Sean-nós, or “old style”, singing might once have been regarded as a niche part of Ireland’s traditional arts, but a plethora of young exponents, from Eoghan Ó Ceannabháin to Nell Ní Chróinín, attest to its strapping state of health.
That upward trajectory has continued with the news that Colm Ó Caodháin: An Irish Singer and His World, a CD and book by Ríonach uí Ógáin, is to be recognised this week by the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, a US non-profit dedicated to the preservation and study of sound recordings.
“Colm was both ordinary and extraordinary,” Uí Ógáin writes in the opening chapter of the book, a labour of love, decades in gestation, that brings this Connemara man and his music viscerally alive.
A singer, storyteller, musician, lilter, whistler and dancer with an indomitable zest for life, Ó Caodháin was born in the townland of Glinsk, west of Carna. “Locally he was known as Colm Máirtín Thomáis,” says uí Ógáin, who is the former director of the National Folklore Collection at University College Dublin.
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“I was always interested in traditional song and in sean-nós singing in particular, and on reading Séamus Ennis’s diaries in the National Folklore Collection I could see that Ennis was the collector who worked most with Colm Ó Caodháin. I discovered that there was a very special relationship between Colm and Séamus.”
This friendship proved to be a defining one for both Ó Caodháin and Ennis.
“Séamus was 23 when he started working with the Folklore Commission, and Colm was in his 40s, so it was more like a father-son relationship, I think,” uí Ógáin says. “They had a shared language, in Irish, shared songs, shared stories, and, very importantly, they had a shared sense of humour and a love of fun. Séamus has written in his diaries that Colm was the person from whom he most enjoyed collecting.”
Uí Ógáin unearthed more than 90 sound recordings of Ó Caodháin. Curating them enabled her to delve deep into the man’s biography and his singing style.
“I had been dipping in and out of Colm’s material for decades,” she says. “I was fortunate to get a stipend to spend a month at the Princess Grace library in Monaco, and in that time I was able to spend all day every day working with the Colm material. Most of his material was in the Folklore Commission collection” — now part of the National Folklore Collection — “and there were sound recordings made by Radio Éireann and the BBC, which gave it a particular life and vibrancy, just to hear Colm talking, and in Irish and in English, and playing the melodeon ... It’s wonderful to be able to hear the sound of his voice.”
The Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) awards recognise the skills involved in sourcing, collating and remastering old audio recordings in order to bring them to the attention of a new generation of listeners. There has been just one previous Irish recipient of an ARSC award: Harry Bradshaw, the ground-breaking RTÉ producer who in 1992 was recognised for excellence in recorded sound research for his widely admired collection of recordings by the great Sligo fiddle player Michael Coleman, who was born in 1891, just two years before Ó Caodháin.
“Ríonach’s award is very impressive,” Bradshaw says. “The ARSC is made up of the top experts in the States of all genres of recorded music and research in all those fields, so to come to their notice is a major achievement.”
“To be recognised here in Ireland is wonderful, of course,” says uí Ógáin, who will receive a certificate of merit for historical research in recorded country, folk, roots or world music, “but this award gives it a global feel, if you like. I just think that Colm would have been so happy to know that his material and his voice are the reasons for this award.”
Colm Ó Caodháin: An Irish Singer and His World is published by Cork University Press. Ríonach uí Ógáin will receive her award at this year’s AMRC conference, which begins in Pittsburgh tomorrow and runs until Saturday, May 20th
