and music relating to his time with The Chieftains. Sometimes it wasn’t clear how items should be categorised but help from ITMA head archivist Maeve Gebruers was always on hand. The sorting of scores meant that I needed to occupy two large tables in the ITMA Library and during this sorting process it was often hard for ITMA Assistant librarian Róisín Conlon to find me as I was hidden behind piles of music manuscripts!

After this first step, I began to describe and sort manuscripts relating to The Chieftains. What I love about this work is that you never quite know what you are going to find from one day to the next. Sometimes it’s film scores, other times it is untitled fragments of tunes which I can’t identify (in these cases I get help from Seán Potts on the third floor, he identifies the tune by playing it on his tin whistle – yes, this is the first time I’ve seen the tin whistle considered an essential piece of office equipment, and I completely love that!). When working on the Derek Bell Collection, everyday has its surprises: one day you find a score called “The dance of the little stout hippopotamus (in pink pyjamas)”, another day it is “The pig’s journey into a potato”, or you find stamps or drawings of animals… If any of you have an idea as to the origins of these titles, or who “Micky the muc” is, please let us know!

Today, I am happy to announce that The Chieftains’ section of the music manuscripts in the Derek Bell Collection is sorted and catalogued: 621 excel lines and 2,390+ pages! This also means that approximately half of Bell’s traditional music manuscripts have been organised. I hope the second half of this collection will be sorted and catalogued in the last month (time goes so quickly!) of my internship here.

I would like to thank my new colleagues, especially my office companion Róisín Conlon for her invaluable help in deciphering Derek Bell’s sometimes illegible scrawls!

by Gwendoline Lemaitre, October 2022

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gallery of images presented below for Heritage Week 2021 comes from the collection of Gráinne Yeats which was donated to ITMA by the Yeats Family in April 2018. Gráinne Yeats (1925-2013) was a professional harper, singer, teacher, arranger, historian and recorded artist. She left an extremely rich collection of printed books, music manuscripts, photographs, slides, lecture scripts, diaries, music arrangements (mostly for the Irish harp), research notes, ephemera, artefacts, and commercial & non-commercial sound recordings.Yeats’ image collection consists of photographs, both in colour and back & white, negatives and a large number of slides, amounting to just over 1,200 items in total. Gráinne’s life-long passion for the Irish harp is very much reflected in this collection. The collection covers a wide range of topics relating to the Irish harp and will be an invaluable resource to all students and enthusiasts of this wonderful instrument.

During a concert tour of Japan in the autumn of 1972 Gráinne and her husband Michael Yeats travelled by train to Fukui city which is located on the Japan Sea coast in the Chubu (central) region of Japan. There they visited the Aoyama harp factory and collected a nylon strung lever harp which had been made especially for Yeats. The gallery includes is a record of their trip to Aoyama on the 9 October 1972. This harp was one of a number of harps that Yeats performed on. It can be heard on the iconic recording published by Gael Linn in 1980 and re-issued in 1992 Féile na gCruitirí Bhéal Feirste 1792: the music collected by Bunting at the historic Belfast Harpers Festival 1792.
The gallery also looks back at the many harp festivals, concerts and events which Gráinne Yeats attended over the years. Below are just a small sample of the many images in the Yeats collection which focus on this aspect of her life. In the course of her career Yeats performed, tutored and lectured extensively in Ireland, Europe and abroad, including a number of tours of North America, Japan, Russia, India and Australia. She was a frequent attendee at international harping events, most notably the World Harp Congress which takes place every three years at different locations around the world. Yeats and Máire Ní Chathasaigh were the first Irish harpers to perform on the Irish harp at the 1993 World Harp Congress in Copenhagen. Some of the other events featured in the images below include: An Churit Chruiterachta, July 1992; ‘Festival for Irish Harp’, Downpatrick, Co. Down, 1988; The World Harp Festival, Belfast, May 1992; O’Carolan Harp Festival, Nobber, Co. Meath, 1992; and the World Harp Congress, Copenhagen, 1993.

Heritage Council Funding 2021

ITMA’s unique image collection now stands at over 21,700 items. Many of these exist in obsolete physical formats only which limits access to this material to those who can visit the ITMA premises in Merrion Square, Dublin. This year (2021) the Heritage Council has awarded ITMA a grant to digitise, preserve and make accessible, to archival best practice, some 4,500+ slides, negatives and photographs from the collections of two highly significant figures in Irish traditional music: Breandán Breathnach (1912-1985) & Gráinne Yeats (1925-2013).

This gallery of images was published for Heritage Week 2021. The images presented below are from Cnuasach an Bhreathnaigh (the Breandán Breathnach Collection) which was the foundation collection of the Irish Traditional Music Archive. Breandán Breathnach, 1912–1985, was a great expert in Irish traditional music — an uilleann piper, collector, publisher, writer and organiser. His collection contains sound recordings, music manuscripts, printed items, a thematic index of dance tunes, and personal papers and was deposited in trust to the Irish Traditional Music Archive by the Breathnach Family in August 1987.
Breathnach’s image collection consists of photographs, both in colour and back & white, negatives, slides, postcards, etc. and covers a wide range of topics relevant to Irish traditional music, song and dance. His huge passion for the uilleann pipes and uilleann piping is very much evident throughout his collection and it will come as no surprise that the vast majority of images in the collection relate in some way to uilleann pipers and uilleann piping. Breathnach was a founder-member of Na Píobairí Uilleann, along with Seán Reid and others, and was the organisation’s chairman from 1968 until his death in 1985. Many of the images below were taken at Tionól held in various parts of the country including Bettytown, Co. Meath and Ennistymon, Co. Clare.
Breathnach also sourced images from a variety of organisations, media outlets, individuals, libraries, archives, galleries and museums. For example we see here a wonderful image of the Castle Céilí Band taken in 1962 by an Independent Newspapers photographer. The clarity and composition of the image are telling signs that this photograph was taken by a professional. The fun of a great evening in the Francis Xavier Hall, Dublin is very much evident in this picture. ITMA is grateful to Independent Newspapers and the National Library of Ireland for permission to reproduce this image here as part of Heritage Week. However, not all images in Cnuasach an Bhreathnaigh were taken by professionals. The image below from 1957 of Willie Clancy at the first Fleadh Cheoil in Miltown Malbay, Co. Clare may have been taken by an amateur photographer (Jim Griffith a visitor from the States) but what a fantastic picture of a young Willie Clancy surrounded by his many adoring fans! This and five other images taken at the same time were sent to Breathnach by Terry Wilson in August 1985. ITMA would like to thank Terry for granting permission to make this image available here.

Heritage Council Funding 2021

ITMA’s unique image collection now stands at over 21,700 items. Many of these exist in obsolete physical formats only which limits access to this material to those who can visit the ITMA premises in Merrion Square, Dublin. This year (2021) the Heritage Council has awarded ITMA a grant to digitise, preserve and make accessible, to archival best practice, some 4,500+ slides, negatives and photographs from the collections of two highly significant figures in Irish traditional music: Breandán Breathnach (1912-1985) & Gráinne Yeats (1925-2013).

ITMA was delighted to hear in April 2022 that it had been awarded a Community Heritage Grant from the Heritage Council for its project “Physical to Digital: A Complete Scanning Solution for the Irish Traditional Music Archive.” This funding has enabled ITMA to purchase a state-of-the-art specialised large format archival scanning system. Presented below is a collection of LP covers which have been digitised for Heritage Week 2022 using this new scanner.

The scanner which was manufactured by I2S a French company who specialise in image capture and processing is A2 in size. This machine enables ITMA to scan a range of large-format materials which we have been unable to do in-house in the past. Materials like large-sized sheet music, posters, LP covers, a wide range of manuscripts, printed books, periodicals and images. This specialised equipment will future-proof the safe in-house digitisation of all this material for many years to come.

Watch the behind-the-scenes video which documents the installation of this new state-of-the-art scanning system and read our Heritage Week blog here.
Heritage Week 2022 – ITMA Scanner – YouTube

The ITMA LP Collection

The Irish Traditional Music Archive has over 4,100 LPs in its collection.

The 1950s was the first full decade in which the new long-playing vinyl discs (LPs) were on sale. Being easily scratched or warped, the discs were sold in stiff cardboard sleeves, unlike their predecessors, the 78 rpm discs, which normally came in printed paper bags (and sometimes in cardboard ‘albums’ like photograph albums). The cardboard sleeves gave record companies the opportunity to use graphic design to set up favourable associations for the music on the records and thus attract customers. The typical disc was 12 inches in diameter (some were 10) and the sleeves provided a large image surface for artists and photographers. (Nicholas Carolan, 1 October 2011)

The LPs presented here are from a collection recently donated to ITMA by the Mac Ionnraic Family. They mostly date from the 1970s and 1980s with one published in 1968 by Gael Linn – Trup, trup, a chapaillín. The collection includes recordings of Irish and English language songs as well as instrumental music. Many of the artists and groups popular at the time are represented in this collection including Clannad, De Dannan, The Black Family, Moving Hearts, etc.

The selection presented here is only the tip of the iceberg, with this new large-format scanner ITMA hopes in time to scan every LP cover in its collection!

Another gallery of LP sleeve designs from the 1950s is available below.

With thanks to the Mac Ionnraic Family.

Shamrock, Rose and Thistle: Folk Singing in North Derry is a classic collection-study made by Hugh Shields of seventy-four traditional songs in English, several in multiple versions, which he recorded in the field from 1961 to 1975 in Magilligan, north Co Derry. It was first published in Belfast in 1981.

Presented here are photographs of most of his source singers – chief among them being Eddie Butcher – courtesy of Evelyn Mullen, daughter of Eddie Butcher, and of the Shields family.

ITMA was delighted to hear in April 2022 that it had been awarded a Community Heritage Grant from the Heritage Council for its project “Physical to Digital: A Complete Scanning Solution for the Irish Traditional Music Archive.” This funding has enabled ITMA to purchase a state-of-the-art specialised large format archival scanning system. Presented below is a collection of LP covers which have been digitised for Heritage Week 2022 using this new scanner.
The scanner which was manufactured by I2S a French company who specialise in image capture and processing is A2 in size. This machine enables ITMA to scan a range of large-format materials which we have been unable to do in-house in the past. Materials like large-sized sheet music, posters, LP covers, a wide range of manuscripts, printed books, periodicals and images. This specialised equipment will future-proof the safe in-house digitisation of all this material for many years to come.

Watch the behind-the-scenes video which documents the installation of this new state-of-the-art scanning system and read our Heritage Week blog here.

Heritage Week 2022 – ITMA Scanner – YouTube

ITMA Poster Collection

The Irish Traditional Music Archive has 1000s of posters in its collection.

The humble poster still catches the attention in spite of the increasing use of electronic advertising media in Irish traditional music, and it brings to public notice festivals, summer and winter schools, concerts, recitals, dances and classes, and a whole variety of publications. The effect of posters has been noticeably enhanced in modern times by increasing local expertise in graphic design and computerised printing, and they are likely to continue to decorate shop windows and pub walls far into the future.

The poster has a secondary, archival value: it serves as a record of events and the places in which they take place, the performers who appear at them, the groups in which they appear, the instruments they play, and a range of other information, from prices to other advertising techniques. Often the poster remains as the only record of a musical event and the people who participated in it. For these reasons, the Irish Traditional Music Archive has always actively collected posters (along with flyers, programmes, and other advertising material). (Nicholas Carolan, 1 April 2010)

Presented below are a selection of Irish music posters from three different sources in the ITMA collection. The first is a collection of posters donated to ITMA recently by Paddy Glackin. The posters mainly focus on Dublin based events in the 1970s and 1980s in venues such as Trinity College and Liberty Hall. The second selection of posters is from the Tomás Ó Canainn collection which was donated to ITMA by his family in 2020. These posters date from the 1970s and feature the Cork group Na Filí which Tomás founded in the late 1960s with fiddler Matt Cranitch and whistle player Tom Barry. Finally a selection of poster from ITMA’s collection is also featured below.

Féile na Bóinne, the Drogheda Folk Festival, was first organised as a weekend festival in January 1976 by a local committee of the Tradition Club of Drogheda, with an emphasis on Co Louth performers. It was next held on a larger scale in October 1977. A great concourse of singers, musicians, and dancers came to the town from all parts of Ireland that year, and parallel sessions of recitals, concerts, workshops, lectures, and sessions were held in the Whitworth Hall, the O’Raghallaighs GAA Club, and other local venues. The festival continued on a smaller scale into the 1980s. Revived in the 1990s, Féile na Bóinne still continues annually as an autumn weekend festival.

Many of the artists at the 1976 and 1977 festivals were photographed in performance by Drogheda professional photographer Joe Dowdall of West Street. His artistic work constitutes a valuable record of traditional music of the period, memorialising older source-singers and musicians who were then being discovered, and the young performers who were learning from them, in what was a heady and exciting period for Irish traditional music. Many of the singers, musicians and dancers pictured here have since died, and it is good to be able to see them in their heyday.

In 1998 Joe Dowdall generously donated his Féile na Bóinne prints and negatives, and their copyright, to the Irish Traditional Music Archive for its use, and copies of them have since appeared in various publications.

Do you have photographs of Irish traditional music? ITMA would welcome their donation or the opportunity to copy them.

With thanks to donor Joe Dowdall and to Gerry Cullen for his good offices.

Nicholas Carolan, 1 December 2009

Since 2006 the Irish Traditional Music Archive has been in a productive partnership with The Journal of Music in Ireland (JMI) in publishing in each issue of the journal a black-and-white archival image from its collections on some aspect of Irish traditional music (as well as extensive listings of recent publications). Each image has accompanying text by Nicholas Carolan.

In 2007 the JMI became an online journal as well as continuing to publish in hardcopy, and the Archive’s images are now available on the JMI site. In 2008 the JMI became the Journal of Music with which the project continues.

With thanks to editor Toner Quinn and JM staff. With thanks also for the donation of photographs to ITMA and for other facilitation to the Breathnach Family, Luke Cheevers, Ken Garland, the Irish Examiner, Antain Mac Lochlainn, Liam McNulty, Pat McNulty, the National Library of Ireland, O’Donoghue’s public house, Merrion Row, Dublin, the Gerard O’Grady Family, J.B. Vallely, & the directors of the Willie Clancy Summer School. ITMA always welcomes such donations or the opportunity to copy such materials.

Nicholas Carolan & Treasa Harkin, 1 August 2008

After the concertina had been introduced to Ireland from Britain by concert recitalists of the 1830s, and was sold, manufactured and taught in Dublin from the 1850s, it spread throughout the country, in various forms, as a mass-produced instrument of popular music. By the end of the century, it had also been taken up widely by players of Irish traditional music, and its adoption coincided with the growing popularity of quadrille-style set dances among traditional dancers.

But the concertina began to fall from favour in the 1920s, eclipsed in most parts of the country by the new louder accordions, and by gramophones as sources of music for dancers. It retained its popularity however in Co Clare, to such an extent that by the 1960s it was being thought of as a purely Clare instrument. This popularity is reflected in the gallery of concertina images presented below from the collections of the Irish Traditional Music Archive.

In the last three or four decades however, with increasing prosperity, the growing availability of high-quality tuition and instruments, and of recordings by virtuoso players, the concertina has once again become a national Irish instrument.

With thanks to photographers and photograph donors Fran O’Rourke, Liam McNulty, Joe Dowdall, Chris Corlett, Orla Henihan, Danny Diamond, Steven de Paoire, & Susie Cox, and to Mick O’Connor for information. ITMA would always welcome the donation of other photographs of concertina players.

Nicholas Carolan & Treasa Harkin, 1 February 2014

Essentially, everyone who learns an Irish traditional tune is a collector of the music, and most interested people will have a memorised collection, even if they don’t sing or play an instrument. But what is normally meant by the term are those dedicated individuals who amass over time large numbers of songs and melodies and preserve them on a variety of paper media or on sound or video recordings. They may partly be motivated by personal or commercial considerations, but most collectors are altruistic, driven by a wish to preserve and share something that they themselves enjoy and value. Some may in time publish items from their collections.

The collectors featured in this gallery from the collections of the Irish Traditional Music Archive range from those of the 18th and 19th centuries who of necessity collected with pen and paper and had the rare skill of being able to jot down melodies at first hearings, to those modern collectors with the no less valuable skill of operating audio and video technology to faithfully convey the reality of live performance. A debt is owed to all of them for enabling people now and in the future to experience the past of the music, and for providing materials for its ongoing re-creation.

Also here while it is still active is a link to a recent RTÉ ‘Nationwide’ programme (this programme is no longer available on the RTÉ Player) which featured the work of the collectors Jim Carroll and Pat Mackenzie on the occasion of their recordings being made available through the Clare County Library here. An ITMA feature on their Irish collections can be found below.

With thanks to Colette Moloney, Ríonach uí Ógáin, Peter Browne, & Lisa Shields.

Nicholas Carolan & Treasa Harkin, 1 June 2015

The accompaniment of Irish traditional music and song as well as the range of instruments employed has evolved and expanded in pace with developments within the music itself. As accompanists continued to explore new avenues of expression, listening audiences have grown more appreciative of their impact on performance.

This gallery of photographs while spanning the decades is a modest selection of accompanists and their instruments from the ITMA image collection.

With thanks to Stephen Power, Dónal Lunny, Eve O’Kelly, Tony Kearns, Paul McCarthy and Danny Diamond for their permission to reproduce photographs.

Jim Carroll, of Liverpool Irish descent, and Pat Mackenzie, herself an Anglo-Scot, have been immersed in traditional singing and in other oral traditions since their earliest involvement in the 1960s. They were both members of Ewan McColl’s influential Critics Group in London, and their study of traditional song there brought them in 1973 to the ongoing tape-recording of Irish Traveller singers in London and, a related project, of traditional singers in west Clare, as well as of English and Scots singers. They have lived in Co Clare since 1998. Their private collection is now one of the largest in Irish music, and they have generously deposited copies of it in the Irish Traditional Music Archive, the British Library, and other public repositories.

A wide selection of their recordings have been published on LP, cassette and CD since 1978: Paddy’s Panacea (singer Tom Lenihan, Clare, 1978, LP), Early in the Month of Spring (Irish Travellers singing & story-telling in London, 1986, cassette) incorporated in From Puck to Appleby (Irish Travellers singing in England, 2003, 2 CDs), ‘… and That’s My Story’ (British & Irish story-tellers, 1991, cassette), and Around the Hills of Clare (Clare singers, 2004, 2 CDs). Royalties have been kindly donated to ITMA and other institutions.

The selection of sound recordings given here represents only the main categories of the Carroll-Mackenzie Collection: their Traveller recordings, their Clare recordings, and their recordings of Irish musicians in London. All of the Collection is freely available for listening and study in ITMA.

With thanks to the singers and musicians presented here, and to Pat Mackenzie & Jim Carroll for their donations of digitised sound recordings, printed materials, & information over many years.

Nicholas Carolan & Danny Diamond, 1 December 2012

Ann Lane, a political activist from Cork and personal assistant to Mary Robinson as Senator and as President of Ireland 1990–1997, was living in the early 1970s in 42 Lower Mount Street in south central Dublin, a Georgian building in a terrace since demolished and replaced by an office block. She acted as its caretaker as it awaited redevelopment. Uilleann piper Liam O’Flynn and his brother Michael took an apartment in the building about 1972, as did, somewhat later, the famous traditional music collector and musician Seamus Ennis. Late-night parties were held in the house, and it became a meeting place for contemporary traditional musicians. They included those who were then in the process of forming the group Planxty, soon to be world-famous, and Planxty held its first rehearsal in the house.

Ann Lane made recordings at parties in no 42 on audio cassette, a new technology then, and also at the landmark Planxty concert in the National Stadium, Dublin, in 1973. She recorded Seamus Ennis in performance at the Swamp Folk Club in Rathmines, Dublin, at about the same time. Ann has kindly donated her recordings and photographs of the period to the Irish Traditional Music Archive, and a selection of the recordings is presented here. She has also recorded an interview on camera for ITMA about her musical memories of the time.

With thanks to Ann Lane, and, for permission to reproduce these recordings of their music, to Andy Irvine, Dónal Lunny, Matt Molloy, Christy Moore, and Liam O’Flynn.

Nicholas Caloran & Danny Diamond,  1 October 2011

This was successfully submitted for the degree of MA in September 1966 to the National University of Ireland. The thesis examined and indexed two unpublished Joyce manuscripts held by the National Library of Ireland, MSS 2982 and 2983 (which have since been presented in facsimile on this site, courtesy of the NLI, with interactive music scores for its Limerick contents). The two are correctly considered as two volumes of a single manuscript, having as they do continuous pagination and tune numbering.

Detail from title page of Caitlín Uí Éigeartaigh’s thesis.

This thesis is also a historical document in its own right, being one of the first-ever postgraduate theses written on the subject of Irish traditional music. The original is a foolscap-size typescript which was accompanied by index filecards. The typescript is reproduced in facsimile here courtesy of Caitlín Uí Éigeartaigh, a former lecturer in music in Coláiste Phádraig (St Patrick’s College of Education), Dublin; secretary of the Folk Music Society of Ireland; and lecturer at the College of Music, Dublin Institute of Technology. She is preparing for publication an edition of the music manuscripts of the Cork collector William Forde (1795−1850).

After an introduction to Joyce and his work and concentrating on melodies rather than song words, the typescript thesis describes the manuscript, the method used in compiling a thematic index on filecards of its tunes, and its treatment of the titles in the manuscript. It lists Joyce’s music sources, and examines in great detail his transcriptions from the manuscripts of the Co Kerry collector James Goodman (1828−96), comparing them to his method in transcribing from the manuscripts of the collectors William Forde and John Edward Pigot (1822−71). The thesis ends with consideration of the musical modes to be found in the Joyce manuscript and with conclusions drawn from this study, and with bibliography and indexes of song and tune titles in Irish and English.

Also reproduced here courtesy of the author is an article based on her thesis:

Caitlín Uí Éigeartaigh, ‘Patrick Weston Joyce: The Collector as Editor’, Éigse Cheol Tíre. Irish Folk Music Studies vol. 2, 1974−1975 [1976], pp. 5−14.

With thanks to Caitlín Uí Éigeartaigh.

The Folk Music Society of Ireland – Cumann Cheol Tíre Éireann – was founded in Dublin in 1971 by a voluntary group of interested individuals who felt that the 1960s revival of Irish traditional music, song, and dance performance had not been accompanied by an appropriate growth in the study of traditional music.

Their aims were to encourage interest in the music and to promote research into it. Prominent in the group from its beginning were Dr Hugh Shields, Breandán Breathnach, Tom Munnelly, Alf Mac Lochlainn, Máire Áine Ní Dhonncha, Aoileann Ní Éigeartaigh, Seán Ó Baoill, Proinsias Ó Conluain, Caitlín Uí Éigeartaigh, and its Chairman Professor Seóirse Bodley. Several had written from 1963 for Breandán Breathnach’s traditional music magazine Ceol.

For 30 years, from 1971 until 2001, the Society ran an annual public lecture series in Dublin, and this programme was added to periodically by recitals, exhibitions, day- and weekend-seminars, and conferences. An occasional journal Éigse Cheol Tíre – Irish Folk Music Studies was published from 1972, and later publications included monographs on bibliography, discography, popular music of the eighteenth century, Dublin songs, the local accent in traditional music, narrative songs in the Celtic languages, and international ballads. An associated audio-cassette series European Ethnic Oral Traditions was edited by Hugh Shields, who also edited most of the Society’s publications.

As the performance of Irish traditional music had reached unprecedently high levels by the beginning of the new millennium, and as the study of the music was increasingly being catered for by third-level institutions and summer schools throughout the country, it was decided that the aims of the Society had largely been accomplished. Most of its activities were discontinued in 2003, but its publishing arm remains, and those of its publications still in print are available for purchase from the Irish Traditional Music Archive here.

The Society’s newsletter Ceol Tíre was begun by its editor Hugh Shields in November 1973 and continued by him and Nicholas Carolan (who was Secretary of the Society 1977–1992) until December 1989. In its summaries of Society meetings and other activities it outlines much of the progress made in the study of Irish traditional music in those years, and it also includes songs, tunes and useful source-material. The complete run of Ceol Tíre is available for viewing or for downloading as searchable PDFs below.

In its aims and philosophy, and in many of its personnel and activities, the Folk Music Society of Ireland was a forerunner of the Irish Traditional Music Archive. The personal collection of Breandán Breathnach was the foundation collection of ITMA, and its holdings have since been greatly augmented by the personal collections of Hugh Shields, Proinsias Ó Conluain and Tom Munnelly.

For further details on the Folk Music Society of Ireland – including a list of its activities and publications – visit the FMSI website.

With thanks to Lisa Shields, Caitlín Uí Éigeartaigh, & Professor Seóirse Bodley.

Nicholas Carolan & Maeve Gebruers, 1 August 2012