Re: Bulmer and Sharpley's Music of Ireland
Originally Posted by
Gary Leonard
I came across this website from a Facebook post the other day. It lists the tunes in the 4 volumes of the Bulmer and Sharpley's Music of Ireland in PDFs, and ABC format with some mp3 recordings (mostly midi from the ABC it seems). A great piece of work capturing a lot of ITM, well worth taking a browse here:
http://www.capeirish.com/webabc/work...ject_home.html
I spent the better part of the evening yesterday combining the individual PDFs for each volume, and added an index for the PDF page numbers. If anyone would like copies, I have them available here. If anyone knows the fine folks who put up these files, I would gladly hand these off so they can be listed on their website.
http://winscore-garfnet.azurewebsite...sharpleys.html
Thanks for this post. I will now dig out my dog-eared original copies of the B&S volumes, which I painstakingly hunted down at folk festivals in England in the 1970s. Music shops did not stock them and there was no online in those days. They were a 'labour of love' and can't have made any money for the authors. They were a godsend for those of us in the city centre pub sessions who could not pick up tunes easily by ear. B&S had a knack of capturing the 'tunes of the moment', including those on the latest albums by De Danaan, Planxty and more obscure stuff on Gael-Linn etc.
I did not know the authors, who were denizens of the Leeds (northern England) session scene; I lived in Birmingham (midlands) which, as in Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, London etc., had several lively Irish pub sessions every week. The B&S books were highly valued, more so than the more academic tune books you could sometimes track down in the local Irish/ Catholic Centre shops in the big cities, and they allowed more young people to build enough repertoire join the session scene. I am sure the B&S books played a key role in expanding the playing of Irish music right across Britain.
I would love to hear how far the B&S books were used outside the UK scene. I imagine a few photocopies were circulated, at least!
Kevin
Anglocelt
mainly Irish & Scottish but open to all dance-oriented melodic music.
Mandos: Gibson A2, Janish A5, Krishot F5, Taran Springwell, Shippey, Weber Elite A5; TM and OM by Dave Gregory, J E Dallas, Tobin & Davidson.
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