NICHOLAS CAROLAN,
Sir, - For the record, it should be added to your obituary of the American traditional music collector and singer Alan Lomax (July 27th) that he had an important involvement with Irish traditional music, and that we in this country also owe him a debt for aiding in the preservation of our heritage.
Lomax came to Ireland in January 1951, together with the singer Robin Roberts, on the first collecting trip for his ambitious LP series of world music The Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music. His guide in Ireland, recommended to him by the BBC, was the Dublin piper and singer Seamus Ennis, then an employee of Radio Eireann and formerly a collector for the Irish Folklore Commission. Both institutions also supported Lomax during his time here by giving him sound-recording facilities and access to their archives.
Before departing in February, Lomax and Roberts, armed with one of the first tape recorders seen in Ireland, had recorded some 25 performers throughout the Republic, including the singers Elizabeth Cronin in Cork and Colm Ó Caoidheáin in Galway and the fiddle players Neilidh Boyle and Mickey Doherty in Donegal.
On a later 1951 visit to Ireland, it seems, Lomax came into contact with the Cork-born street singer Margaret Barry, whom he later employed in London as his housekeeper. There he recorded her songs and an extraordinarily frank interview about her life and times, and launched her career on radio and record.
The material collected by Lomax in Ireland and from the Irish in London was first heard in this country from 1952 on the influential BBC radio series As I Roved Out on which Lomax and Ennis, by then colleagues in the BBC, were driving forces. The series was instrumental in introducing urban audiences here to their own traditional music. The recordings also became the basis of Ireland, published in New York in 1955, the first volume in the Columbia LP series and the first original LP of Irish traditional music. Some of them appeared on the 12-volume Caedmon LP series Folk Songs of Britain, published in New York from the late 1950s and later reissued by Topic of London.
The original Lomax Irish field recordings and diary are held in the Alan Lomax Archive in New York, and copies (not yet publicly available) are held in the Irish Traditional Music Archive, courtesy of Dr Anna L. Chairetakis, daughter of Alan Lomax. The Columbia LP was reissued on CD in 1998 by Rounder Records of Massachusetts, which also issued Lomax recordings of Margaret Barry the same year and some of his other Irish singers on anthologies in 2000. A double CD of selections from the Irish recordings is in preparation.
As a singer and guitarist, and as a participant with such as Ewan McColl and Peggy Seeger in the British Folk Revival, Alan Lomax was heard here on radio on commercial recordings of the 1950s and 1960s, and helped form the taste for guitar-accompanied traditional song that became a feature of the Irish scene.
Irene, Goodnight, the song he and his father collected in 1933 in Louisiana from the convict Huddie Ledbetter, was known to everyone in Ireland in those years after it became a million-seller in 1950.
Readers may be able to help with a missing Irish Lomax item: a recording of a 1950s BBC radio ballad opera The Stones of Tory, written by Lomax and Ennis and featuring several of those he had recorded in 1951 as well as the Abbey actors Walter Macken and Eileen Crowe.
This has not been preserved, as far as can be established, but it is possible that some reader taped it from air at the time of its transmission and would make it available to the various archives interested in it. - Yours, etc.,
NICHOLAS CAROLAN, Irish Traditional Music Archive, 63 Merrion Square, Dublin 2.