Chapter 6. A harvest lost

Chapter 6. A harvest lost: the banning of house dancing in early twentieth century Ireland

In preceding chapters some mention has been made of the contrast between the repertoire of music as it was played by Irish concertina players in the house dance era, and music as it is played by young Irish concertina players today. In this chapter we will examine the changes that happened to Irish music in the early twentieth century, and why the modern Irish traditional repertoire is so different not only from that of the Irish concertina players of the house dance era, but from the repertoire of traditional musicians in all other countries where the concertina was played in its heyday.

If we look at the sum total of the recorded legacy of three Irish women who played the concertina in the house dance era and compare it with the recorded legacy to date of three modern Irish women who play the concertina, a stark contrast emerges. The graphs below show a count of tunes by dance type for these three old time players:

Mary Ann Carolan (1902-1985), who played for house dances in The Hill of Rath in rural County Louth in the second decade of the twentieth century, and then stopped playing for over sixty years; Ella Mae O'Dwyer (1906-1992), who played for house dances in her youth and later for dances at her family's dance hall in rural Ardgroom, County Cork in the early twentieth century; and Katey Hourican (ca.1890-ca.1990) of Lough Gowna, County Cavan, of whom little is known, but who was of the same generation as the previous two women.45

Together, these women left recordings of 57 tunes, all made in the middle to late twentieth century. As young women, they played in the last decades of the house dance era, well before the House Dance Act of 1935. All played the German concertina.

A second part of the graph shows a count of tune types by dance for the current repertoire of three well known modern Irish women who play the concertina. Claire Keville, of Claran, County Galway; Edel Fox of Miltown Malbay, County Clare; and Dympna O'Sullivan of Lissycasey, County Clare were all born in the late twentieth century, nearly a century after the earlier three women listed above. All play the Anglo concertina. Each has issued either one or two CDs in the first decade of the twenty-first century. A total of 120 recorded tunes were counted from these recordings.46 Of course, neither graph captures the entirety of the repertoires of any of these six women, but perhaps it captures the general essence of the music they mostly preferred/prefer to play.

Changing irish repertoire

Top: the recorded repertoire of three women concertina players of the house dance era,
by dance type: Mary Ann Carolan, Ella Mae O'Dwyer, and Katey Hourican.
Bottom: the recorded repertoire (CDs to date) for three modern day women concertina players.
Dance types are shown by percentage. The chart shows that the house dance favorites
(schottisches, quadrilles, polkas, waltzes) of the early players are absent in the repertoires of
modern players, to an extent not seen in the traditional music of the other three countries studied.

The differences are very clear. Over the past 80 years or more there has been a great narrowing of focus in the repertoire of Irish musicians - especially concertina players. This change in repertoire favors the step dance music of largely pre-Famine origin (primarily reels and jigs) to the near-exclusion of the many dances of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century house dance era: quadrille tunes, schottisches/flings, polkas, mazurkas, marches, waltzes and barn dances. This abrupt change in repertoire has occurred among musicians all over Ireland, including the Gaeltacht of the west, leaving a gap in the modern Irish repertoire relative to that of the other countries in this study, where the repertoire of 'traditional' dance music played today in Australia, England and South Africa is not particularly different in its mix of dance types than that once played by Carolan, O'Dwyer and Hourican.

But is it traditional music? Playing for round dances, England 1890s

But is it traditional music? A concertina and a banjo playing for round dances, England 1890s.

The story of what happened to early ballroom dance music in Ireland, after a half century of suppression and banishment by clerical, patriotic and government groups, is an important one, not just historically and sociologically, but because of the strong impact it had on concertina playing, both on the repertoire played and on the playing styles employed. It is safe to say that when house dances were banned in Ireland, the concertina nearly died out too - along with most locally composed Irish ballroom dance tunes. If we rejoice in the great nineteenth century collections of Irish music (O'Neill's work has been called A Harvest Saved 47) then we must also consider the harvest of locally composed square and round dance music that was lost, never to be recorded by collectors and their recording machines.

Gaelic heritage under threat, late nineteenth century

After the national tragedy of the Great Famine in the 1840s, the pace of Anglicization of language in Ireland - the growth in the use of the English language over the native Irish tongue - increased dramatically. Whereas Ireland before the famine was mostly Irish-speaking in all areas except for Dublin and its surrounding environs, by 1870 it was predominantly Irish speaking only in the western half of the country.

48 By the early twentieth century the only remnant Irish-speaking areas were in small enclaves, mostly in western Kerry, Galway, Donegal, and Mayo. These areas constitute the Gaeltacht, which has a similar outline today. The change was enormous, not only for the language, but also for the culture that went with it, including music and dance. The great Chicago collector Francis O'Neill began his collecting of Irish music as he lamented the loss of the Gaelic songs sung by his mother in his youth, before the Famine. He noted that 'Where a generation ago a wealth of folk music was the common possession of the peasantry, now scarcely a fraction of it is remembered'.

49 O'Neill built his music collection from the memories of immigrant pipers and fiddlers in Chicago, the last remnants of the old pre-Famine Irish patronage system with its wandering professional musicians. They left during and after the Famine, as there was little money left in rural areas for such luxuries as professional musicians.

The German concertina came to Ireland during this time of great cultural change, and because it was inexpensive and easy to learn it helped fill the gap left by departing professional musicians. This instrument, along with the button accordion and the mouth harp, accompanied an invasion of ballroom dances from central Europe: a popular craze, that had global dimensions. The 1867 dance book of Dundalk resident Kate Hughes contains instructions for eight sets of quadrilles and eight set dances 'of quadrille type', including Caledonians, Lancers, mazurka quadrilles, and waltz cotillons. There were also instructions for some 54 English-style country dances. The dance book only contains instructions for only two reels.50 As Breandan Breathnach noted, 'Before the end of the last [nineteenth] century the sets and half sets had pervaded the country and had completely ousted the old solo dances, jigs, reels and hornpipes, and the group dances based on them...'51

Monaghan's Irish quadrille

An Irish dancing class in New York, 1905. The dancers are learning the 'Irish quadrille',
at a time when the quadrille was being banned as 'foreign' back in Ireland.
From the American Memory collection, Library of Congress.

And then there were the round dances. As Helen Brennan notes:

Apart from the sets, the most popular new dances in the nineteenth century were the ballroom dances such as the schottische, the barndance, the military two-step and the waltz, which became the dance practice of all classes of [Irish] society. When they reached the areas where traditional dance was strong, they were absorbed into the repertoire and subtly changed by the effects of Irish 'stepping' and local musical taste

Not only did the concertina accompany these imported ballroom dances in their conquest of Irish culture, it was also used to play music from the ever-popular minstrel shows and music halls, along with the banjo. Traditionalists and Irish nationalists connected these two instruments and the global music and dance styles that they promoted with the wave of Anglicization that was sweeping away the old Gaelic language from the countryside. In response to this shockingly rapid Anglicization and consequent loss of culture, Douglas Hyde and Eoin MacNeill founded the Gaelic League in 1893. Its goal, as related by historian Donal McCartney, was:

[T]o keep Irish alive where it was still spoken, and later, to restore Irish as the spoken language of the country. By giving up our native language and customs, said Hyde, we had thrown away the best claim which we had upon the world's recognition of us as a separate nation. Therefore the task facing the present generation of Irishmen was the re-creation of a separate cultural Irish nation, and this could only be done by what Hyde called de-Anglicization - refusing to imitate the English in their language, literature, music, games, dress and ideas.

Both the nationalists and the more culturally-oriented members of the Gaelic League took square aim at the concertina and banjo, as well as the "foreign" dance music that was played on them. As this nationalistic observer wrote in 1894:

Since the Union, Ireland has shuffled off her ancient language, with its thousand years of history and its striking imaginative literature, with almost indecent haste. She has neglected the priceless treasure of her ancient national music, and her western peasantry sing the music hall songs of London. The Irish harp and the Irish pipes have given way to the banjo and the concertina. The people have even in thousands of cases changed their names, lest any trace of their Celtic nationality should cling to them.

Potato harvest festival

A group of farmers and townspeople from Athea , Co Limerick, celebrating the potato harvest, 1911.
Several on the right are preparing boxty for the party, and a concertinist (May Nan Stevens)
is ready to play for the dance that would accompany the celebration.
With thanks to the National Folklore Collection, University College Dublin, and to Sean O'Dwyer and Nora Hurley.

A decade later in 1906 music collector Francis O'Neill returned for the first time to the Ireland of his youth, noting that:

A six week's trip through Munster and Leinster ... after an absence of forty years, disclosed nothing which afforded much evidence of a musical regeneration. Not a piper or a fiddler was encountered at the five fairs attended, and but one ballad singer. The competitors at the Feis at Cork and at Dublin were amateurs, except one or two fluters. Their very best performers on any instrument at either Feis are easily outclassed (by émigrés) here in Chicago.

The pipers and fiddlers had largely emigrated, but the music scene was not as depleted as O'Neill let on. Ireland was at this time at the very peak of both the concertina's heyday and the ballroom dances' popularity. It was a time, as many people have reported, that nearly every cottage had a concertina or an accordion. And as Helen Brennan noted (above), ballroom dance was at the peak of its popularity in all parts of the country. O'Neill observed little 'music' in Ireland on his 1906 trip, mainly because he did not think of the ubiquitous ballroom-style popular music and dance that surrounded him as at all 'Irish.' He and those in the like-minded Gaelic League considered ballroom dances, and the concertina and banjo, as abominations, and the ruin of Gaelic Ireland.

Country people, including those in the Gaeltacht, saw this somewhat differently, and voted with their feet. Witness the recollections of Patrick Flynn, of rural Loughrea in County Galway:

My first dance was at a wedding in 1909. It was in a big barn with a good concrete floor and two oil lamps gave light. There was one melodeon and three men and a girl played it in turn. The rule seemed to be a different dance after the last one. They danced Quadrilles or as it was called, the Plain set and the Reel set. The Lancers, which seemed to require more skill, was danced once or twice. After each set, a polka was danced and partners were changed. Then a Fling [schottische], danced in pairs, the Military Two-Step, sets again, and then the Valeta Waltz. There was no M.C. [Master of Ceremonies]. The music seemed to regulate what the next dance would be. When there was a lull, somebody called for a song ...

Dances were mostly held in farm kitchens ... Waltz, Polka, and Lancers were the thing. Reel sets were for the lesser breeds, without the law.56

In the above account, two very new dances (the 1900 Veleta Waltz and the 1904 Military Two-Step) show that Irish dancers were, like their counterparts elsewhere, eager to keep up with the latest fashions. European ballroom dances had by that time been fully integrated into house dances, and were comfortably danced alongside older forms of step-dancing; all were part of an evening's fun. A Ballivor, County Meath woman remembered the dances of her youth, at this same time in the first decade of the twentieth century:

The actual dances were chiefly sets [quadrilles] or more usually half-sets except there was a lot of room and a big crowd. Now and then there was a set of Lancers and now and then some of the men did a step dance - jig, reel, or hornpipe - and I remember some of the old people - a man and two women - doing a three-hand reel. I remember a man who lived near us who had worked for some time in the "North" (south Armagh) and he always did a special dance across a long straw on the floor. There was also a dance called by us a "Seteesh" [schottische]. Also, the Waltz was coming in and one or two could do the Military Two-Step. There were always songs between dances at any dance.

The war of the clergy

The dominance of these ballroom dance styles over older, pre-Famine reels and jigs had caused resentment by moralists and Gaelic nationalists for decades. A key element of moral concern was the clutch-hold of the waltz and other round and square dances, which contrasted so vividly with the relative lack of touch between sexes in the older forms of Irish step dance. Many although not all village priests took direct action against this perceived moral problem, as in the following descriptions, the first from 1912:

The heart and spirit gave way in a sort of terrorism before the priest. In his day of dominance, he did much to make Irish local life a dreary desert. He made war on the favourite cross-roads dances - with exceptions here and there - and on other gatherings where young men and women congregated in the company of their older relations and friends.

Wooden road-side [dancing] platforms were set on fire by curates; surer still, the priests drove their cars backwards and forwards over the timber platforms; concertinas were sent flying into hill streams and those who played music at dances were branded as outcasts.59

In 1924, the Bishop of Galway railed about house dances, where imported 'foreign' dances were featured, and about the young women who flocked to them, often staying out very late:

The dances indulged in were not the clean, healthy, national Irish dances. They were, on the contrary, importations from the vilest dens of London, Paris and New York, direct and unmistakable incitements to evil thought and evil desires.

Fathers of this parish, if your girls do not obey you, if they are not in at the hour appointed, lay the lash upon their backs. That was the good old system and that should be the system to-day.61

Lenten pastoral sermons in 1925 took up the call, recognizing a distinction between Irish dances and 'degenerate' foreign dances:

It is no small commendation of Irish dances that they cannot be danced for long hours. That however, is not their chief merit, and while it is no part of our business to condemn any decent dance, Irish dances are not to be put out of the place that is their due, in any educational establishment under our care. They may not be in the fashion in London or Paris. They should be in fashion in Ireland. Irish dances do not make degenerates.

The Gaelic League and the Government abolish the house dance

At first, the new Gaelic League was primarily an Irish language organization, but it soon turned its attention to dance as a result of developments in its London branch. The largely middle class, white-collar membership there had little idea of what constituted Irish dancing, and apparently had little first-hand knowledge of the house dance culture in the Gaeltacht. When a Scottish dance group performed at the League's first ever céilí in 1897, it caused a bit of cultural envy within the League. A Kerryman living in London stepped forward to teach League members some long dances and eight hand reels that he had known in Kerry. When the London branch brought the dances to the Dublin branch in 1901, a hot debate ensued on whether those Kerry dances were really 'Irish' dances, and also whether or not the ballroom-style round and square dances should be banned as non-Irish. An acid-tongued Mayo dancer wrote in 1904:

Those figure dances were brought to Dublin from London and the city of Limerick and foisted on the Gaelic League as genuinely Irish by some enterprising individuals who saw ... the opportunity of making money ... The apostles of the figure dances urge them as substitutes and antidotes for the round and square dances. But in this way they are perfectly wrong. Their figure dances are jumbles of the quadrilles, the polka, the lancers - the very ones they want to avoid.

The end result of a very lengthy and acrimonious debate was that a Commission for Irish Dancing was formed in 1927 to regulate dance throughout Ireland. It held competitions and formulated dance books of approved dances, and these completely excluded the waltzes, schottisches, polkas and set dances of the country people. Instead, people were urged to support the new céilí dances, which included both eight hand reels and the line and circle country dances that either descended from Kerry remnants or were newly minted (The Waves of Tory, The Siege of Ennis, etc.).

Music collector Frank Roche, who alone among Irish music collectors of that era made room for some of the old ballroom dances in his collections of Irish music, observed in 1927:

It was unfortunate that in the general scheme to recreate an Irish Ireland, the work of preserving or reviving our old national dances should have largely fallen to the lot of those who were but poorly equipped for the task. For the most part they were lacking in insight and a due appreciation of the pure old style, and had, as it appears, but a slender knowledge of the old repertoire ... The spectacular and difficult dances for the few were cultivated to the neglect of the simple ones for the many, leaving the social side untouched except to criticise or condemn ... The ballroom dances in vogue at the time were the quadrilles or sets, lancers, valse, polka, schottische or barn dance, two step and mazurka. These were all banned and nothing put in their place but for a couple of long dances. An exception should have been made, one would imagine, in favour of the popular old Sets (that had been Irish-ized), if only on account of the fine old tunes with which they were associated, but they were decried amongst the rest.

The League banned ballroom dances at their events, and after the foundation of the Irish Dancing Commission in 1927 they acted as an empowered national organization. Then the young Irish Government put its mark on the contentious issue. The Public Dance Hall Act of 1935 was the final blow to the old house dances, and in particular to round dances. It decreed that "no place shall be used for public dancing unless a public dancing license is in force in respect of such a place." The late, renowned fiddle and concertina player Junior Crehan, of Ballymakea, Mullach, County Clare describes the background of the law and its effect:

The Dance Hall Act was passed in 1935 and the clergy and the politicians abolished the country house dances. They believed that there was immoral conduct carried out at the country houses and that there was no sanitary arrangements. That was their excuse. You had to pay three pence tax to the shilling going into the hall which meant money to the government ... They didn't care if you made your water down the chimney, as long as they collected their money. That put an end to the country house.

So, they barred the country house dance, and the priests was erecting parish halls. All they wanted was to make money - and they got 3d. into every shilling tax out of the tickets to pay the government for tax. So the country house dance was knocked out then, and 'twas fox-trots, and big old bands coming down, and our type, we'd be in a foreign country then. We couldn't put up with it at all, the noise and the microphones, and jazz and so on ... the music nearly died out altogether - Irish music. Then the emigration started, a lot of the lads I used to play with went off to England and America, and there was no-one but myself - Scully was dead - and I used to go down the road, and I used, honest to God, I used to nearly cry. Nowhere to go, no-one to meet, no sets in the houses, nothing left but the hall ...65

The triple pincer effect of the Church, the Gaelic League, and the Irish Government soon finished off the house dance and in particular ballroom dance, at least for the time being. Not approved for use in national competitions that underpinned modern Irish culture, and banned from the dance halls that were now largely Church or state-run, the old dances fell away. Breandán Breathnach had this to say:

It is ironic that the sets and half sets should have been outlawed in that fashion. They were the only form of dancing practiced by the people of the Gaeltacht; in providing a function for traditional musicians they had helped greatly in preserving the traditional music, and there can be little doubt that in movements, and structure the Irish or céilí dances owed a lot to their inspiration.

Effects upon Irish concertina repertoire and styles

With no more house dances and thus no reason to play the tunes for those house dances, and no interest from official Irish dance and music organizations in collecting or recording that music, a vast repertoire of tunes that had either been imported and modified or had been newly composed in Ireland fell away. It is for this reason that the concertina repertoires of the old women of the house dance era and of the young women of today are so different; the dance tunes of nineteenth century Ireland were cast away and discarded by the bigotry of moral and cultural authorities. The new céilí dances in the public halls used the officially blessed reels, jigs and hornpipes. Once the country house dances were banned, there was no more demand for polkas, mazurkas, schottisches, quick-steps, varsovianas, and the like.

Music collectors turned their back on these dance tunes. Francis O'Neill despised them and transcribed none. Even Breathnach, in his definitive and relatively recent collection of Irish music, could only bring himself to include polkas, largely because they had been incorporated (albeit in a rhythmically modified form) along with Irish double reels into the sets, which were revived by various organizations during the 1970s and 1980s. Other than a few handfuls of schottisches, barn dances, and mazurkas transcribed by Roche in 1927, and a few recordings of aging musicians made by Ciarán Mac Mathúna of RTÉ and others, the Irish ballroom dance repertoire - much of it comprised of modifications on imported tunes as well as completely locally-composed tunes - was largely lost. In the Australian, South African, North American and British traditional music repertoire, there are thousands of such tunes nestled away in collections, and they are regarded as part of each country's cultural heritage. Not so in Ireland, where round dances even today are often considered as foreign.

Attitudes are slowly changing, however. There has been a great resurgence of set dancing in Ireland, albeit to 'Irish-ized' music, and many of these dance evenings now include a schottische, a Shoe the Donkey varsoviana, or a Stack of Barley barndance.67 Set dancers, it seems, are keenly aware of history and sympathetic to these lost dance forms. Schottisches/flings, polkas, barn dance and quadrille tunes are now allowed in Irish music competitions of the Comhaltas Ceoltóiri Éireann, and that organization has preserved old field recordings of schottisches, polkas and waltzes in its audio archive. Topic records produced a recording of 'Irish country-house music' in 2001 that gathered early twentieth century recordings of Irish musicians, especially emigrés in America, who continued to play ballroom dance music after the ban in Ireland.68

But for the most part, the currently played traditional repertoire in Ireland that stems from the house dance period is very lean, indeed. From the beginning of the céilí dances, Irish concertina players have concentrated on learning reels and jigs to the exclusion of almost everything else. An adjacent chart compares the same group of three women whose repertoire, recorded in their senior years, firmly reflects the house dance era (Carolan, O'Dwyer and Hourican) versus a four men (and one woman) of the same general range of birth years who chose in their later years to play a repertoire that reflected the céilí dance era that replaced it. Their music and this chart are explored in Chapter 8, below. Women players in Ireland tended to play in the home rather than in pubs, and were thus less exposed to changing fashions of music. The one woman in the second group, Elizabeth Crotty, played often in her family's pub, and also was an officer in Comhaltas Ceoltóiri Éireann, where the renewed céilí dance repertoire was preferred.

A Changing Irish Repertoire

A comparison of dance types in the repertoire of two groups of contemporaneous Irish concertina players.
Tune counts (shown in percentages of total) include those of all known recordings for each individual,
and include a total of 57 separate tunes from group 1, and 97 from group 2.
The second group has narrowed its focus greatly on reels and jigs.
Group 1: Mary Ann Carolan, Ella Mae O'Dwyer; Katey Hourican, who played a house dance repertoire.
Group 2: William Mullaly; Patrick Flanagan; Tom Barry; Elizabeth Crotty; Michael Doyle,
whose playing reflected the céilí dance repertoire.

Beyond repertoire, the ways in which the concertina was played also changed dramatically as a result of the banning of the house dance. After the Public Dance Hall Act, dances moved from small neighborhood houses to large parish and community halls. Whereas a solo concertina or fiddle player had long been thought adequate for a house dance, groups of musicians were needed to fill the larger volume of space in public dance halls. These new céilí bands had a varied instrumentation of fiddles, flutes, pianos, drums, and accordions playing together, and most of these musicians preferred the 'fiddle' keys of G, D, and A to the old key of C (and G) used by the those who played German concertinas. Playing in the keys of D and A requires a third row of buttons on a concertina, and most German concertinas only had two rows. Many if not most concertina players gave up playing at this time, due to the double whammy of changing repertoire and changing keys.

The Green Isle Céili Band

The Green Isle Céili Band, 1950s. Donnie Connor, first president of the Tulla Comhaltas,
is seated at right, holding a German concertina. Céili dances with large bands
replaced the earlier house dances that typically had solo musicians.
Relatively few céili band musicians played the German concertina. Photo courtesy of Tulla Comhaltas.

By the 1950s, the few remaining Irish concertina players, by then mostly men concentrated in County Clare, had moved from the old octave style of playing to a single-note, along-the-row style, the better to keep up with reel tempo for the new Irish dance repertoire, and the better to play in the keys of G, D and A. Reels in Ireland had always been played mostly singly (one note at a time) and along-the-row, largely because of their rapid tempo. With the advent of the céilí dances, these more rapid reels and jigs dominated the repertoire, and a new generation of concertina players began to adjust its playing style accordingly, playing almost everything in that manner. By far, most of the concertina players who were recorded during the 1970s played in this new manner, for example Tommy McCarthy, Bernard O'Sullivan, John Kelly, Solus Lillus, and Packie Russell. Solus Lillis, a blacksmith from Clonreddan, near Cooraclare in West Clare, recalled the older generation - the house dance generation - as follows:

I started to play when I was no more than eight or nine years old or less, maybe. My mother used to play. A lot of old people used to play, you know. They sounded a lot of bass keys down below on the left hand side of the concertina. A lot of unnecessary noise I used to call it. They had more or less only the bones of the tune, a lot of them; the old women especially. 'Twas nearly all women who played around here. They never played for tape recorders or anything like that.

The 'unnecessary' bass notes that Lillis refers to are the lower notes on the C row, used when playing in octaves in the key of C, in the older style of the house dance era. "The bare bones" he mentions refers to the practice of dance musicians to play simply, for the step of the dancers.

During the revival of Irish music of the latter half of the twentieth century, playing styles changed again when concertinas began to be played for judges at competitions as well as for listeners in pub sessions. Inevitably, concertina players began to play in a more ornamented style and at a more rapid tempo, the better to hold the attention of a static listener. The result today is a highly ornate style, played singly, within a reel-rich repertoire that bears little resemblance to that of the Irish musicians of the house dance era. This is not to criticize the modern style, as it has won thousands of converts to Irish traditional music and to the concertina, and there is much to commend in its beauty and gracefulness. It seems a pity, however, that so few in Ireland play tunes of the house dance repertoire and in the old style today.

In the other three countries, all of which were spared the early twentieth century cultural warfare that plagued Irish music and dance, the ballroom dance repertoire has remained largely intact amongst modern day 'traditional' musicians, although of course the general, worldwide collapse of most forms of European social dance in the present era is well known. In England, it could be said that ballroom dance music was ignored by folk music authorities until an 'English Country Music' movement began in the 1970s, turning a spotlight on surviving rural musicians there who still played many ballroom dance tunes alongside tunes of the older step-dance and country dance genres, in country pubs. In South Africa, another small movement has begun within the Tradisionele Boeremusiekklub to preserve the old style of playing the two-row German boerekonsertina, in octaves with associated chords. New German-style instruments are now being produced there in order to help that movement to grow. In Australia, collecting efforts of both traditional music and dance began in the 1950s, and as a result old time music and dance were passed on to a newer (albeit less numerous) generation before the last of the old guard had passed away. As we shall see in Chapter 11, there are still a few players in rural Australia and South Africa who both play for ballroom dance and still play in the old octave playing style.

Notes:

45. Data sources: private tapes and RTE recordings for Mary Ann Carolan, recordings from the Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann archive and from Neil Wayne of O'Dwyer, and Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann recordings of Hourican.

46. As of writing, there are two published CDs featuring Edel Fox, two of Claire Keville, and on for Dympna O'Sullivan.

47. Nicholas Carolan, 1997, A Harvest Saved: Francis O'Neill and Irish Music in Chicago. Ossian Publications, Cork, 79pp.

48. E G Ravenstein, 'On the Celtic Languages of the British Isles: A Statistical Survey', Journal of the Statistical Society of London, vol.42, no.3 (1879), p.584. Citation found in Wikipedia, History of the Irish Language. Note: A good map-based summary of the famine and its cultural aftermath in Ireland may be found at http://www.irelandstory.com

49. Francis O'Neill, Irish Folk Music, a Fascinating Hobby (1910; repr. Darby, Pennsylvania: Norwood Editions, 1972), p.288.

50. Frank Maginnis, Joan Flett and Chirs Brady, Kate Hughes' Dancing Book, Dundalk, 1867 (online at www.chrisbrady.itgo.com/dance/dundalk, 2002).

51. Breandán Breathnach, Dancing in Ireland: Dal gCais, 1983, p.27.

52. Helen Brennan, 1999, p.28.

53. Donal McCartney, 'From Parnell to Pearse', The Course of Irish History (Cork: Mercier Press, 1967), pp.295-296.

54. Anonymous, 'The revival of Irish Literature, and other addresses, 1894', The Quarterly Review, 190 (London: John Murray, 1899), p.17.

55. Francis O'Neill, Irish Folk Music, a Fascinating Hobby, (1910, repr.Norwood Editions 1972), p.288.

56. Helen Brennan, 1999, p.109.

57. Helen Brennan, op.cit., p.105.

58. W P Ryan, 1912, The Pope's Green Island: London, J Nisbet. Quoted in Helen Brennan, op.cit.

59. Bryan MacMahon, 1954, The Vanishing Ireland: Dublin, O'Brien Press, p.212.

60. Irish Catholic Directory, 1925, p.563. Quoted in Breandán Breathnach, The Church and Dancing in Ireland: Dal gCais, 1982, pp.59-71.

61. Ibid, p.568.

62. Breandán Breathnach, The Church and Dancing in Ireland: Dal gCais, 1982, pp.59-71.

63. Anonymous 'Gaedeal,' writing in The Western People, Mayo, 27 August and 4 September 1904. As quoted in Helen Brennan, op.cit., p.32.

64. Junior Crehan, as quoted in Larry Lynch, 1991, p.43.

65. Recorded conversation between Junior Crehan and Barry Taylor, Ballymackea, County Clare, 8 July 1976.

66. Breandán Breathnach, 1983, Dancing in Ireland: Dal gCais, 1983, p.27.

67. See for example Bill Lynch's online Set Dancing News, www.setdancingnews.net

68. Reg Hall, ed., Round the House and Mind the Dresser: Irish Country-House Dance Music: Topic Records, London, CD TSCD606, with liner notes by Reg Hall.

69. Ibid., p.175.

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