Courtesy of the University College Cork. 114 cylinders total, 84 are field recordings made by the Fr. in the Déise Gaeltacht of Waterford, the rest were sent to him by Chief O’Neill and are of the musicians he knew while living in Chicago. I’ve had dubs of some of these for years now, Touhey playing Drowsie Maggie etc and the sound hasn’t improved drastically with these new dubs, some are still noisy in the extreme; but most of this music is new to me, too. The story is many of these records were stored in a damp barn attic for years, messing up the grooves in the wax; Breandan Breathnach attempted to dub them in the 60s and couldn’t get some of them to play at all. Great that we can now hear them all, recordings like this are a link to another time.
Some more century old recordings of piping:
Dunn Family Collection
Patsy Touhey cylinder recordings.
Touhey is featured prominently on all of these, I think he made more homemade cylinders than fiddler Michael Coleman made commercial 78s, he must have been one of the most prolific home recording artists of the time - definitely the king of trad music. He’s the only piper to really be heard in this new batch, really - there are a couple of duets of Early and McFadden but Early’s pipes are hardly to be heard.
Touhey’s Star of Munster and Flogging Reel are outstanding - I might transcribe those some time, he really puts the whip to the Flogging, way more than on his 78. The aforementioned Maggie has some great variations too but it’s one the noisiest of these old records.
. I thought I had developed the crucial filters needed to get through the previous releases of like material, but this stuff is rough going. Still, I will continue to plow through it like a good little piper. But I won’t be making the mistake I made with the first Patsy Touhey material I acquired: playing it in the car on a long family road trip.