NONSENSE IN THE OBSERVER – NOTHING NEW IN THAT! by Donal Kennedy

Rory Carroll, Ireland Correspondent of the Observer, knows little of Ireland, and when he sought an authority on Irish music consulted Bono who gave him the Bone-headed story that what the late
Garech Browne (1939-2018) was doing when he founded Claddagh Records in 1959 was an (apparently unprecedented)  attempt “to preserve melodies that might never have been heard again.”

Creditable though Garech’s work was, in befriending the Uileann Piper Paddy Maloney, Paddy was one of the pupils of Leo Rowsome (1903-1970) who had been appointed as teacher of that instrument at the age of 16 by the Dublin Municipal School of Music. Leo was a third generation piper and 120 years after
his birth the Rowsome Dynasty are still masters and mistresses of that instrument.

Leo , though based in Dublin, played internationally and in 1933 on BBC TV from London’s Alexandra Palace, the first Irish traditional musician to have that honour.

For years Leo ran The Pipers’ Club in Dublin which met every Sunday Evening in Dublin and in 1951 with others he launched the annual Festival _ FLEADH CHEOIL na hEIREANN, in Mullingar.

This month the Fleadh was again held in Mullingar, running  from 6th to 14th August drawing 100,000
 including players, singers, dancers and their supporters.

Decades before the 1959 founding of Claddagh Records

Radio Eireann had regular traditional music programmes, many of them recorded in Camden Town.
Gael Linn records were going from the early 1950s. Britain’s TOPIC RECORDS featured Irish traditional
music.

I cannot myself play an instrument nor sing in tune.

Wikipedia has much on Leo Rowsome. His son, the late Liam Rowsome, played the fiddle and I sat
next to him in St Fintan’s CBS, Sutton in the 1950s. 

Perhaps the greatest collector of Irish melodies was Edmund Bunting (1773-1843) the Armagh man
who transcribed music from oral-tradition harpists at the Belfast Harp Festival organised for such 
preservation of the old music in 1792.

Bunting’s monumental “A General Collection of the Ancient Music of Ireland.” was published in London in 1796. – and can be accessed FREE on the internet. Bunting continued collecting for many years and he published another book in 1813.

Bunting lodged with Henry Joy McCracken, hanged as a rebel in 1798. The United Irishmen took the
Irish Harp as their Symbol. with the legend -” ‘Tis Newly Strung and Strung and Shall Be Heard”

As it happens Wolfe Tone was in Belfast on United Irishman business during the festival. Though
himself an amateur flautist, he wrote “Strum, Strum and be Hanged”

On similar business in Ballinasloe he had cursed carousers and a piper in the next room when he was trying to sleep.