As the archive’sdirector, Barry Stapleton, tells the story, in 1992 Ed Ward, the founder ofIrish Fest, was in the Irish Traditional Music Archive in Dublin waiting to seethe archive director when he happened across copies of his grandfather’scollection of music books. Finding this piece of his family’s heritage inspiredWard to research how Irish America’s musical history was being preserved. Hefound that no comprehensive collection existed. By that point, Milwaukee’s Irish Fest had in its possession15 years’ worth of music and music-related items sent by musicians hoping toplay the popular festival. It was a perfect base on which to grow the archivesand initiate an effort to preserve Irish musical heritage in America.
When the Ward IrishMusic Archives moved in 1998 with its parent company, Milwaukee Irish Fest,into its current digs, an old Masonic lodge, it was given the second floor ofthe building, a whole 2,500 square feet to accommodate the growing collection.That year, the Ward Irish Music Archives received a generous donation fromMichael and Mary Comer: 5,000 reel-to-reel, CD, cassette, LP, 45 rpm and 78 rpmrecords on Irish labels from the 1940s through the 1980s, most of which wouldbe very difficult to find today.
The most rare andvaluable collection in the Ward Irish Music Archives was acquired against allodds. Francis O’Neill was an Irish-born American police officer who served as Chicago’s police chieffrom 1901 to 1905. An avid collector of Irish traditional music, he oftenrecorded the major performers of the era, including Patrick Touhey, one of thebest uilleann pipers of all time, on wax cylinders. Stapleton recounts thatafter O’Neill and his wife suffered the loss of all their sons, they decided togive their music collection away. It is believed that Michael Dunn, a musicianand instrument maker, as well as the captain of the Milwaukee Fire Department,received some of O’Neill’s field recordings and manuscripts.
“The story goes thatsometime between the time Dunn died in 1935 and World War II, his daughter wastold that, if bombed by the Japanese, the cylinders would become shrapnel andtear the whole house apart, so she took them outside and burned them,”Stapleton says. “So in all the history books it says the Dunn cylinders werelost in Milwaukeewhen the daughter burned them. That’s what everybody thought until 2003, whenDr. David Dunn, a retired pediatrician from Children's Hospital, walked intothe building carrying a suitcase with the cylinders.”
“The importance of theO’Neill cylinders is that he was recording the experience of all the Irishimmigrants,” explains archives assistant Jeff Ksiazek. “For a long time, therecordings on the cylinders and the music in the books didn’t match up. Thebest analogy is to imagine that the Beatles just wrote out all their music in amanuscript book and never recorded. Imagine 80 years later you find a recordingof them. That’s really what we have here.”
For more information: 414-476-8999/ 1532 Wauwatosa Ave./www.irishmusicarchive.com.
