Dirty Linen

This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen #138 (October/November 2008).
The full article is in the magazine, available on newsstands, by subscription, and at the Dirty Linen webstore.

Francis O'Neill

Unearthed: Treasures and Oddities from the American Folklife Center Archive at the Library of Congress

Cylinder Recordings of Irish Music by Francis O'Neill

by Steve Winick

Irish music fans have reason to rejoice in a recent acquisition of the American Folklife Center Archive: Thirty-two tunes played by legendary Irish musicians from turn-of-the-century America, including Patsy Touhey, James McFadden, James Early, Barney Delaney, and Edward Cronin. The tunes were recorded on wax cylinders by Francis O'Neill, one of the most important collectors of Irish music in history. The cylinders came to light in 2003, when David Dunn of Milwaukee found them in his late grandfather's attic. They were like buried treasure in the Irish music world; scholars knew that they had been made, and that Dunn's grandfather had been their last known caretaker. But everyone believed that they had been lost or destroyed long ago.

Dunn brought the cylinders to the Ward Irish Music Archives of Milwaukee. They contacted the American Folklife Center for help in digitizing the recordings. In return for their assistance, AFC obtained digital copies, which will soon be available for listening in the AFC reading room, and may form part of an online presentation in the future. The original cylinders, and another set of digital copies, remain at the Ward Archives.

Francis O'Neill is a crucial figure in the history of Irish music. Born in Ireland in 1848, toward the end of the catastrophic Irish potato famine, O'Neill grew up in a home filled with traditional Irish music. As a youth he learned to sing and to play airs and dance tunes. His instruments of choice were the flute, tin whistle, and several types of bagpipes, including the complex uilleann pipes. Like many of the post-famine generation, O'Neill left Ireland seeking a better life. After many adventures, he made his way to Chicago, where he became a policeman. By the time he retired, he was a popular public figure, Chicago's Chief Superintendent of Police, a position known colloquially as "Police Chief."

During his time on the force, O'Neill spent his spare time collecting Irish music. With the aid of a transcriptionist, fiddler and police sergeant James O'Neill, he wrote down tunes from the playing of local musicians. Out of the resulting transcriptions, O'Neill compiled a large book, O'Neill's Music of Ireland, which he published in 1903. Consisting of 1,850 separate pieces, over 1,100 of them dance tunes, it was at the time the largest collection of traditional Irish instrumental music ever made.

[The American Folklife Center Archive at the Library of Congress is home to many unusual artifacts related to folk music. This is one in a series of reports on unusual musical materials in the Archive. Steve Winick, contributing editor to Dirty Linen, is also a folklorist, writer, and editor for the American Folklife Center.]

[cover #138]