A few months ago someone here posted a link to a Patsey Touhey 78 on ebay. I regretted not bidding. When this one came up, I grabbed it. $16 on ebay. The condition was described as never having been played. This recording was made in 1919. 
I see his records on eBay all the time, he was quite popular with the Irish crowd it seems.
Patrick J Clancy wasnāt any great shakes on the fiddle though. Another of Touheyās records had proto-box player John Kimmel on the flipside, a better muso.
Congrats! I only own a few 78s, including a Pat Fiztpatrick disc received as a very kind gift. Theyāre way cool as ding an sich (things in of themselves).
The Touhey ones are very common so $16 doesnāt seem a bargain really. The most recent I got was clean as a whistle and was $4.99.
Kevin,
Iāve looked through your sticky post of 78ās and I didnāt see any Patsey Touhey. You must not have thought much of his playing? Iāve never heard any of his recordingsā¦he was highly spoken of in Irish Minstrels and Musicians (but then so was everyone), so Iām expecting good things, but now Iām starting to have my doubts. The record will arrive late next week. Buzz kill. Maybe I should have bought a pizza with the sixteen bucks!
Thanks to Ross Anderson, on his āRossā Music Pageā, you can listen while you wait for your hard copy:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/musicfiles/mp3s/touhey_maid.mp3
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/musicfiles/mp3s/touhey_drowsy.mp3
Touheyās playing has a wild, frenetic quality about it. Sometimes I wonder about the playback speedā¦ but I think the reality is that he was really that good. Sounds like nothing being played today.
The 78s are cool artifacts, I recently got them myself for sentimental reasons. Iām planning to frame the Drowsy Maggie disc 
Bill
Lest we forget, NPU has re-issued their album, The Piping of Patsy Touhey, on CD. For those who may have owned the previous cassette version, the tracks have been much cleaned up, plus there are additional recordings by PT added to the CD. As Kevin has pointed out, the 78s are a collectible in themselves, but you donāt need to buy these to be able to listen to PT.
djm
Didnāt PT used to record himself on Edison cylinders and sell them for a couple of dollars? I recall reading somewhere that folks would tell him the tunes they wanted and heād go into his āstudioā (the storage space under the stairs?) and record them.
Some of the cylinders are reissued on the NPU CD, and the details of his home recording biz are detailed in the Mitchell/Small book. I didnāt include the Touhey 78s in the Archive because theyāre available on a variety of commercial CDs - NPU, Wheels of the World, āFarewell to Ireland,ā etc.
Just to illustrate my earlier point that Touheyās 78ās come up regularly on e-bay: I just got another one for $0.99 (Iāll sweep them up if nobody wants them)
Maybe they are all pirate copies .
RORY