Singing with the Pipes: McPeakes and others?

Uilleann Pipes
1

Does anyone know where one can find recordings (trans: audio files) of Francis McPeake I playing the pipes and singing? Does anyone know of other people singing with their pipes?

T

2

The CD “Traditional Songs of Ireland” on Saydisc records has 6 tracks of the McPeaks playing and singing. It’s a British company, and my copy was printed in 1995. It has a disc number CD-SDL 411.

3

FTX-176 - THE RIGHTS OF MAN is the one to own of Francie. That’s the Folktrax label. You can find the McPeake Family’s LPs on eBay from time to time, on labels like Fontana. There’s a very valuable Topic LP, last I saw it went for about $60 US.

There’s a column in An Piobarie, Sing a Song of Piping, which mentions the current crop of piping singers. I sometimes sing along with the pipes myself. Drones are good to drown out the sound of the dogs howling…

4

Looks like a good one. I’ve a track or two from the old saydisk, dubbed to cassette and then rerecorded to CD in the great cassette burn of 2006. However, three months ago the combined move/major reno threw my stuff in such an uproar I can’t find the bulk of it easily.

I’ve always thought that this was the most singular pipe style I’d ever heard; the least like everyone else, in other words.

5

There is a CD with 18 tracks called Francis McPeake -The Singing Piper of Belfast (Folktrax-176) available from www.folktrax.org Inspirational music

6

Francie also did some singing(and playing) on Ewan McColl’s Radio Ballads, most notably (for me) one of MacColl’s songs called Just a Note on the second of the Radio Ballads, A Song of the Road.
A perfect song for Mattie Connolly.

7

Radio Ballads, A Song of the Road

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/radioballads/original/songofaroad.shtml

tommy

8

Sin é go direach.

The 20 min clip the BBC lets you listen to has Francie singing Come All you Gallant Drivers (with Peggy Seeger backing on banjo), but not the song Just a Note; which song is worth the price of the CD (it was re-issued on Topic in 1999). There’s also Seamus Ennis singing Hot Asphalt if you need more reasons.

9

Listening now. I’m might have to break down and buy the radio ballads, but it’s close. Does the beeb sell them in a batch for less?

If they were in a box with the original shows on CD or DVD, and an auxilliary CD had the songs and music (perhaps un-truncated full takes, if those exist) extracted and treated like a standard music CD, that would be a compelling offer.

I love the original form, but I know that CDs with mostly music are just more durable* that CDs with lots of talking.

*From an “I wanna play this again” POV.

10

I don’t know if the Beeb sells them at all–I found nothing in the Shop.
They are all on Topic
(see http://www.topicrecords.co.uk/acatalog/index2.html)
Shouldn’t be too hard to get them.