After listening to an interview of Brian McNamara on one of the links at uilleannobsession.com (Thank you Mr. D’Arcy), I began to wonder about the bulk of the piping tradition as it exists today. The conversation was concerning the piping /musical traditions of county Leitrim, and how it had some distinct offerings to the tradition as a whole. What other areas have influenced the piping tradition, and how have they? I would love any info that you guys (and gals) could offer…
I’m not sure that there is a specific piping tradition unique to Leitrim. Much of Brian McNamara’s repertoire (or at least his recorded repertoire) is specific to Leitrim but his style of playing is not.
The surprise is that there even was a Leitrim piping tradition at all, something that a lot of people would be unaware of - it is only through Brian that I became aware of it. Throughout the country, piping seemed to have largely died out by the 1970s apart from the few main population centres - mainly Dublin, so yah boo to Flanum! - where it was kept alive by conscious effort by organisations like NPU, and one or two well-known rural regions like Clare where its survival seems to have depended largely on a handful of individual pipers rather than a large number of people playing as part of a truly local strong tradition.
In the popular mind, Leitrim and the surrounding counties would tend to be associated with flute and fiddle, instruments of which one can say that there is a local tradition.
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