Surprised nobody else has mentioned this. ITMA have acquired four acetate sides of Michael Coleman recorded in February 1942 at Lad O’Beirne’s home.
The recordings were previewed on the Rolling Wave on RTE Radio 1 on Feb 14th and are now on the ITMA website. The playing is astonishing. There are also recordings of Lad himself and Martin Wynne on the Rolling Wave programme and these and more will be made available soon through ITMA.
Liam O’Connor and Joe Burke gave a full background to these recordings which have also been supported by the O’Beirne family in the USA.
The whole story is on ITMA’s site, including the recordings, and the anouncement has been there for a while. It’s so public it seems sometimes superfluous to post that sort of thing here, note there’s no mention here either of the Aggie Whyte recordings project that is utterly wondeful to hear.
The recordings show him in good enough form and that’s good to hear. On his final recordings, the broadcast discs of 1944, he sounded frail and in decline.
It’s always nice to hear this sort of stuff when it turns up . A lot of Lad O’Beirne’s axcetate recordings have been in circulation for years though.
The whole story is on ITMA’s site, including the recordings … Mr. Gumby
A very interesting article. Read it last night around 11.30 pm Swedish time, then took a look at Facebook before turning in and saw a post from Catherine McEvoy that Joe Burke had passed away. A bit of a shock as Joe was very involved regarding the “new” Coleman acetates
More rediscovered recordings not made public previously , I’ll tack this onto this thread:
Bill Stapleton had a studio in Moore street in Dublin during the late 1940s. We knew he recorded people, mostly traditional musicians and released some on 78 rpms, pipers Felix Doran and Tommy Reck were released in the US (without their knowledge, it must be added).
I remember one instance where we had taken Tommy Reck to a friend’s house in the aftermath of a pipers’ meeting. The friend was an avid collector of 78 rpms. Early on the morning after the nighs before we were listening to Stapleton’s recording of Tommy Reck. Tommy walked in looking for his breakfast and was amazed by what he heard. He remebered going into the studio, playing a few tunes and receiving £25. He never heard anything after that and basically forgot about it, unaware a 78 rpm was brought out in the states. He was quite chuffed with what he heard, forty years later.
The recordings have been subject of speculation, what else was there and who were recorded (I remember some wishful thinking dsuring the eighties along the lines of ‘did he record Johnny as well as Felix Doran before the accident?’ ) and above all, were they still in existence. Now Harry Bradshaw has dug up Stapleton’s recordings and remastered them with a view to release them as a double CD set, one CD of fiddlers and one of pipers.
Among the rediscovered material is the earliest known recording of young Willie Clancy, recorded in 1947 as well as material by Seamus Ennis, Sean McGuire, Tommy Potts and others.
John Bowman dealt with the issue on RTE on sunday See here, the item, starts about 8 minutes in. And the previous Sunday : here, starting around 18.30