Ancestral Imprints: Histories of Irish Traditional Music and Dance

8. Broadcasting Bailiúchán Bhairbre

8. Broadcasting Bailiúchán Bhairbre: RESEARCHING AND REPRESENTING RECORDINGS VIA RADIO1 Deirdre Ní Chonghaile 118 In the course of my research on Irish traditional music in the Aran Islands, I have spent a great deal of time searching for sound recordings of the music of the past. My search first brought me to sound and radio archives in Ireland, England and America, but I was soon persuaded by family members – in particular by my father Máirtín and his sister Mary – to bring my search closer to home. In September 2003, Paddy Quinn of Cill Rónáin, Árainn – the largest of the Aran Islands – loaned me a collection of thirty-eight largely unlabelled reel-to-reel tape recordings created by his late wife, my aunt Bairbre. He hoped that I might be able to find a machine to play them and that they might then contribute to my research. Paddy also expressed an interest in hearing the recordings. With the help of Meaití Jó Shéamuis Ó Fátharta, I borrowed a 1970s UHER reel-to-reel tape recorder from RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta (RnaG), and local trawler engineer Pat Maguire wired it for AC power. The engineers in the AudioVisual Department at University College Cork (UCC) also created an analogue cable for me to connect the machine to a mini phono jack so that I might be able to transfer the recordings from reel-to-reel to more modern formats. I was thus enabled to begin my work on Bailiúchán Bhairbre, the name I have given to this collection of amateur tape recordings. Bailiúchán Bhairbre was created by my aunt Bairbre Quinn (1935–1987). The material was mostly recorded in Árainn and Conamara, from 1958 at the latest to the 1970s. The collection is significant, not just because Bairbre (see Fig. 1) was the first islander to own a tape recorder (a Philips EL3541, it would appear), but because she acted like a collector; she used to call herself ‘Ciarán Mac Mathúna’. In fact, Bairbre Quinn became the single most productive collector of music in Árainn (see Fig. 2). The overall good sound quality of Bailiúchán Bhairbre and the preservation of the collection are also considerable feats for an untrained amateur collector. Bailiúchán Bhairbre captures in sound, and especially in music, a sense of the complex variety of the cultural landscape of Ireland, and especially of An Ghaeltacht, at the time. It is, in fact, the most substantial and probably the most significant body of field recordings of music ever to emerge from Árainn. In particular, it offers a comparatively pluralistic and democratic view of music in Árainn from the mid-1950s to the 1970s that differs radically from the offerings of other contemporary collectors, in particular professional music collectors. Bailiúchán Bhairbre thereby makes a strong case for music collecting that is conducted ‘outside the conventional institutional framework’ of universities and other institutions and organisations. This work can offer, as Hugh Cheape argues, ‘a freshness of approach’.2 Fig. 1: Bairbre Quinn, Cill Mhuirbhigh, 1950s (By permission of Mary Conneely). Fig. 2: Bairbre with her husband Paddy, her mother-in-law Nell Quinn, and a visitor (in cap) to their house in Cill Rónán, 1960s (By permission of Mary Quinn). 8. Broadcasting Bailiúchán Bhairbre 119 Upon discovery of the extent of Bairbre’s collection, and having witnessed among my immediate family the power of the recordings to evoke memories of music made in the past, I realised its potential to contribute to my research. I soon learned, however, as Anthony Seeger observes, that ‘it is exceedingly difficult to document a collection after many years, and infernal to document one after the death of the collector’ (1986: 269). I realised that individual ‘listening sessions’ with a number of Bairbre’s contemporaries was too inefficient a method to help identify the unnamed performers on the tapes. Bairbre’s sister Kathleen inadvertently prompted a solution: upon listening to some of them, she suggested broadcasting the tapes on a radio programme. I knew that there would be great local interest in such a broadcast. In the course of my fieldwork, I found local people were almost universally respectful of my institutionally affiliated efforts to learn more about local music and to write about it, but not all of them expressed an interest in...