Na Píobairí Uilleann

Chairman, NPU

An Píobaire

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7 3 24 20110711 24 ready established in the United States; the hith- erto general popularity of their music may have been a casualty. When stray newspaper references to Irish pipers are again found, from 1860, and then in- creasingly from the 1880s, we are back in the familiar world of Francis O’Neill, and find pro- fessional and semi-professional uilleann pipers such as Charles Ferguson, John Egan, Thomas F. Kerrigan, Eddie Joyce, John K. Beatty, and Barney Delaney, all of them documented by O’Neill. There are now large Irish-born audi- ences in the eastern cities, and Irish pipers are playing for them and appearing at their con- certs and picnics, at political and charitable events, on the vaudeville stage, in stage plays, and at the gatherings of Irish-language revival organisations. Some of the pipers are inter- viewed by the newspapers, and, unlike their barely recorded predecessors of the first half of the century, we hear them speak about their music and their feelings about it. With thanks to Lisa Shields, Terry Moylan, Keith Sanger, and Seán Donnelly ABBREVIATIONS AB American Beacon, Norfolk, Virginia; AC Augusta Chronicle, Augusta, Georgia; ACNY American Cit- izen, New York; AG Alexandria Gazette, Alexan- dria, Virginia; AEJ Albany Evening Journal, Albany, New York; AH Alexandria Herald, Alexandria, Vir- ginia; BDA Boston Daily Advertiser, Boston, Mas- sachusetts; BG1 Baltimore Gazette, Baltimore, Maryland; BG2 Boston Gazette, Boston, Massachu- setts; BP Baltimore Patriot, Baltimore, Maryland; CNY Columbian, New York; CC Columbian Cen- tinel, Boston, Massachusetts; DA Daily Advertiser, New York; DNI Daily National Intelligencer, Wash- ington, District of Columbia; EP Evening Post, New York; KR Kentucky Reporter, Lexington, Kentucky; LJ Lancaster Journal, Lancaster, Pennsylvania; MWT Macon Weekly Telegraph, Macon, Georgia; NBM New Bedford Mercury, New Bedford, Massa- chusetts; NH Newburyport Herald, Newburyport, Massachusetts; NYDA New York Daily Advertiser, New York; NYG New York Gazette, New York; PADA Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; PL Public Ledger, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; PP Providence Patriot, Providence, Rhode Island; RE Repertory, Boston, Massachusetts; RIA Rhode-Island American, Prov- idence, Rhode Island; SH Shamrock, New York; SU Sun, Baltimore, Maryland; WG Washington Gazette, Washington, District of Columbia 1 See Nicholas Carolan, A Harvest Saved: Francis O’Neill and Irish Music in Chicago (Ossian, Cork, 1997: 29). O’Neill, like all nineteenth-century Irish pipers in America, would have been known as a ‘union piper’ or an ‘Irish piper’. He himself preferred these terms to ‘uilleann piper’, which was coming to the fore in Ireland in the early twentieth century (Francis O’Neill, Irish Minstrels and Musicians, Chicago, 1913: 41–3, 194–216). 2 There are however problems facing such a project. Digitised newspapers, with their wide variety of type- faces, are notoriously difficult to search accurately and comprehensively, and significant references may be missed. Historic newspapers are widely scattered throughout many libraries and other repositories, and it may be years before significant issues, especially of obscure ethnic newspapers, are digitised. It is certain that some relevant newspapers have not survived at all, and others only in broken runs. 3 Although other similar information is available from other sources not yet comprehensively digitised, the main entries reproduced in this preliminary outline article have been confined to information found in the large database America’s Historical Newspapers including Early American Newspapers Series 1–6, 1690–1922, searched January 2011 in the New York Public Library at Lincoln Centre. Not all of the entries found are given. It is hoped to use this database as a foundation collection of information for a larger collection from other newspapers. Capitalisation only has been modernised in quotations. 4 Although bellows-blown bagpipes are known in Britain and Ireland at least from the first half of the 1700s, the term ‘union pipes’ as applied to them is only (in our present state of knowledge) known from the The World of London of 5 May 1788 when an Irish piper Denis Courtney was advertised to play them on stage there on 14 May (see also Nicholas Carolan, ‘Courtenay’s Union Pipes, 1788’, An Píobaire, vol. 4, no 25, Apr. 2004: 21–3). NOTES

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