Na Píobairí Uilleann

Chairman, NPU

An Píobaire

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7 2 20 20110510 20 ~ SEANCHAS ~ SOME IRISH PIPERS IN AMERICA 1800 – 1850 NICHOLAS CAROLAN T HE GREAT sources of biographical infor- mation on Irish pipers in the United States of America are of course the Chicago writings of Francis O’Neill, especially his Irish Folk Music: A Fascinating Hobby (1910) and Irish Minstrels and Musicians (1913). O’Neill was himself an uilleann piper, and a sometime player on the lowland and highland Scottish pipes, 1 and in his extensive oral and print researches into Irish music he foc- uses particularly on uilleann pipers in America and preserves much detail about them that would have been lost without his efforts. But O’Neill only came to live in the United States in the late 1860s, in the post-Famine period. His fellow-musicians in Chicago were also Irish immigrants of the same general period, or their American-born children, and their exper- iences and inherited memories did not encom- pass the earlier nineteenth century in America, nor the eighteenth century. The written sources available to O’Neill rarely had reference to ear- lier Irish pipers there. Irish pipers unknown to O’Neill and his in- formants were however active in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. Specific information about some of them is now beginning to emerge from various Amer- ican federal and state projects, currently in progress, of digitising historical American newspapers and making their contents ma- chine-searchable. In time, it is hoped that a comprehensive database can be made of all such information on elbows-blown pipes and pipers of all traditions in America. 2 It will throw light both on the history of the pipes in their European homelands and on their natu- ralisation in America. But even now, the outlines of certain kinds of Irish piping activity in eastern and southern states of the United States – New York, Mas- sachusetts, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, Washington DC, Kentucky, Rhode Island, Georgia – are evident from newspapers of the period already digitised, from the period 1800 to 1850. 3 These are newspapers of general in- terest and were not directed at Irish readers particularly. A summary report on this inform- ation is given below. While it must be taken as preliminary, and will have to be modified as further evidence emerges, its general outlines are likely to stand. The Irish piping activity reflected in the news- papers searched is public and commercial in nature and is documented mainly in advertise- ments featuring professional touring pipers, and occasionally in advertisements selling pipes. Some of these professionals advertised several times, some only once; it can be pre- sumed that most of their performances were advertised by handbills or by word of mouth, and that the newspaper advertisements were exceptional. No reviews of these performances have been found, nor are there contemporary references to the non-commercial playing of Irish pipes in America, although doubtless such playing took place. From the number of adver-

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[Periodical]

2011-04-24T00:00:00

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