In search of lost rhyme – An Irishman’s Diary on the song collecting of Tom Munnelly

Old songs, as folklore collectors know, can be like rare animal species. Countless numbers of them have died out over the centuries, unrecorded. And for those that still exist in the wild, it’s often a race against time to find them before they too become extinct.

Hence the heroic work of such conservationists as Alan Lomax and Seamus Ennis, mentioned here last week (Diary, January 31st) in connection with the street singer Margaret Barry. On foot of which column, a reader has sent me a fascinating account of the methods of another, somewhat less-famous collector, Tom Munnelly, 42 years ago in Kerry.

It was written by Patrick Carroll, a Chicago-born writer who accompanied Munnelly for a few days on his travels in and around Castleisland – part of the famous Sliabh Luachra district that straddles Kerry, Cork, and Limerick, and is to traditional songs what the Amazon rainforest is to wildlife.

Native habitat

Speaking of which, the account is interesting for, among many other things, a cameo by Con Houlihan, still based in his native habitat then. But even with Houlihan as a guide to who and where all the local singers were, Munnelly’s work proved, as it often did, slow and frustrating.

It was complicated by the fact that some of the best sources of old songs were Travellers – or Tinkers as they were still known circa 1973 – who by definition could be hard to locate. Thus, after a few fruitless circuits of greater Castleisland, Munnelly complained to Carroll: "Sometimes I'll go through this sort of thing for two solid days and wind up with some ould one singing I'll Take You Home, Kathleen".

Even when he did find a local repository of song, one Jack Horan, and sat him down in front of a pint and tape recorder, the results were at first prosaic. The subject, who declined his age but was thought to be 84, went through a fairly standard repertoire, using the same air for everything. But then, without warning, Munnelly hit paydirt. In the middle of singing his version of Barbara Allen, an old but well-preserved ballad, Horan digressed – unconsciously it seemed – into a different song, one which the collector knew to be called Lord Thomas and Fair Eleanor.

He sang this in its entirety, then lapsed back into Barbara Allen, as if it was all one continuous piece. But as Munnelly explained afterwards, the song in the middle had never been "collected from oral tradition" in Ireland until then. A manuscript version had been found in Cork in 1928. That aside, this was the first evidence it existed here.

Munnelly must have packed away his tape machine that day as a natural historian would a cage with a breeding pair of dodos. Which said, the Kerry discovery was not his most famous. That, probably, had come a few years earlier, courtesy of a Roscommon Traveller, John Reilly.

The latter had an unparalleled repertoire of very old songs, but was a threatened species himself by the time the collector caught up with him. On one of Munnelly’s subsequent visits, Reilly had to be rushed to hospital, where he died, in Carroll’s words, “more or less of old age. He was 43.”

But the collector had already recorded Reilly's version of a ballad called The Maid and the Palmer, which until then, had not been found alive anywhere in Britain or Ireland since 1801. A few years later, Munnelly "gave" the song to Christy Moore and Planxty. And as The Well Below the Valley, it went forth and multiplied again for the benefit of a new generation.

The folk revival, inspired in part by Lomax and Ennis, was in spate then. But old songs were still dying, as Munnelly was painfully aware. He was Ireland’s only full-time collector in 1973, employed by the Department of Education and given five years to find everything.

Full potential

As he told Carroll, it was an impossible task. They had spent five days skimming the surface of an area 17 miles in radius (a full version of their adventures can be found at www.patrickcarroll.co.uk) when it would have taken six months to tap the full potential of that alone. Even so, and as always, Munnelly did what he could.

Born in Dublin, he left school early and worked in a variety of humdrum jobs before an inexhaustible knowledge of traditional song propelled him into his defining role. In later years, he moved to Miltown Malbay in west Clare – a town that is to traditional musicians what Varanasi is to Hindus, and where he died, much lamented, in 2007.

@FrankmcnallyIT