The Irish Folk Song Society (IFSS) was founded in London in 1904, one of several Irish cultural societies set up in the metropolis around the turn of the century by middle-class Irish people living and working there in the heyday of empire. They included the Irish Literary Society of 1892 and the still-flourishing Irish Texts Society of 1898. The IFSS was itself an amicable break-away from the Folk Song Society of 1898, established in London by Cecil Sharp, Kate Lee and others to foster and explore the traditional music and song of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland; the new society hoped to maintain the scientific spirit of the older one.

The object of the IFSS was ‘to collect all the unpublished traditional airs and ballads of the Irish race, and to print and publish as many as possible from time to time’. This was to be accomplished by the publication of a quarterly journal which would record these items as they were found, without arrangement or harmonisation but with sources and background information. Articles in the journal, ballad-sheet reprints, concerts and lectures for members would form part of the programme.

In the style of the time, the Society had an aristocratic president (the Earl of Shaftesbury), a set of vice-presidents, a council and various other officers. The annual subscription for those in London was half a guinea; for out-of-town members five shillings. The year after foundation there were over 120 members, but a small membership and difficult finances continued to be a restraining factor on the Society before it came to an end in 1939 after thirty-five years of existence.

To the fore in the new society were the Dubliner Alfred Perceval Graves (1846–1931, centre above), a schools inspector and songwriter, and Mrs Charlotte Milligan Fox (1864–1916) from Omagh and Belfast, a classically trained musician who had studied in Germany, Italy and London. As the honorary secretary of the Society, she was its highly energetic driving force until her early death, and she was also prominent in its publication committee, initially with Herbert Hughes (1882–1937, right above) of Belfast, a music journalist and collector of Irish traditional songs. Irish people living in Ireland were also contributing members, among them the Limerick educationalist and music collector P.W. Joyce (1827–1914), the Wexford music historian W.H. Grattan Flood (1859–1928), the song collector Mrs Maude Houston (d. 1905) of Coleraine and the writer Mrs Edith Wheeler (d. 1922), a sister of Mrs Fox’s.

Although the Journal never became a quarterly after its first numbers, it appeared in small soft-cover volumes at approximately annual intervals from 1904 to 1915 before going into a period of abeyance at Mrs Fox’s illness and death and the disruption caused by the First World War (her last volume carried news of members at the front and the Society’s raising of funds for Belgian refugees).

The content of the journal in those early years consisted largely of English-language Ulster songs and tunes and of nineteenth-century writings on Irish music; there is no trace of influence from the contemporary and highly active London Gaelic League. Some 260 song and tune items were published, sometimes in a slapdash presentation and not always edited to the highest standards. Irish-language Ulster song material was carried from volume VI of 1908 after Mrs Fox had famously discovered in 1907 the surviving music and Gaelic song manuscripts of the collector Edward Bunting (1773–1843) in the possession of his descendants. In dealing with the Irish language Mrs Fox was guided by another sister, the nationalist writer Alice Milligan (1866–1953), and advantage was taken of modern reprographic technology to present facsimiles from the manuscripts. Mrs Fox made a further important discovery on a 1911 visit to the United States: traditional music manuscripts held in Boston of the Dublin collector Henry Hudson (1798–1889). Selections from these were published from volume X of 1912. In her final years Mrs Fox expanded the range of contributors to the journal, published there melodies and songs that she had collected on the phonograph, some in Co. Waterford, others in London from Co. Cork, and separately from the Society published her Songs of the Irish Harpers (1910) and Annals of the Irish Harpers (1911). In 1917 the Bunting manuscripts came by the terms of her will to the Library of Queen’s University, Belfast.

The second, very different, phase of the Journal of the Irish Folk Song Society consists of its final volumes XVI–XXIX, 1919–1939. This is available here.

The copies of the IFSS journal presented here in facsimile are from ITMA’s Gráinne Yeats Collection, donated by her family.

Text: Nicholas Carolan; digitisation: Linda Badgley & Maeve Gebruers, 28 March 2024