Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive
Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive
Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive
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COURTNEY’S ‘UNION PIPES’ AND THE TERMINOLOGY OF IRISH BELLOWS-BLOWN BAGPIPES 18<br />
London, at least one <strong>Irish</strong>-made bellows bagpipe by a recognised<br />
<strong>Irish</strong> maker is also being played there:<br />
Wants a Place, a young man, who is thoroughly acquainted with all<br />
the branches of servitude... The same person has a very handsome<br />
pair of <strong>Irish</strong> Bag-pipes, by the real old Egan in Dublin, made for a<br />
nobleman deceased. Any single gentleman wanting a servant, or a<br />
pair of Bag-pipes, or both... shall be immediately waited upon... 42<br />
<br />
This young man is doubtless the ‘Murphy, Player of the <strong>Irish</strong> <strong>Pipes</strong>’<br />
who would advertise in Edinburgh for a place in service as a musical<br />
dresser or butler in 1787, the year before Courtney’s London debut. 43<br />
His full name was John Murphy, 44 and he also would become a well<br />
known professional recitalist from 1788. 45 An <strong>Irish</strong> ‘bagpipes’<br />
player, unnamed but from Mullingar, Co Westmeath, was playing on<br />
stage for dancers in 1781 in a revival London production of Allan<br />
Ramsay’s Scottish pastoral the Gentle Shepherd. 46 At this general<br />
period also the ‘bagpipe’ is the favoured instrument among the poor<br />
42<br />
Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, London, 20 Sept. 1779. For the 1760s<br />
Dublin pipe-maker Egan see Donnelly 1983: 7–11.<br />
43<br />
Caledonian Mercury, Edinburgh, 26 July 1787.<br />
44<br />
Murphy c. 1810: title page, quoted in Cannon 1980: 90–1.<br />
45<br />
Murphy played for the Highland Society of London on seven documented<br />
occasions in 1788, beginning on 20 January, and twice during the year with<br />
Denis Courtney (NLS MS Highland Society of London Dep. 268/34). Although<br />
playing <strong>Irish</strong> bellows pipes in London earlier than Courtney, he was eclipsed by<br />
him.<br />
46<br />
Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser, London, 14 Dec. 1781: ‘When his<br />
Majesty was to see the Gentle Shepherd, one of his officers, a Scotchman, being<br />
behind the scenes, and conceiving that no person but of his own country could<br />
play the bagpipes, went up to the man who performs on that instrument in the<br />
Highland reel, and said, “What part of the kirk, laddie?”. The other answered,<br />
with a very broad provincial accent — “From Mullingar, by J—s honey!”’.<br />
Mullingar is in Co Westmeath. The John Geoghegan mentioned above was also<br />
of Co Westmeath connection, but was doubtless of a different social class from<br />
this piper.