I have never heard of any recordings by Gildas. McSweeney would have been just too early for any chance of recording. He was in Chicago in 1893, the first recordings of pipers we have were made just five years or so later. It’s very unlikely he’d have been recorded in Donegal at that time.
There are a lot of sweeping generalisations about styles, a bit of caution is probably a good thing. R.L. O’Meally’s recordings are tight enough I suppose but maybe not enough to declare them representative for all pipers up there. There’s enough evidence to suggest that sort of playing wasn’t confined to any particular region.
I was thinking R. L. Mealy spent time in Cork before moving north. This would make any generalizations about his ‘regional’ bias very speculative. There would also be the need to take into account the speculation that he had a family connection of some sort to Kenna, which would imply a connection to a much older piping tradition. And of course, Gildas was quite thick with Mealy, and in fact appears to have ‘cooked up’ the O’Mealy moniker. I wonder how much of an echo of Gildas’ playing might be heard from the fragments we have of Mealy.
I’d say we have a bit more than a few fragments of ROL’s playing, ten tunes is more tha nwe have of some pipers and it’s about enough to get some idea of his piping anyway. I must admit that as more material of Touhey became available over the years the insight in his playing has broadened, I mean, who’d have expected multiple rolling based on the material we had twenty or thirty years ago?
But to get back to the original line, two more clips of Felix Doran’s music. They are from 1966 or there about but I am not sure they come from the aftermath of the Keele festival or are part from the next item on the tape, which is a huge session of Felix, Michael Gorman, Maggie Barry and many more. The first one is a nice approach to that tune anyway, and it shows once more ‘open style’ is only relative a descriptor.
And here’s Willie Clancy sending up the Bally Boys. A study in controlled wildness you could say. I have several recordings of him playing this and he seems to use the same variations although on some occasions he’s very controlled and precise, on others the playing is more loose and wild .
Great to hear these clips and they confirm that these pipers Clancy, Rochford, Doran, Walsh had their own personal styles, throwing tight and open fingering in to the mix when and where they felt it appropiate. Willie sounds like Johnny when the wildness comes upon him.
I can hear a harp in the recordings of Felix, wonder who that could be, don’t think there was a harpist at Keele?
I see that the McPeakes were at Keele '65 so there’s a good chance that the harp player heard on the Felix’s clips was Kathleen or James McPeake, if the recordings are from 1965 that is.
Concerning “individual style”: One of the most “open” pipers of today I know is Mrs. Becky Taylor. This seems to be a bit astounding as her first bagpipes were NSPs - or maybe thats just why. The traditional way of playing NSPs sometimes IMO sounds a bit like hen cackling
