New Online Audio Series from Irish Music Archives

A new series within Burns Library’s blog presents rare audio recordings of Irish music from the 1950s and 1960s. The ongoing series offers unique material selected from the Irish Music Archives, including collections digitized by Boston College Libraries in 2018 through a Recordings at Risk grant.

This fall’s Irish music blog posts focused on New York City ‘s Irish music from Joe Lamont Irish Music Recordings. Fiddle player Joe Lamont (1905-1972) emigrated from County Derry to New York in the 1920s, eventually becoming a founding member and officer in the Paddy Killoran Club. Lamont’s open-reel tapes, donated to Burns Library by his nephew Jim Lowney, include live music by well-known fiddle players such as Paddy Killoran and many other performers. Copies of commercially-recorded sound discs also appear, alongside some of privately-recorded discs featuring rare clips of Michael Coleman and James “Lad” O’Beirne.

A related collection, Boston-based James W. Smith Irish Music Recordings, was also digitized in 2018 and will provide material for online streaming. More details on both the Lamont and Smith collections are available through Burns Library’s blog and archival finding aids. The Lamont blog posts, which have attracted many readers, listeners, and comments, can be found at https://johnjburnslibrary.wordpress.com/tag/joe-lamont/.