Paper presented to the International Council for Traditional Music conference, London, November 1995 © S. C. Hamilton 1995.

Introduction:

I do not want to dwell for long here on defining the sort of music with which this paper is concerned. Irish traditional music fits well into the ICTM ( IFMC ) definition, and even modern commercial manifestations of it still fit well into this definition:

Folk Music is the product of a musical tradition that has been evolved through the process of oral transmission. The factors that shape the tradition are:

1/ Continuity which links the present with the past.
2/ Variation which springs from the individual or the group.
3/ Selection by the community which determines the form or forms in which the music survives. (come back to this )

I want to give a brief outline of ITM as it was before the advent of sound recording, which is the basis of this paper.
Irish traditional music consists basically of two related but distinct bodies of material:

a/ Songs in both the Irish and English languages.
b/ Instrumental music, for the most part dance music with a very small amount of “ listening “ pieces.

The origins of the bulk of this material are to be found from the 17th C to the present day, and for the most part seems to date from the 18th and 19th centuries.

Song was originally in the Irish language but since the late 17th/early 18th C there has been an increasing body of song in English. This is mainly of local composition although there are some imported songs.
Singing was traditionaly unaccompanied, and very often rubato in character. There was a large body of songs both lyrical and narrative, as wel####l as a body of songs with more specific use and function, almost entirely in Irish, which are now extinct.

Dance music is based on an 8 bar unit, and is commonly found in 4/4, 6/8, 9/8, and 2/4 forms. Music was also traditionaly solo, and accompanied two sorts of dancing:

1/ Step Dancing, normally danced solo but sometimes by a separate couple.
2/Set Dancing, danced by normally four, or occasionaly two attached couples.

Step dancing seems to be the older form, sets being versions of the Quadrille introduced from Europe in the 18th C.
Instrumentation was composed mainly of instruments borrowed from Europe, such as the fiddle and simple system flute. One instrument which was developed in Ireland, probably in the early 18th C, the uilleann pipes. Finally a selection of instruments which in all probabilty, owe their popularity to their increasing mass production towards the end of the 19th C, such as the accordion, the concertina, and the tin whistle.

The social venue for music making and dancing was initially outdoor, mainly due to the restrictive size of houses, but towards the end of the 19th century this was expanded to include dwelling houses, where people would gather informally to “ceilidh“ or “ramble”, or rather more formally for house dances or “gambles”.

This was the state of affairs in Ireland, when in the mid 1880’s the principle of sound recording was being developed in the states. In 1888 Emile Berliner invented the a “talking machine” which was at first seen as a toy and marketed as such..one of the first applications being a talking doll which was produced in Europe. In 1894 Berliner, now back in the States founded the United States Gramophone Company, and in that year offered about 50 different pre-recorded discs. The Phonograph, invented by Edison in 1878, had the advantage of being able to record as well as play, and the introduction of wax cylinders in 1885 made the process easier. However the lateral groove disc eventualy won out as the commercial system, and the vast majority of the early recordings of Irish music were made using this system. Some very few early recordings were made by musicians at home, using a wax cylinder phonograph, and re-recording the tune every time to order! Patsy Touhey the well known piper made a few dozen recordings in this way. The durable, easily reproducable, shellac disc, made it feasible for companies to offer large selections of recordings to the public, but it was the invention of a cheap reliable way to play them, which to a large extent depended on a good clockwork motor, that really led to the opening up of the ethnic record market. Almost all the record companies that were active at the time had ethnic series, which were intended to take advantage of the large populations of different ethnic groups that were living in the USA at the time.

The Irish emigration to America falls into two distinct phases:

1/ The pre-famine phase (1st phase 1718-1729 ) which consisted mostly of the Scots-Irish who left from Ulster, and who moved on from the East coast to follow their trades of farming etc.
2/ The post-famine emigrants who stayed and formed communites in the cities of the Eastern United States.

Although emigration had reduced considerably since the huge exodus in the years after the famine, in the early 20th C there was still a considerable flow of people. For reasons yet to be determined, and outside the scope of this paper, the musicians who were recorded were almost without exception new Irish born emigrants, rather than those of Irish extraction in the US. It may have something to do with increasing prosperity in Ireland leading to more “amateur” musicians at this time, as opposed to the professional musicians of the earlier 19th C, it may also tell us something about the level of musical activity among the mid 19th C emigrants.

Sound recordings in fact took quite some time to become a popular aspect of life in America, and by e###Ÿxtension in Ireland. Although the technology was developed in the late 19th C, and perfected by around the turn of the century, it was only after the first World War that numbers of recordings really began to increase. The following graph shows the number of sides released as a function of date. This information was extracted from Spottswood’s Ethnic Music on Records.

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It is tempting to assume all of this body of recorded material represents what we now think of as “traditional music”. This misconception is reinforced by the fact that among enthusiasts, the better known recordings are of “traditional “ players….the great sligo fiddlers Coleman and Morrison, and McKenna the Leitrim flute player. In fact the recordings fall into two distinct categories.

1/Instrumental music
2/Song

The following graph shows the proportions of song and music throughout the period.

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As can be seen from the above, song forms a large percentage of the total material recorded, and in fact in the post depression boom, forms the majority of the recordings. This material is not however traditional song in the sense that we understand it now. It turns out that almost none of what we would consider to be traditional song……. solo, using traditional voice quality and decoration, using traditional material was recorded…although whether it was actually being performed in the emigrant communities is another matter. As the pie chart shows, song in the Irish language makes up an infintessimal percentage of the total, and from the recording details it seems that this material as well was performed in the “tenor with orchestra style” as opposed to the sean-nós normally associated with it. This style of singing makes up a large proportion of the recorded song, and the rest consists of similar usually accompanied by a group of musicians who would normally also play instrumental selections. The songs are mainly in the sentimental, nationalistic, and humorous class.

musical example

Many of the songs recorded in this period became standards, and for many people especially Irish Americans, represent the essence of Irish music. With the return and reissue of the recordings “traditional” singers here began to sing them, and some of them became “re-traditionalised”.

The instrumental music on the recordings has received more attention from academics because it is more fairly representative of the undiluted tradition of Irish dance music. This is not to say that it was presented on record exactly as it would have been heard at the same period in Ireland. The major difference here is in the move away from solo playing, and this occours in two forms.

1/ One melody player with harmonic accompaniment (solo 2)
2/ Ensemble playing.

Some small number of solo 1 recordings of instrumental music were made, 6.4% but this is insignificant.
The same instruments that were found in 19th C. Ireland are also found on the recordings with the addition of several others such as the piano, the banjo and the picolo. The use of these extra instruments seems to have originated in the states, and is closely tied in to the move towards ensemble playing. The early recordings are solo, and it is only around the mid-twenties, when the Irish record boom really began, that we see large numbers of ensemble recordings.
The reason for the move away from solo performance is unclear, but there is evidence to suggest that it is connected with the new larger venues in which Irish musicians found themselves playing in the east coast cities. The new ensembles tended to expand not by adding or duplicating the traditional instruments, but by including new instruments such as the piano, banjo, and piccolo, all of which, as loud instruments helped audibility.
Later in the post-depression recordings a few of the better known bands began to add standard instruments such as saxophones, clarinets, and occasional brasswind. This experimentation was brought to an end by the collapse of the ethnic recording industry with the onset of the 2nd World War.
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There seems to have been a deliberate attempt to move in the direction of ensemble playing. Some of the early groups tended to exagerate their size. e.g. MacNamara’s Emerald Orchestra in 1924, consisted of a fiddle, a piccolo, piano, and drums! In fact the use of the term orchestra was widespread, nad in fact rarely meant what the word normally implies.

This period of great activity in the mainly New York based recording industry has been called the Golden Age of Irish music. The musicians who recorded were household names back in Ireland, and still are among afficionados of traditional music. As a result of the records names such as John Kimmel, Patsy Touhey, Michael Coleman, James Morrison, John McKenna, and Paddy Killoran are still commonly heard on the lips of today’s musicians, and the tunes that they played, in the styles that they played, and even in the sequence that they were played in, form the basis of the repertoire of most contemporary musicians. Even such a basic concept as the assembling of tunes into sets of normally two, or sometimes three apparently dates from this period when the 3 minute format became standard, and one tune was not enough to fill one side of a record.
The ensembles faded from memory more quickly, especially during the revival period when such music was looked down on by purists as not being traditional. There is a recent increase in awarness of the role of this music however, and many are beginning to find once again that the music of the likes of Martin Beirne and His Irish Blackbirds, Packie Dolan’s Melody Boys, McConnell’s Four Leaved Shamrock Orchestra or Pat Roche’s Harp and Shamrock Band is an attractive aspect of the recent history of ITM.

The start of the 2nd World War conincides with the virtual collapse of Irish ethnic recording in America. The war obviously has a role to play here but it is far from the only reason. Perhaps as important, if not more so in the long run is the fact that as Irish emigration to the US slowed, with emigrants tending to go to England, the second and third generation Irish Americans became more acculturated to mainstream American culture and tended to be content with a tin pan alley version of Irish culture. At home, traditional music was also at a low ebb in this post war period with more and more rural people who up to now had been the main adherents of traditional music turning to the dance halls and cinemas and the American and British culture associated with them.
Terence Brown (Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922-85) claims that in the late 40’s early 50’s that the inhabitants of small town Ireland and small town America danced to the same music and saw the same movies.
Some small number of recordings were made in this period but Irish traditional music was not to be extensively commercially recorded until the revival period which we can usefully claim as beginning in the mid 50’s.
Various factors combined to produce the folk revival. There was an imported aspect concerned with the American folk revival which came both directly and via England. There were homegrown factors such as the foundation of CCE in 1951, and the economic boom in Ireland in the 60’s, which gave many people, especially young people, the resources to buy records and instruments, and travel to listen to music. There were individuals such as Sean O Riada and his work with film music and new forms of ensemble playing. The history of the revival is outside the scope of this work, but if its development can be indicated by the renewed interest in and production of records, the graph below sums it up chronologically.

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In many ways the revival recordings are distinct from their American predecessors. Although some of those released in the 50’s were in 78 format, the vast majority were microgroove L.P records each holding up to 8 times the playing time of the standard 78 record.
However it is in the content and approach that the major differences lie.
One major difference in approach was the appearance of recordings of what I will call for the purposes of this paper “non Commercial” meaning performers who in general did not perform prfessionally, or semi- professionally, and who never sought to perform in these situations though they may have been persuaded to do so by others. This is typical of the group of small “altruistic” companies mentioned below.
The companies that produced the 78 recordings were for the most part large companies who had many other spheres of operation apart from Irish or even ethnic music. There were some small companies whose main or only interest was Irish music, most notably O’Beirne de Witt, but the numbers of records they produced are dwarfed by the major companies such as Columbia, Victor, and Decca.
One typical aspect of the revival recordings is the presence of small recording companies who although they were producing recordings for commercial sale had a altruistic interest in the music as well. This resulted in the commercial recording, for the first time of some types of music which the larger companies would not have seen as commercially viable, including the first recordings of sean-nós singing, and unaccompanied traditional singing in English. Instrumentally we find albums of completely solo performance appearing.
The increasing awarness of traditional music meant that this type of recording although not comparable with the commercial success of other sorts of music, sold enough to enable the producers to stay in business. These companies would include, Gael-Linn, Claddagh Records, Topic, based in England, and Outlet, among others.
Similarly to the American phase, not all of the records released at this time were purely traditional in nature, and again it is in the area of song that this is most apparent. The term “Ballad Boom” is sometimes applied to the early days of the revival, when a new type of presentation of some traditional songs was popularised by singing groups such as the Clancy Brothers. Media treatment of the phenomenon at the time initially made no differentiation between the development of the ballad groups and the revival of traditional dance music and traditional singing, but it soon became clear that the two, although related were to follow different paths in terms of venues, performers and performance style.
At present I am still in the process of analysing the recordings of this period, but the following graph shows something of the relationship between “ballads” and “traditional” as far as 1983.

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The interesting point emerging here is that the ballad groups formed a constant proportion of the overall releases up to c. 1973, when they are overshadowed by “ traditional” recordings. Thus in the 70’s at any rate the revival had certainly moved out of the ballad boom phase.

The continuation of the work will involve further investigation of the revival recordings from similar approachs to those outlined for the American records.

The title of this paper suggests that Irish traditional music was under threat, that it has survived, and hopes to elucidate the role of the recording industry in this. We must be careful not to isolate the recording industry to much in this study. Other related areas such as broadcasting, and the rôle of home recording are of great importance and must be taken into account. In the case of home recording the problem is that it is impossible to quantify.

In drawing conclusions from this work, the first question that must be asked is: What has survived. Is the music that we currently know as ITM actually a survival or a development of what has gone before. That it has changed is obvious, also that recordings have played a major role in this change, but might we be inclined to give too much credence to the more visible factors. Comparison with other similar cultures might warn us to be careful. In Brittany for example, there is a thriving revived traditional music culture, but in this case it survived without the help of early recordings, or any significant braodcasting up to the 1970s!
I have tried to point out that in both periods of recording activity there was a strong admixture of what some would consider “non traditional” material. It must also be remembered that the numbers of Irish records here discussed were completely overshadowed by the numbers of mainline and popular recordings that were issued at the same time, and while traditional recordings may have encouraged those already involved or marginal in the trad. scene, many more would probably have transfered their aleigence to other music