Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive

87 COURTNEY’S ‘UNION PIPES’ AND THE TERMINOLOGY OF IRISH BELLOWS-BLOWN BAGPIPES
concert reports and radio listings, and from record labels, Leo
Rowsome seems to have made the change-over in this latter period.
In letters published in The Evening Herald of Dublin in May 1930,
he and Seamus Mac Aonghusa were in agreement in using the new
term, referring respectively to ‘Irish pipes’ and ‘uilleann pipes’,
while Rowsome came back to refer to the ‘Irish (or uilleann) pipes’
which had also the title of the ‘Irish Organ’. 320 William N. Andrews
was billed as late as 1935 as playing the ‘union pipes’ on the radio,
but this happened in Belfast, on BBC Northern Ireland, where the
political neutrality of Courtney’s term was evidently still useful. In
his Dublin advertising of the same time Andrews had succumbed to
‘Irish uillean pipes’. 321 Kildare piper Sean Dempsey, recording
commercially for the Regal Zonophone label in London and Dublin
in 1936 and 1937, muddied the waters still further. In 1936 and 1937
respectively he is playing the ‘Irish union pipes’ and the ‘Irish pipes’
in London, according to his record labels, 322 while in 1937 he is also
recording in Dublin on ‘Irish uilleann pipes’. 323
In 1936 however a significant die was cast in the entire matter with
the publication of the first Irish bellows pipes tutors to appear since
those of the early nineteenth century: Tadhg Crowley’s How to Play
the Uillean Pipes, published in Cork by Crowley himself, and Leo
Rowsome’s Tutor for the Uileann Pipes, published in Dublin by the
Dublin College of Music. In a move reminiscent of those of
O’Farrell, Fitzmaurice and Murphy over a hundred years earlier in
relation to ‘union pipes’, Flood’s new term was finally established in
printed music-book form and by authors who were themselves
pipers. Since he was a prize-winning performer, teacher, recording
artist, broadcaster, pipe-maker and repairer, and inheritor of a family
320
Evening Herald, Dublin, 15, 20 & 21 May 1930.
321
Campbell 2011: 185.
322
Regal Zonophone IZ 603, Regal Zonophone IZ 656.
323
Regal Zonophone IZ 705.