I’ve put up on my website three MP3s I’ve made from old cylinder recordings. There are two of Bernard Delaney, recorded in Chicago in 1898 - playing Colonel Taylor’s and the Cook in the Kitchen. The third is of the last of the Munster pipers, Mici `Cumbaw’ O’Sullivan, playing fragments of Alasdrum’s March. The URL is
Man, that’s painful to listen to for any length of time!
I saw a news story recently about a process being used by the Library of Congress or Smithsonian (one of those big American collestions) that uses lasers to scan the surface of old wax and shellac recordings and turn them into digital recordings. They can then process the files and clean up a lot of the noise, and then go back and bring out a lot of the sound to come very close to the originals. I wonder if they have any UP recordings tucked away?
Apparently the wax cylinders are more of a challenge, as the recording is cut into the grooves vertically (needle goes up and down) as opposed to horizontally like on 78s and LPs (needle bounces side to side in track). Anyway, its good to know that these old recordings are still around, and that there is yet a chance we might hear them cleaned up in future. Thanks for posting these, Ross.
Although painful to listen to it is still very interesting. Delaney’s style is composed mostly of tight cuts, pats and stacato. There are no long 5 note rolls. Very much like Touhey but not as many notes or as smooth.
Delaney was Francis O’Neill’s brother-in-law, and O’Neill’s favorite piper; his description of his playing was “smooth and rolling,” among other qualities, so I’ve always wondered if these recordings weren’t Delaney just showing that he could play the tight piping like nobody’s business too.
Sad to say there are no more extant recordings of him, or the other musicians who made cylinder recordings back in the day, although there may be cylinders which no one has ever managed to get playing satisfactorally - Breandan Breathnach hinted at such in his article on pipers and the Feis Ceoil.
I’ve brought up the suggestion to various people that better copies of these records could be made using some of the methods available now, such as laser light players, or even superior stylus players. The web has various sites that show some of these newfangled record players.
Delaney’s records can be made much easier on the ears with a judicious use of EQ - the thump going all through Colonel Taylor’s is mostly bass frequencies, the actual music can be isolated, and the pipes only recorded in a narrow range with these cylinder machines anyway.
Yeah, sure, it’s scratchy & noisy, but I think these old recordings are fantastic… like Kevin said, it’s sad that there are no other recordings of pipers like this man Delaney.
We folks living in the 21st century certainly seem to take technology for granted… think about the wonder that these pipers must have felt when sitting down in front of these huge machines, and then within a few hours of recording and then reworking, they’d be able to hear themselves playing the music… I often wonder if they were afraid that the cylinders and later records were going to make the live playing extinct.
Before this thread, I’d never heard of Delaney or O’Sullivan (gotta love that nickname - “Cumbaw” )
And the intro to “Cook in the Kitchen” - it’s SO cool - "And now, an old Irish jig called 'Cook in the Kitchen…" I LOVE this old stuff!
And poor Cumbaw - it sounds as though the “engineer” such as he was - kept interrupting him!
Doesn’t he do a long roll on the C#? Admittedly this is actually a “roll” with two “cuts” (Back D and a chanter closure, obtained by closing the C# hole), rather than the more usual roll with a cut and pat. As a variation he tips the C# four times in a row, which takes a nimble touch.
O’Neill transcribed a few tunes from Delaney with extensive rolling on the C natural - Follow Me Down to Carlow is one, with a high G followed by a roll on the C - that must have been something to hear. (Look in the Music of Ireland (1850 tunes), which gives sources for the tunes, not the Dance Music of Ireland book).
It would be more accurate to describe Follow Me Down to Carlow as having its first part in A minor, and its second part in C. The first bar of the second part is eC(3) eceg, the triplet suggesting the roll on C. James O’Neill is the source of the second setting of this tune in ONMI, #1282, which actually is easier on the pipes - maybe the printer switched the sources for the two tunes!
At any rate - Colonel Taylor’s shows Delaney could roll a C# like no one’s business. Note also his “shake” double-cut ornament on the low G in the second part. Seamus Ennis used a very similar technique, and Ennis’s father learned from Nicholas Markey, who learned from Billy Taylor - who was also one of Delaney’s tutors.
The owners of the cylinders. Rights belong to the archive that owns the cylinders.
Same goes on the web site for the test pressings that belonged to the relation of Willie Ross - she owns the rights. No one but her has the ability to call them free of copyright.
If an owner is still around, they own the rights.
Same goes for old books. People have released library copies of old music books. The libraries own those editions. One needs to get one’s own copy to reprint and sell it.
The copyright on recordings expires after fifty years; on compositions, seventy years after the composer’s death. There is an enormous amount of misinformation about this, I’m afraid, put out by people such as the music industry who are trying to bamboozle governments into changing copyright law in their favour. The MP3s on my website are indeed in the public domain.
For a piece I wrote recently on copyright law, see
Is there a distinction to be made here between copyright on a commercially made & distributed recording (I thought the max term is 75 years in the US) and a one-of-a-kind recording which is part of someone’s archive? In the latter case I’ll betcha the rights of the archive or owner never expire.
This stuff was never commercially published. Thus, the publishing rules don’t apply. They are not in the public domain.
Touhey’s, Michael Coleman’s, etc 78s are in the public domain but you need to own the original and cannot use, say, the Shanachie master and call it your own.
10 Coleman sides recorded a year or so before he died surfaced in a jazz company archive. They had never been released and are owned by the archive.
No, there is no distinction. These recordings are entirely safe for human consumption.
An owner of a unique disc has of course the physical right to do as they please with it, including refusing to allow copying. However, the owner of that disc has zero rights over copies made with it, at least under copyright law.
Rights for a copy extend to the copy - not to general distribution. The rights to the Delaney cylinders belong to the owner (and I am not sure what archive has them).
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