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 86<br />
and the early 1930s, the term almost invariably employed in<br />
newspaper programme listings was ‘uilleann pipes’ and not ‘union<br />
pipes’. The more recent term was used during those years of Máire<br />
McCarthy, Leo Rowsome, Risteárd Ó Briain, Séamus Mac<br />
Aonghusa (James Ennis), Liam Breathnach (Liam Walsh), R.L.<br />
O’Mealy, Philip Martin and Sean O’Leary in publicity for their<br />
occasional 10- or 15-minute radio recitals. The term was doubtless<br />
promoted by Seamus Clandillon of Galway, the first director of the<br />
station and an <strong>Irish</strong>-language enthusiast, 317 and it was firmly<br />
established in a radio context by the time he retired in 1934.<br />
In 1928, the year of his death, Grattan Flood was still actively<br />
engaged in his campaign to have his term accepted: ‘Uilleann pipes<br />
[are] incorrectly called the “union” pipes’. 318 This was his last known<br />
word on the matter, although his opinions would live on influentially<br />
in print.<br />
But among <strong>Irish</strong> bellows pipers usage still continued to vary. When<br />
they began to record commercial 78s for the <strong>Irish</strong> market, in London<br />
from the 1910s, ‘(<strong>Irish</strong>) union pipe’ was the term commonly used on<br />
their record labels by such nationally known players as William N.<br />
Andrews of Dublin and later Leo Rowsome of Dublin and Liam<br />
Walsh of Waterford. 319 In the course of the 1920s this was replaced<br />
first on labels by ‘<strong>Irish</strong> (bag)pipes’, and joined in the second half of<br />
the decade by ‘(<strong>Irish</strong>) uilleann pipes’. From his frequent newspaper<br />
317<br />
He is reported as having used the term himself in 1931 when being<br />
interviewed by a journalist for an article on ‘The Passing of the <strong>Irish</strong> Piper’<br />
(<strong>Irish</strong> Independent, 13 Feb. 1931).<br />
318<br />
W.H. Grattan Flood, Cork Examiner, Cork, 14 July 1928, quoted in An<br />
Píobaire vol. 2, no 2 (Sept. 1978): 4.<br />
319<br />
The very earliest <strong>Irish</strong> bellows players to record commercially were Coventryborn<br />
Thomas Garoghan in Britain (who used the term ‘<strong>Irish</strong> bagpipes’ on<br />
Berliner discs of c. 1898) and Limerick-born James C. McAuliffe in the United<br />
States (who used ‘bagpipe’ on Edison cylinders of 1899).