The theme of this year's Merriman summer school in Lisdoon arna concerns the significance of song and singing in popular Irish culture, but there were also insights into how it was collected for posterity.
Prof James Delargy, of the Irish Folklore Commission, wrote in his diary dated January 3rd 1930: "Anthony Moloney has arranged for us to gather in order to give me an opportunity of getting acquainted with some of the old people whom he had specially selected as being likely informants and of service to me in my work.
"I paid for a bucketful of porter fetched from the local pub, there was a good fire blazing on the hearth, the night was cold, the sky covered with frosty stars, and the faint murmur of the sea seeped in through the door. A memorable night of storytelling followed, each old man giving of his best.
"In the outer and larger room (used by the medical officer as a dispensary), there were a number of local people gathered who listened intently to the songs and stories by the select artistes in the inner room, where I too had my place by the ediphone machine."
In his lecture, "Narrative Song in Clare", yesterday, folklorist and collector Mr Tom Munnelly mentioned Prof Delargy when he was describing the earliest attempts at bringing together a vast storehouse of local folklore and tradition. He noted there did not seem to be much Clare traditional music from the earlier part of this century preserved in sound form.
"The earliest recording I could find dates from September 19th, 1930, and it comes from that part of Clare which can only be reach ed by road from Galway - Aughinish Island. It comes from the Doegan Collection in the Royal Irish Academy."
Dr Wilhelm Doegan was a German philologist who was asked by the academy and the Ministry of Education to make recordings of Irish dialects in 1930. The project was originally intended to cover only Munster, but was eventually expanded to cover all Gaeltacht areas, many of which are long since vanished.
The summer school has already heard from RTE's director general, Mr Bob Collins, that the work of restoring old tapes and gathering new ones is still going on. The pioneers in this regard were Radio Eireann, later RTE, then Raidio na Gaeltachta and now Teilifis na Gaeilge.
He said the archives showed that in 1926 there were only 70 listed broadcasts of Irish songs and the annual total had fallen to as low as 40 broadcasts in 1931. Because of agitation by the Gaelic League, the number of broadcasts increased to 63 in 1933.
After that, there was another decline until better recording techniques were introduced as well as mobile recording units in the late 1940s. The rest is history. Trail-blazers such as Proinsias O Conluain began the work of compiling and helped to create the early RTE archive.