Readings for Tue 4.17

All from Readings Packet; nothing from Glassie or Carson

Three short excerpts which address the period between the Famine (1849) and the advent of sound-recording in Irish music (roughly, 1890). In this period, though both Catholic repression and economic depression (and exile) were eroding traditional culture, the music continued to be important in the lives of the rural Irish—and, for the first time, for large numbers of emigrants who had departed but held onto the music as a recollection of home.

Hall, Reg. “Heydays are Short-Lived: Change in Music-Making Practice in Rural Ireland, 1850-1950.”

Reg Hall is a great scholar of traditional music and is able to correct many of the romantic fictions which have previously been believed about the music and its culture. His summary of the 100 years b/w 1850-1950 is very useful and you should be able to relate it.

Hickey, Donal. “A Blind Fiddler and his Donkey.”

Hickey is a specialist in the music of Sliabh Luachra (“the Rushy Mountain”) on the contiguous border of Cork and Kerry. Tom Billy Murphy, a blind traveling fiddler and teacher, had learned tunes from the Famine piper Garrett Barry, and had taught Padraig O Keefe, last of the traveling fiddle teachers. Murphy is thus a crucial link b/w the post-Famine era and the 20th century.

McNamara, Christy and Peter Woods. “Last Night’s Fun.”

The McNamara/Woods is essentially fiction, relating 2 generations of music in a rural family whose males emigrating, taking the music with them. In this (early) chapter, the story relates how young people learned in the pre-recordings era of the 19th century, and the reaction of rural people when the first 78s recorded in New York began coming back to Ireland.