KINDRED LINES: IRISH TRADITIONAL MUSIC ARCHIVE
Published in Features, Issue 2 (March/April 2023), Volume 31By Fiona Fitzsimons
Irish traditional music is both an oral tradition and an art form. It often, though not always, has no set composer and is rooted in a community of practice. It is dynamic and subject to change as artists interpret it, but also as the knowledge and skills are passed between generations of musicians.
Although music is probably the most accessible part of traditional Irish culture, can it ever retain the kind of evidence we look for in family history? I believe that it can and does, and that we should give some thought as to how we use it in research.
We cannot separate Irish traditional music from the families and communities from which it springs. The music they make is a response to the inherited tradition, to the local environment and to history. We find evidence of personal names, place-names, great events and local rows documented in the music. Musical families are common in Irish traditional music. We often hear musicians described as having a ‘musical inheritance’ of generations. This phrase means much more than an innate ability. It includes the early exposure to music: the absorption that brings someone at a young age to practise consistently and deliberately, developing a musical memory, learning the canon and a wider range of influences and how to communicate feeling in the performance.
Above: A traditional music session in the Old Dubliner, Hamburg.
Dolores Keane ‘learned what singing was’ from her aunts Rita and Sarah Keane, both well-known sean-nós singers, themselves members of the Keane Family Ceilidh Band. Martin Hayes’s father, P.J. Hayes, and his uncle, Paddy Canny, were influential fiddle-players. We find dynasties of uilleann pipers—the Rowsomes, the Dorans and Cashes, Irish Traveller families with a distinguished musical heritage.
The relationship between Traveller culture and Irish traditional music is a given. It may provide a ‘way in’ to explore Traveller family history. Travellers were migratory for part of the year. What records they left are dispersed. If they had common names (Connors, Doherty, MacDonagh etc.), it is difficult to separate them out from their doppelgangers, without more corroborative evidence such as a permanent address. Many of the renowned Traveller musicians are documented, however, in the Irish Traditional Music Archive (ITMA) and the National Folklore Collection. By tracing the footsteps of Traveller musicians, we can often follow the families and find them in the records.
The ITMA has a comprehensive library of the commercial output of traditional music (documentaries, recordings, publications, books, sheet-music). Its archival holdings include the papers, music manuscripts and correspondence of some of the greats, including Liam O’Flynn, Grainne Yeats, Tomás Ó Canainn, Derek Bell and other prominent musicians. It also has audio collections of non-commercial recordings (reel-to-reel tapes, cassettes, acetate discs). The ITMA has created a comprehensive catalogue of names, an authority collection, so that people can navigate the archival holdings to find musician ancestors. It aims to provide the English and Irish versions of names, so that no one slips under the radar.
One of the most intriguing collections, from a family history perspective, are the programmes of the Feis Ceoil (from the 1890s) and the Fleadh Cheoil (after 1951). These have a wealth of names of performers and competitors, placing them in a location on a given date. This collection is as yet uncatalogued and you have to do a ‘fingertip search’ to mine it for information.
Irish Traditional Music Archive, 73 Merrion Square South, D02 WK75, 10am–1pm, 2–5pm (https://www.itma.ie/).
Fiona Fitzsimons is a director of Eneclann, a Trinity campus company, and of findmypast Ireland.
Personal Histories
On this Day
April 24
- 1951 Enda Kenny, TD for Mayo West (1975–97) and Mayo (1997–2020), leader of Fine Gael (2002–17) and taoiseach (2011–17), born in Derrycoosh, Islandeady, near Castlebar, Co. Mayo.
- 1945
Above: The steamship Monmouth Coast—torpedoed by a German U-boat near Tory Island on 24 April 1945. (Paul Johnson Collection)
During the last week of the Second World War, the Monmouth Coast, an unescorted steamship en route from Sligo to Liverpool with a cargo of barytes ore from the mines of Ben Bulben, was torpedoed by a German U-boat some seven miles north-east of Tory Island. The captain and fifteen crewmen (including two Irishmen) lost their lives, but one managed to survive, thanks to two locals from Arranmore. Two days later, whilst beachcombing on the north-eastern coast of the island, they spotted a life-raft floating in a remote sandy inlet; they rowed out to it and lifted the tarpaulin, to discover a wide-eyed teenager, Derek Cragg (17) from Liverpool, the mess-room boy from the Monmouth Coast. He explained that the ship had gone down very quickly and that those of the crew who managed to leap clear were sucked down after it. He, too, was dragged down but somehow managed to make it back to the surface, where he spotted the life-raft and clambered on board. He was given every assistance by the islanders and safely repatriated, but had the north-easterly wind that drove him 25 miles blown him into the adjoining inlet, his raft would have been smashed to pieces. Over 30,000 Allied merchant seamen, of every nationality, lost their lives during the war. Despite our neutrality, Irish Shipping lost two ships. The Irish Pine was torpedoed off Greenland in November 1942 with the loss of all 33 on board, and the Irish Oak was sunk in the North Atlantic in May 1943, though her entire crew was rescued by a sister-ship, the Irish Plane.
- 1912 Justin McCarthy (82), Home Rule politician, leader of the anti-Parnellite faction (1891–6), historian and novelist, died.
- 1916 The Easter Rising began.Sir Ernest Shackleton and five of his crew set out on their epic 720-nautical-mile rescue mission in the James Caird, from Elephant Island to South Georgia.
- 1974 The Electricity Supply Board (ESB) announced that Carnsore Point, Co. Wexford, would be the site of its planned nuclear power station.
May 19
- 1935
Above: ‘Lawrence of Arabia’—his father was in fact Sir Thomas Chapman of South Hill, Delvin, Co. Westmeath.
T.E.—Thomas Edward—Lawrence (46), the legendary ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, died as a result of a motorcycle accident in Dorset. For much of his adult life Lawrence was a troubled man. Though his key role in the British-inspired Arab revolt (1916) against Ottoman Turkish rule earned him international celebrity, he was torn by guilt over Britain’s post-war betrayal of the Arabs with the implementation at Versailles of the notorious Sykes–Picot Agreement. Then there was the issue of identity. At the tender age of ten he discovered that his parents were not married, meaning that he and his four brothers were illegitimate. Later he was to learn that ‘Mr Lawrence’, his father, was, in fact, Sir Thomas Chapman of South Hill, Delvin, Co. Westmeath, who, though married with four daughters, had fled with their governess, Sarah Lawrence, first to Wales—where ‘Ned’ was born—and finally to London. He was eventually to find himself increasingly drawn to his father’s homeland. A close friend of George Bernard Shaw and his wife Charlotte—GBS had helped him to edit his major work, Seven pillars of wisdom (1926)—he mentioned his desire in his surviving letters to visit Ireland and often referred to the works of Seán O’Casey, James Joyce and J.M. Synge. Indeed, he hoped to write a biography of Sir Roger Casement. It seems that he never did try to make contact with his half-sisters. In 1954, almost twenty years after his death, some of his old friends visited the two surviving ones, who were living at 39 Northumberland Road, Dublin. They told them that they had followed their half-brother’s career with great interest but likewise had made no attempt to contact him.
- 1870 The Home Government Association of Ireland was founded by Isaac Butt with the aim of establishing a federal system for the United Kingdom, which would grant Ireland a parliament responsible for national affairs. Succeeded by the Home Rule League (1873).
- 1868 Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness, son of Arthur Guinness (1725–1803), brewer and writer who restored St Patrick’s Cathedral (1860), died.