The travelling dancingmasters are fairly well documented, Breathnach writes about them at length in ‘Irish Folk music and dances’, a lot of information can be found in his ‘Dancing in Ireland’. A travelling dancing master by the name of Pat Barron is often described in articles about Junior Crehan, they will yield a lot of information too about the nuts and bolts of the whole thing [the arrangement of them staying at a house for prolonged periods, fees for dances, way of teaching, the sort of tunes they had as often the dancingmasters would have special dances for special tunes].
Often in the context of [step] dancingmasters the story of ‘competitions’ between rival teachers comes up, for them a door would be pulled off it’s hinges and put on a table, the competing dancers would perform their steps on the confined surface of the door.
An interesting feature of the old houses was that they often had a ‘battering pot’, a clay pot dug in under the flagstones of the kitchenfloor to create a resonant chamber the step dancers could use to amplify as it were the sound of their ‘battering’.
There is some information to be found in articles about the Russels concerning instruments etc [see Mick Moloney, Michael Coady etc].
The whistle usually described for the early part of the century would be the Clarke [type] whistle, the concert flute was harder to come by, they were expensive and they are often described as having been sent over by relatives who found them in pawn shops and the like in England or America. Flutes would only come into the hands of the better players.
The whistle is called the flute sometimes by the older generation [the tin flute as opposed to the german or concertflute, timberflute was also sometimes used as a name for the flute].
I am not sure a young boy would have been considered strong enough to fill a flute for a dance, whistleplayers often moved on to the flute [for greater volume] coming up to their mid teens.
Bill Ochs in preparation for the Micho Russell book has done some considerable research into the housedances, I have exchanged some information with Bill and talked fairly extensively to older people in the locality about the dances durin their younger days.
At the housedances players would often sit on chairs placed on a table or on the settlebed. Music, in Clare at least, would have been provided by combinations of fiddles, [german]concertinas, whistles and flutes. Musicians would, during the season, often play at a different dance nearly every night of the week[walking considerable distances to get there], those who played at the dances all say it was very hard work, tipping away for hours on end.
It is also interesting to note that there would have been no or hardly any formal music teaching, people would be shown the basics and then it was from there on picked up at the dances, there are wonderful stories of Junior Crehan and his contemporaries standing behind Scully Casey at dances, just watching and listening, to pick up on bowing patterns and tunes.
All joking in the previous posts aside, there’s no harm in realising tuberculosis was as rampant in Ireland as everywhere else and people were likely to be aware of the dangers of flinging a spit filled whistle around a kitchen full of people.
Below is a pic of a typical and wellknown house for dances, the now ruined birthplace of my great friend concertinaplayer Kitty Hayes in Fahalunaghta, Miltown Malbay. Which is about a mile and a half over the hill from where I am writing this. In it’s time there were many dances, Kitty’s father played the concertina with Willie Clancy’s father, Gilbert, playing the concertflute. During Kitty’s youth all the great musicians of the day and locality played there, Jimmy Hogan and Pappy Looney, Packie Russell, Paddy and John Killourhy and many more. Dances would have taken place in the kitchen, the room between the two chimneys
