Sir, - Nicholas Carolan (August 1st) pays tribute to the work done in Ireland by the great American folk-song collector Alan Lomax. In the course of a few short weeks in 1951 (guided by our own great collector, Seamus Ennis), he recorded songs and tunes from a wide range of Irish musicians and singers.
This was part of the plan he conceived in 1949 to produce a series of LPs "that would map the whole world of folk music", a project as magnificent in conception as it was remarkable in execution. It was no accident that Lomax published his Irish material as Vol. 1 in his Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music, so impressed was he by the quality of what he had recorded here.
Among his many informants was my grandmother, Mrs Elizabeth (Bess) Cronin of Ballyvourney, Co Cork. The technical quality of Alan Lomax's recordings of her was so good that I was able to re-use his material, without any re-mastering, for the collection The Songs of Elizabeth Cronin, Irish Traditional Singer (Dublin 2000). His trusty Magnecord was the first portable reel-to-reel recording equipment, and the tapes he made, in Ireland and around the world, are as clear today as the day he recorded them.
Lomax was the first in a line of American folk-song collectors who came to Ireland: Jean Ritchie and George Pickow followed soon after him, and Diane Hamilton after them, but he was the pioneer, in this as in so many other aspects of his life.
The most fitting memorial to his work is the recent re-issue by Rounder Records,of many of the discs that were long out of print, as well as fascinating new material from the Lomax archives. His Irish Folk Songs from the Western Counties of Éire is among those re-issues.
Lovers of Irish music and song will miss him just as much as our American cousins. - Yours, etc.,
DÁIBHÍ Ó CRÓINÍN, Caherfurvaus, Craughwell, Co Galway.