In the summer of 2006, a group of Irish musicians and enthusiasts participating in the Catskills Irish Arts Week, myself included, were assembled around the dinner table discussing a variety topics when one of the company announced that we should be celebrating the centenary of the first commercial recording of Irish traditional music being heard in the land that spawned it. The only facts gleaned that day were that this event happened in 1906 and that it involved a dozen cylinders being shipped back to Ireland, including those of the famous piper Patsy Touhey (1865-1923).1

“There you go, Roxanne! Your dissertation topic: From Wax Cylinder to iPod!” An animated discussion ensued and lots of fantastic ideas and approaches were generated. It quickly became a little overwhelming, but the company and the wine and beer had me flowing with enthusiasm, eager to bring this idea back to my committee. As one of my advisors later remarked, “The scope is rather large—it would likely take a lifetime to do all that. Why not just do the early recording technology and media… say the 78s?” And thus my journey began.

It took more than two years to find all the remaining pieces of the wax cylinder story—in bits of conversation, tracked down in books and papers, and, the most surprising piece, announced at a conference in Dublin that I attended at the last minute because of a chance remark, a cheap airfare, and a close relation who was willing to put me up for a few nights. This story—carried on through the letters and gifts between two scholars, friends and fellow collectors of Irish music—is the first in a series of cross-Atlantic musical conversations I discovered while I conducted my research.

The exchange was between Captain Francis O’Neill, of the Chicago police, and Father Richard Henebry (1863-1916), one time Professor of Celtic Studies at the Catholic University in Washington, D.C. and Professor of Irish at University College Cork.2 Henebry was born in Portlaw, Co. Waterford, to an Irish speaking family. It is possible that O’Neill first knew him when he was Professor of Celtic Studies at the Catholic University in Washington D.C. (1898-1903.)3 From 1909 until 1916, he was Professor of Irish at University College Cork.4 Between these two appointments, he spent a number of years in the Gaeltacht, the Irish speaking area of Co. Waterford, recording and collecting tunes, songs and stories in the Irish language, perhaps the first mechanical field recordings ever conducted in Ireland. Like O’Neill, he was a musician (fiddle and uilleann pipes) who had not had formal music education. However, he did publish two books Irish Music (1903) and A Handbook of Irish Music (1928).

A letter transcribed in O’Neill’s Irish Folk Music: A Fascinating Hobby ties these three luminaries of Irish music—O’Neill, Touhey and Henebry—together in a single vignette. It is a record of the first ever known instance of commercially recorded Irish music returning to Ireland—the first Irish-American cross-Atlantic musical conversation. My colleagues were wrong in only one detail—the year was 1907 and not 1906. Nonetheless, the event is genuinely one to be celebrated:

As a Christmas present which was sure to be appreciated, I forwarded in 1907 to Rev. Dr. Henebry, at Waterford, Ireland, a box of Edison phonograph records which Sergeant Early generously permitted me to select from his treasures. Among them was “The Shaskeen Reel,” played by Patrick Touhey. The clergyman’s comment is best expressed in his own words:

“The five by Touhey are the superior limit of Irish pipering. One of his, especially ‘The Shaskeen Reel,’ is so supreme that I am utterly without words to express my opinion of it. It has the life of reel and the terrible pathos of a caoine.5 It represents to me human man climbing empyrean heights and, when he had almost succeeded, then tumbling down to hell, and expressing his sense of eternal failure on the way. The Homeric ballads and the new Brooklyn Bridge are great, but Patsy Touhey’s rendering of ‘The Shaskeen Reel’ is a far bigger human achievement. Why, there is no Irish musician alive now at all in his class! If things were as they ought to be, he should be installed as professor of music in a national university in Dublin. And that is what I think of Patsy Touhey and his pipering.”6

…

In 2008, I had an opportunity to chat with a group of people at the Kilmaley Senior Center, situated in a small village in the west of Ireland, about their earliest recollections of music when they were growing up—family members, neighbors, music on records and radio. The conversation had wandered on to gramophones and two of the participants invited me to their homes to see their machines and old 78s that had long been in their family. At Nonnie Hickey’s house, the gramophone turned out to be an electric Dansette7 and not the wind-up I expected. However, the 78s themselves seemed to be from a variety of decades from the first half of the twentieth century. I was asked did I want to photograph the records? At first I said “yes” out of politeness and respect for our hostess. However, while I was clicking away at record label after record label, I began to notice that some of the records had been manufactured in Boston, Massachusetts on the Copley label—a company started by the entrepreneurial O’Byrne DeWitt family. On the “B” side, there was another sticker or paper stamp indicating a popular record shop in New York, Mrs. Mattie Haskins’. In addition, the performers on this disk were the McNulty family, a highly successful New York-based vaudeville act who rose to fame in the first half of the twentieth century. However, at no time in their career had they ever been to Ireland. In certain areas of Ireland the McNultys might not have been a household name, but evidence of their popularity seemed to be significant in this part of the country.

At the second house, that of Mary Greene, who has since passed on, the visit began with an inspection of the family photographs on the wall—a catalogue of who went to America and who stayed behind. Then she showed me the old wind-up gramophone—a dusty black box with the picture of the little dog inside the cover. And more 78s, many of them going back to the 1920s and '30s. Everything from New York-based fiddler Paddy Killoran to the McNultys again—this time on Decca—the beloved John McCormack who had moved to the U.S. in 1909, “The Bells of St. Mary’s” by Bing Crosby and, a real find, Peter Conlon and James Morrison—famous New York-based Irish musicians who had great influence on traditional music on both sides of the Atlantic. I was curious—how did these 78s come to be here in a rural farmhouse in Kilmaley, County Clare? And I began to wonder if there was a way one could document the paths Irish music had traveled back and forth across the Atlantic as a result of immigration using, not just the songs and tunes, but the media themselves. Could the presence of 78 recordings in Irish and Irish American homes tell us anything about the relationship between these two communities and what they came to identify as intrinsically “Irish”? Could the provenance of these recordings indicate that their “social histories,” as Arjun Appadurai and Igor Kopytoff suggest, say something about the cultures that valued them?8

Stories From Your Granny’s Gramophone is intended to be an archive of the oral histories I collected while trying to explore and articulate this question. It is where the full transcript of the speaker can be found. I’m hoping to also provide some audio of those interviews that aren’t completely distorted by background noises. While the dissertation itself has snippets from the interviews, pieces that help support the arguments in the work, it rarely includes the full narrative. The full dissertation can be found at the Salve Regina Digital Commons… or you can message me for the full color version as the photos of the record labels is germaine to the question.