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The Breathnach Recordings

Tommy was recorded by Breandán Breathnach in March 1968 in Dublin where he lived at the time. Breathnach published some of these tunes in the second volume of Ceol Rince na hÉireann in 1976. It is a significant recording for a number of reasons. Firstly, the Irish Traditional Music Archive was founded in 1987 with the Breandán Breathnach Collection at its core. The sound recording in this chapter are the first of Breathnach Collection to be made digitally available. Secondly, it is also significant in that amongst the tunes Tommy played were compositions of his – ‘The Green Fields of Glentown’ and ‘La Cosa Mulligan’ — as well as other tunes which Tommy learned at home in St Johnston.

Breandán Breathnach and his Collections

Breandán Breathnach (1912 – 1985) was an Irish music collector and uilleann piper. Breathnach grew up in the Liberties area of Dublin and learned the pipes from John Potts, William Andrews and Leo Rowsome. He worked as a Civil Servant with the Department of Agriculture, but in 1965 switched to the Department of Education where he was responsible for collecting music from around Ireland.

Breathnach wrote extensively about traditional music, often from a very personal perspective. He established the journal Ceol, which was published between 1963 and 1985.  Ceol served as a key forum for discussion on Irish traditional music, including reviews of books and recordings, transcriptions of songs and tunes, and editorials on various aspects of the tradition from Breathnach and others. In 1971, he made a significant contribution to the field with the publication of ‘Folk Music and Dances of Ireland’. This landmark text considered the history, structure and style of music in the tradition, and is still widely used as a reference book.

Breathnach is perhaps best known for his Ceol Rince na hÉireann (‘Dance Music of Ireland’) series of music books. This iconic series was based on his work as a collector and involved the transcribing of recordings that he initially made in-person, and later taken from commercial recordings.

The first volume of CRÉ was published in 1963 and concentrated on well-known players of Irish traditional music from The Pipers Club and the Dublin area. The second volume was published to great acclaim in 1976 with a wider scope of players from around Ireland included. According to Jackie Small (‘Sé Mo Laoch, 2019, s9e1), who edited subsequent editions of the CRÉ series after Breathnach’s death, only two teenage players were collected: Tommy Peoples and Frankie Gavin. Breathnach’s inclusion of these two young musicians was a significant mark of respect, given that he was renowned for his discerning, and perhaps conservative attitude towards performance styles in Irish traditional music.

Jackie Small stated (translated from speech in Gaelic):

“Breandán Breathnach was the pre-eminent expert on Irish folk music in the twentieth century. He was mostly interested in the older musicians [in his collecting]. However, he also recorded a small number of younger musicians; there were two of the younger musicians at that time that Breandán was very interested in, and they were Tommy Peoples and Frankie Gavin. The reason Breandán had so much respect for them was that they were traditional musicians. They hadn’t gone to colleges of music or the likes of that. It goes without saying that Breandán knew a lot of younger musicians at that time, and that he knew their parents also, but he didn’t regard them as traditional musicians because they went to the college of music in Dublin.” (‘Sé Mo Laoch, 2019, s9 e1)

Breathnach obviously was not aware of Tommy’s irregular classical lessons with his friend Sam Nisbet.

Selecting Contributors

In 1965 in Ceol: A Journal of Irish Music vol. 2, no. 2 Breathnach wrote ‘An Appeal’ to the readers. In this missive he asked the general public to contribute items of interest to his collection of Irish traditional music, which he was undertaking on behalf of The Department of Education. The full ‘appeal’ can be read on pages 42 & 43 here.

The most significant part of the appeal, which would go on to inform his second volume of CRÉ, was the call for musicians to contribute tunes or settings of tunes from their repertoires which they considered not widely known.

Breathnach stated that:

“Only the names of ‘first-hand’ players should be included, that is, players whose repertoire does not wholly or mainly derive from radio programmes, records or tapes of other players. Generally, such players will be around 50 years or upwards.” (Ceol, v2 n2, p.42-43)

It should be noted that the quality of the playing is not the important thing here, but that the tunes (whether well played or otherwise) have not been noted down previously or differ sufficiently from other printed versions to justify inclusion in the collection. Very old players, therefore, could be well worth recording while younger players of much greater musical ability might be of less value for the purpose of this work because their music had been derived from printed collections or from radio programmes.

Vols. 3 (1985), 4 (1996) & 5 (1999) of CRÉ were based on published recordings of music as opposed to the field recordings made by Breathnach himself in the earlier editions. The series was highly influential with it being widely distributed during the revival and growth of Irish traditional music.

Breathnach’s methodology owes much to the collections of Francis O’Neill, made in Chicago form emigrant Irish musicians in the early 1900s. The transcriptions are ‘descriptive’, as opposed to the type of ‘prescriptive’ transcriptions more commonly found in tutor books. In this regard, the melodies given are a very close approximation of what the informant played and include the various ornamentations heard in the recordings. However, the transcriptions are not fully descriptive in the way that later works by the likes of Pat Mitchell would be, transcribing the entire performance from start to finish.

By the time of his death, Breathnach had recorded over 7,000 tunes. His efforts were responsible for saving many melodies and he is generally recognised as a major figure in the preservation and revival of Irish traditional music. He developed an ‘incipit’ system, a way of standardising all tunes to the same key and denoting the first bar in letter form. This allowed for easy comparison to be made between different settings of tunes. The system would also be adapted by Aloys Fleischmann in his landmark Sources of Irish Traditional Music (1998).

Tommy Peoples recorded for Breandán Breathnach in March 1968. Tommy had been living in Dublin for around three years at this stage. It was also in March 1968 that Tommy joined An Garda Síochána aged 19, with which he worked for around two years although as he later said ‘I was more into prevention than cure’ and he claimed that he had never served a summons in his time there.

The Recording

The field recordings made of Tommy Peoples by Breandán Breathnach consist of twelve tunes (eleven reels and one hornpipe). Two of the twelve pieces were composed by Peoples himself, although he did not claim ownership of these pieces to Breathnach on the day. Breathnach used six different sizes of reel-to-reel in the collection, from little tiny 3 inch reel-to-reels to large, professional-grade 12 inch reel-to-reels.

Also given here are Breathnach’s CRÉ transcriptions along with new descriptive transcriptions made by Siobhán Peoples. Nine of these tunes played by Tommy here were transcribed by Breathnach in CRÉ2 which was published in 1976. They can be compared and contrasted with Siobhán’s own transcriptions and can also be used as learning aids by anyone keen to understand Peoples’ style and approach at this point in his development.

We have included all the audio from this recording so that you can hear the communication between Breathnach and Peoples on the day as it illuminates some of the reasoning behind the selection and the way they were played. Tommy plays noticeably slower than he does on later known recordings. Peoples was aware that the tunes would be used for Breathnach’s published collections, and this may partially explain the reason for the slower tempo. Evidence from the previous chapter suggests that in general, Peoples played at a slower tempo in his youth than in the 1970s.

Whilst Tommy didn’t spare double stopping or other elements of his playing on the recording, it is possible that he used a little bit less ornamentation and variation than would have been the norm at this point in his life.

Of his own style at this time, Peoples wrote:

“My own playing at that time differed somewhat both in choice of tunes and method of ornamentation. Donegal was somewhat isolated from the rest of the country due to its extreme north-western position and being almost cut off by the six-county border. Emigration from there was traditionally to Scotland so any influences on musicians tended to be Scottish ones.” (Between the Jigs and the Reels, 1994, introduction).

Tommy says very little on the day, in-keeping with his shy, understated nature and his nervousness of playing in public. In this case this nervousness would have been heightened by his playing for an eminent collector of whose reputation he was well aware.

Evidence of Tommy’s shyness are abundant in the recordings we present throughout this project. Whether working alone (the McConnell recordings) or with others, Peoples focused directly on the playing of the tunes, rather than the folklore, stories, or even the names of the pieces he was playing.

Breathnach was aware of tunes that Tommy had passed to the Castle Céilí Band – namely ‘Jackson’s’ and ‘The Oak Tree’ amongst others – and Breathnach is heard to ask Peoples for some of these. The Castle were extremely influential, with members of Ceoltóirí Cualann and The Chieftains amongst their members. Many of their sets are still considered standard repertoire amongst musicians today, especially those in the Dublin area.

They also included Seán Keane, a favourite of Tommy’s father, from when Keane won a fiddle competition on Seán Ó Riada’s Fleadh Cheoil an Radio in the early 1960s. The admiration that Peoples Snr had for Keane most definitely influenced Tommy. Upon moving to Dublin Tommy regularly met Keane and they played many times together over the years as is evidenced by private recordings.

Aside from music from the Castle Céilí Band, it’s clear that Breathnach was interested in music from Peoples’ homeplace. Breathnach asks Tommy to explain where he is from and asks about the local dance tradition. The conversation that we hear, makes it obvious that this is a region with which Breathnach was not familiar. That Breathnach was keen to unveil east Donegal’s musical heritage is of note, particularly as the area was often forgotten by the political decision makers of the day.

Breathnach did not know that Tommy was hiding some of his own compositions amongst the tunes that he collected. Amongst these was an embryonic version of ‘The Green Fields of Glentown’, a tune that Tommy says was his first composition. He later told Kevin Glackin that hearing his tunes played by others gave them a certain ‘validity’ and this gives us an insight into his motivation in putting his own tunes to the fore in this short recording session.

Of the encounter, Tommy recalled in his book:

“Bréandán Breathnach collected this tune from me along with ‘The Green Fields of Glentown’ in March 1968. No one will find any record of either tune previous to that date. They are both in his Book 2 collection as two-part tunes (numbers 163 and 246, respectively), even though I know that I never would have played them this way, but only as three-part tunes.

“I contacted Jackie Small recently to see if he could confirm what was on the original Breathnach recordings for me. Jackie took over Brendán (sic.) Breathnach’s collection, released Book 4 a couple of years ago and has access to all the recordings. He told me that they were transferring all the recordings to CD form and he would let me know when he found the relevant tapes. I make the three-part claim for each tune even though recorded more than forty years ago and am sure that the missing part happened in transcription from tape to page.

“Although I’d written ‘La Cosa Mulligan’ I didn’t name it for a number of years. This was due to the fact that in those years there was an emphasis on tunes being strictly traditional. Not so many were openly composing, apart from Ed Reavey [sic] in the U.S. As a result, I would have been slow to state my authorship by putting names on my tunes. Even without being named by me, however, the tune acquired the name ‘Jackson’s Number 2’, and I left that name on it when I played it on the 1986 Walton’s collection. This was due to the fact that Frankie Gavin recorded the tune as a selection with an older, similar sounding tune known as ‘Jackson’s’ and put the title ‘Jackson’s’ on the entire selection. During a recent phone call Frankie told me he had first heard the two tunes played together by me. I recorded the tune for the 50 Irish Fiddle Tunes collection published by Waltons and at that time just decided to leave the name Jackson’s on it since it had come to be known that way. When I was recording my own CD, The Quiet Glen, of some of my own tunes in 1998, however, I put my own name for the tune La Cosa Mulligan, on it. I can state here clearly that no one will find a recording or notation of this tune pre-1968, the year Breathnach collected it from me.” (Ó Am go hAm, 2015, p.289-290)

The Music

The recording features a number of tunes that Peoples learned from his uncle Mattha. The first set of tunes on the Molloy, Peoples, Brady record is two reels under the title ‘Matt Peoples’. On the Breathnach recording they are recorded separately and in reverse order. They are noticeably slower, and they aren’t in E flat as they are on the recording. Tommy’s playing with Matt was faster than when playing solo and it is also likely that the trio recording was sped up slightly, which was a recording technique commonly used at the time. In Ó Am go hAm (p. 87) Peoples clears up an urban myth about the origins of these tunes, accrediting them to his uncle Mattha, rather than to himself and Matt Molloy.

Another tune that Tommy played that we know he got from his uncle Mattha was ‘The Milkmaid’. He didn’t give Breathnach a name for this tune either and its title in CRÉ2 ‘Tommy Peoples’ became how it was known in Irish Traditional Music. Its popularity in the tradition today under Tommy’s name speaks to how influential that book of tunes was. The tune was played in Tommy’s local area for a long time, and Tommy got it from his uncle Mattha as he explains in the Tutor section of his book with the title ‘The Milkmaid’ (p. 88).

The tune also appears in The James Tourish Manuscripts (1896) without a title, a collection which was found just miles from Tommy’s homeplace in St Johnston. It is derived from a famous Scottish reel and puirt a beul (‘mouth music’) entitled ‘Clean Peas Straw’ which is used in the film Braveheart.

Notes on the Tunes

1 – Matt Peoples’ #2 – Reel

A reel that Tommy got from his uncle, Mattha Peoples.  It is listed as No.256 in CRÉ2 p.132 under the title ‘Gan Ainm’. Tommy has a slightly different twist on the end of the second part from the Molloy, Peoples, Brady album. On the McConnell recording he says he hasn’t played them in years.

Breandán Breathnach’s transcription of Tommy Peoples’ playing of ‘Matt People’s Reel #2’

2 – Matt Peoples’ #1 – Reel

A reel that Tommy got from his uncle, Mattha Peoples. This is the first tune on Molloy, Peoples, Brady. It is No.237 in CRÉ2 p.123 under the title ‘Gan Ainm’. Tommy’s triplets as they were at this time and his fourth finger double stops that double up the open A are notable here.

3 – Lady Lincoln – Reel

This was a version of what is more widely known as ‘The Maids of Castlebar’. A Donegal Setting called ‘McFarley’s’ also exists. The first recording of Tommy playing this, aged thirteen, is available in Chapter 1.

Again, this tune came to Tommy from his uncle Mattha as can be made out from some of the barely audible chat in Track 3 of the below playlist, before the tune is played –
TP – “What do you call that one, The Maids of Castlebar?”

BB – “Yeah”.

TP – “Whatever, it goes something like this… it was an uncle I learned it of”.

After Tommy plays it the conversation continues:

BB – “Had your uncle a name for it?”

TP – “He hadn’t no”.

Talking over each other

BB – “I’d say it is The Maids…”

TP – “It is a local version of it”

4 – Green Fields of Glentown [comp. Tommy Peoples] – Reel

Breathnach only takes the first two parts in his transcription. ‘The Green Fields of Glentown’ was recorded twice by Tommy, firstly on his CCÉ-issued album, and later on The Quiet Glen. More information on this tune is available in Chapter Four: Compositions.

Breandán Breathnach’s transcription of Tommy Peoples’ playing of ‘The Green Fields of Glentown’

5 – The Mint in the Corn – Reel

In the full recording given above, Tommy has a run at the first part and then drops out at the syncopated section. Where does the syncopation come from? Did he learn this from home? And the triplets on the run down. On the McConnell tapes (see Chapter 5) recorded a few years later he hits his mark in the playing of this tune and has clearly worked on it. ‘The Mint in the Corn’ was recorded by John Doherty around this same time and can be heard on The Floating Bow. Doherty’s version doesn’t have this syncopation . Breathnach noted this tune as Tune 191 on CRÉ2 under the title ‘Gan Ainm’. The piper Mick Coyne, who played regularly with Tommy, played his setting of the tune Both Sides of the Coyne (2001).

6 – The Oak Tree – Reel

Sean Keane and Mick O’Connor learned this tune from Tommy and played it in the Castle Céilí Band. Frankie Gavin also subsequently learned this from Tommy, from whom he was also inspired to explore performing in E flat tuning (‘Sé Mo Laoch, 2019 S9 E1). The Boys of the Lough also recorded it in 1974. It later appeared on Tommy’s CCÉ album and The High Part of the Road. As with ‘The Green Fields of Glentown’, Breathnach only gives two parts.

The second card from Breandán Breathnach’s transcription of Tommy Peoples’ playing of ‘The Oak Tree’

7 – Jackson’s – Reel

A traditional reel associated with Tommy from this and later recordings. Frankie Gavin recording this along with ‘La Cosa Mulligan’, calling them both ‘Jackson’s No.1’ and ‘Jackson’s No.2’. Tommy himself paired it with ‘The Oak Tree’ on the CCÉ album.

8 – La Cosa Mulligan [comp. Tommy Peoples] – Reel

Tommy wrote:

“I named this tune as a mark of respect to Mulligan Music Ltd., a record company with which I was briefly involved in the 1970s. This tune was given the title ‘Jackson’s No.2’ on a Frankie Gavin recording because Frankie played it with a Donegal reel of similar style called ‘Jackson’s’.

‘La Cosa Mulligan’, is listed as No.163 in CRÉ2, collected from me in 1968. ‘The Green Fields of Glentown’ is listed as No.246. Both are transcribed as two-part tunes, but I only ever wrote and played them as three-part tunes. Most of the other tunes listed as having come from me I got from my Uncle Mattha.” (Ó Am Go hAm p. 220)

More information on this tune is available on the ‘Compositions’ page.

Breandán Breathnach’s transcription of Tommy Peoples’ playing of ‘La Cosa Mulligan’

9 – Untitled, hornpipe

This tune was published in CRÉ5, a volume of Breathnach’s collected materials that was edited and published after his death by Jackie Small. It is found on p.104 (no.215) and is given without title. The first part is reminiscent of the James Hill composition, ‘The High Level’. The reference note for the tune simply states that it was collected by Breathnach from Tommy in March 1968.

10 – The Humours of Tirconnell – Reel

This tune was published in CRÉ5, a volume of Breathnach’s collected materials that was edited and published after his death by Jackie Small. It is found on p.96 (no.203) and is given without title. The title here is one that has become attached to the tune in recent times. The reference note for the tune simply states that it was collected by Breathnach from Tommy in March 1968.

11 – The Milk Maid – Known widely as Tommy Peoples’ – Reel

The name Mattha had on no. 166 was ‘The Milkmaid’, and Tommy also heard him play a third part of ‘The Heather Breeze’, no. 149 in Breathnach’s third collection (Ó Am go hAm p. 220). The tune is also known as ‘Clean Peas Straw’.

12 – The Heathery Breeze – Reel

‘The Heather Breeze’ or ‘Heathery Breeze’ is a common tune in ITM. It is in O’Neills 1001, and Michael Coleman recorded it along with many others from the early 1920s onwards. When Breathnach included it in his collection he did so from Tommy’s playing of it with his slightly usual setting. A third part, which is reminiscent of the melody of ‘The Ewe with the Crooked Horn’, is also heard here.

Breandán Breathnach’s transcription of Tommy Peoples’ playing of ‘The Heather Breeze’.

Sources

Breathnach, Breandán (ed.). Ceol: A Journal of Music, Vol. 1. Available digitally here on the ITMA website.

Breathnach, Breandán. Folk Music and Dances of Ireland. Cork: Mercier Press, 1971.

Breathnach, Breandán (ed.). Ceol Rince na hÉireann, Vol. 2. Dublin, An Gum Press, 1976.

Mac Aoidh, Caoimhin. Between the Jigs and the Reels. Leitrim: Drumlin, 1994.

Broadcasts

Aniar TV (prod.). ‘Sé Mo Laoch: Frankie Gavin. TG4, 2019.

Sibéal Teo (prod.). ‘Sé Mo Laoch: Tommy Peoples. TG4, 2008.

Photographs

Photograph of Breandán Breathnach from ITMA Collection, 3656-PH.