Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive

91 COURTNEY’S ‘UNION PIPES’ AND THE TERMINOLOGY OF IRISH BELLOWS-BLOWN BAGPIPES
and jigs on simply ‘(bag)pipes’. This usage continued through to
about 1960, when a shift to the term ‘uilleann pipes’ began to occur
under the influence of uilleann pipers such as Seamus Ennis and Leo
Rowsome coming to America on commercial recordings or in
person, and the foundation of branches of CCÉ which generally used
the new term. This influence was greatly reinforced later in the
decade by the commercial recordings of the group The Chieftains
(led by uilleann piper Paddy Moloney), by Americans who became
members of the organisation Na Píobairí Uilleann from 1968 and
adopted its terminology, and from the 1970s by touring solo uilleann
pipers such as Liam O’Flynn of the group Planxty and Paddy
Keenan of the Bothy Band. As part of this trend, the first newsletter
for American players of Irish bellows pipes was The Uilleann Piper,
a short-lived circular edited in 1974 by Rev. James MacKenzie of
North Carolina. Remaining to an extent with the older usage
however has been the society of Irish bellows pipers which began
life in 1979 as The Irish Pipers’ Club of San Francisco, and which
still flourishes as The Irish Pipers’ Club, based in Seattle with
connections to other North American Irish pipers clubs. Its 1979
constitution stated that it was formed to ‘preserve and promote the
playing of the Irish Union (Uilleann) Pipes’, and in its journal Iris na
bPíobairí – The Pipers’ Review, it has continued to actively employ
the term ‘union pipes’ as well as ‘uilleann pipes’. 338
However, in the wider world of globalised Irish bellows piping, now
found on four continents, modern Irish usage has been almost
universally adapted and the instrument is formally known as the
‘uilleann pipes’, both in its contemporary forms and as an ahistorical
term of convenience for referring to its older forms. Breandán
338
It was influenced at first in this by Denis Brooks, a founding member of the
club and the first editor of its journal. I am obliged to him for the information
that he favoured the Courtney term as it was what he had heard from older
players in the United States in the 1960s (pers. comm., 2 Oct. 2011). His 1985
manual for the instrument is entitled The Tutor: Irish Union Pipes. A Workbook.