The uilleann piper Patsy Touhey was the most celebrated Irish traditional musician of his day. Born in 1865 in Co Galway, he flourished in the USA as a professional entertainer and became a prime mover of the Gaelic music revival in the States. Today his music is a byword for unsurpassed virtuosity.
His crucial importance to the history of Irish traditional music is that he is the earliest traditional musician of whom we have a substantial body of sound recordings, giving us a unique insight into the incredibly rich world of traditional music making in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
The largest single collection of recordings of Touhey’s music is the Busby-Carney collection, which is now held at the Irish Traditional Music Archive. This collection contains private cylinder recordings made by Touhey himself and often featuring spoken introductions by him. A remastered selection from the collection is given here.
Jackie Small, Harry Bradshaw & Danny Diamond, 1 August 2008
Patrick J. (‘Patsy’) (1865–1923), traditional musician and vaudeville entertainer, was born 27 February 1865 in Cahertinny, Bullaun, Loughrea, Co. Galway, son of James Twohill, or O’Toole (1839–75) (all variations of the surname being anglicisations of the Irish ‘Ó Tuathail’), a professional piper in service to local gentry, and Mary Twohill (née Curley). Two of his paternal uncles were itinerant pipers in England, and his grandfather, Michael Twohill (b. 1800), was an accomplished piper who had trained under Patrick Cummings of Athenry, Co. Galway, whose family for generations had kept a piping college. When Patsy was three he was brought by his parents to America. Reared in the Irish enclave of south Boston, he received lessons in piping from a pupil of his father, the Mayo-born Bartley Murphy, but then abandoned the instrument for a time.
His interest was rekindled at age 18, when, while working in a timber yard in Brooklyn, New York, he saw a performance in a Bowery music hall by John Egan (c.1840–c.1897), the celebrated ‘albino piper’ from Dunmore, Co. Galway. He and Egan toured the eastern states together in the ‘Irish Hibernia’ variety show of Jerry Cohan (father of George M. Cohan), performing individually and as a duo on stage in a concert setting (1886–7). Under Egan’s tutelage Touhey perfected his technique, eventually surpassing his mentor in his bold mastery of the regulators, the use of which to provide harmonic accompaniment to the melody line was a controversial new development in the art of uilleann piping. Thereafter Touhey performed with various travelling companies and enjoyed a long residency in the Pleasant Hour tavern on West 42nd St., New York. He came to wide attention when engaged to perform inside the ‘Donegal castle’ at the 1893 Chicago world’s exposition. Francis O’Neill (qv), the Chicago-based traditional musician and music collector, contemplated the striking contrast between the eminent Donegal piper Turlough MacSweeney (Tarlach Mac Suibhne (qv)), an unpolished rustic who played on his ancient instrument at the castle’s entrance, and the youthfully buoyant Touhey, fashionably attired in corduroy trousers and ribbed stockings, and expertly plying his great set of modern pipes, and identified apt images of the antiquated and oppressed Ireland of the past, and the boundless aspirations of a regenerated Irish nation.
Touhey was a leading draw at the 1903 Louisiana purchase centenary exhibition in St Louis, commanding his own considerable price to appear in the ‘Irish village’. Enthusiastically supporting the cultural programme of the Gaelic League, he played for league functions in many localities, and appeared at the 1902 feis ceoil in New York’s Carnegie Hall. Touhey married (c.1904) Mary Gillen; it is not recorded whether they had children. His prowess as a musician notwithstanding, he derived most of his celebrity and income as a touring vaudeville entertainer. Performing as a comedian, comic actor, and musician on music-hall stages throughout America, he was renowned for a lengthy partnership (1904–18) with Charles Henry Burke. Their fifteen-minute sketches would include a musical interlude during which Touhey played the pipes, as a solo performance, and as accompaniment to Mary Touhey’s step dancing. However, the ‘Mick-and-Pat’ routine of situation comedy, slapstick, and verbal gags and repartee, smacked of the stage-Irish caricature popular with working-class immigrant audiences, but disdained by the upwardly mobile element of Irish America, embarrassed by the crudely blatant ethnic stereotyping. The tenor John McCormack (qv), engaged with Touhey at the 1911 New Orleans fair, was so incensed by such features of Touhey’s act that he insisted it be removed from the programme.
A left-handed player, ‘the only Patsy Touhey’ (as he was billed) was universally regarded as the finest uilleann piper of his generation, acclaimed for his fertile imagination, dexterous execution, and endless variety in ornamentation. A trademark elaboration, associated with the tight staccato tripletting of the Connacht tradition for which he was renowned, was his use of backstitching, often as a final flourish near the end of a piece. His pipes were made in America by the Drogheda-born Taylor brothers of Philadelphia, and included their modified concert-pitch chanter, which produced a loud sound, suitable to the large venues that Touhey played. Francis O’Neill, in comparing Touhey to the other great piper of the day, the Chicago-based Bernard Delaney, adjudged that while Delaney was the better player to accompany dancing, Touhey was the more versatile, boasting the greater range, virtuosity, and expressiveness, and hence the more satisfying for listening. Touhey contributed an appendix, ‘Hints to amateur pipers’, to O’Neill’s seminal study, Irish folk music: a fascinating hobby (1910). First observing the Edison phonograph at the Chicago world’s fair, Touhey, appreciating the device’s commercial potential, became one of the first Irish traditional musicians to make sound recordings. Buying an Edison machine in 1901, he recorded as the technology required separate performances on individual wax cylinders. Compiling a catalogue of some 150 tunes, he bypassed commercial recording companies, and sold the cylinders himself by mail order. Six of his cylinders, posted by O’Neill to the musicologist Richard Henebry (qv) of Waterford, are in the department of music at UCC. Henebry praised Touhey’s playing as ‘the superior limit of Irish pipering’, and was moved to lavish rhetoric by his rendition of ‘The Shaskeen reel’, discerning ‘the life of a reel and the terrible pathos of a caoine’, suggestive of ‘human man climbing empyrean heights and, when he had almost succeeded, then tumbling, tumbling down to hell, and expressing his sense of eternal failure on the way’ (quoted in O’Neill (1910), 113–14).
In 1919 Touhey recorded several tracks for the Victor label issued on 78-rpm flat discs for play on the new hand-cranked gramophone. The piping of Patsy Touhey (1986), by Pat Mitchell and Jackie Small, includes a biographical sketch, detailed analysis of his technique, and transcriptions of fifty-eight of his tunes. An accompanying cassette tape of the same title comprises a selection of his surviving recordings; additional tracks are included on a 2005 CD reissue (NPU CD 001). He is also represented in several multi-artist compilation recordings. Genial and obliging, devoid of professional jealousy, Touhey was unaffected in demeanour, and modest of his talent. He died suddenly 10 January 1923 in his home at 1175 Concourse, New York.
Source: Dictionary of Irish Biography https://www.dib.ie/
