Part II. The Musicians: An Archive

The selection process of musicians for this archive of early recordings on the concertina was simple: musicians who had been active players before 1920.  That rather arbitrary year was chosen as being approximately the end of the heyday of the Anglo concertina, as well as an approximate date for the beginning of the decline of the early ballroom dance genre, of which the concertina had taken such a large role in the late nineteenth century.  Clearly, the playing of the concertina lived on much longer in Australia and South Africa than it did in England and Ireland, and even in the latter two countries there were small pockets of players well into the twentieth century.  But overall, things changed for the worse everywhere for the concertina when the jazz age and the widespread use of recorded music arrived, and in most areas the house, barn and woolshed dances that had been so prevalent in rural areas declined and disappeared.

The recordings of this archive all postdate 1920, however.  Some few were made in the 1920s and 1930s (especially those in South Africa), but most were made after various efforts at folk and traditional music revivals were begun after the end of World War II.  A handful of these recordings was made as late as the 1980s. 

Many if not most of the field recordings were made when a particular musician was well advanced in age; some sources were recorded well into their nineties.  In addition, a significant number of these musicians had not played for decades before someone thrust a concertina into their hands and asked for some music from the old dances.  As a result, there is a large variety of quality here not only in the field recording process but in the technical polish of the music provided.  Tracks were chosen for their significance in illustrating either old styles of concertina playing or the house dances themselves, not recording quality or the (apparent) skill of the musician.  Most of the musicians were prominent players for house dances when they were in their prime, and were, in nearly all cases, better players than the field recordings would show.  The music they recorded provides a unique window into the past, even if that window has a small cobweb or two on it.

No claims are made here to this archive being completely encyclopedic in including every concertina player from the house dance era, although every effort has been made to include something from every eligible performer who I could find.  Only in one instance was a known performer left out because of a lack of permission from a copyright holder; in a few other cases some known field recordings were left out because those recordings could no longer be found by their owners.  A check of most performers whom one might think ought to have been included will, it is hoped, find that the performer in question was a bit too young to have been playing before 1920.  Still, there are many, many individuals out there with recordings of relatives on family history tapes that are simply not known to the author.

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