Anne Byrne (101) donates 62 years of music to archive

Ireland’s oldest music collector Anne Byrne sat in the Irish Traditional Music Archive yesterday, listening to an old-style waltz – one of more than 60 recordings spanning as many years which she has donated to the archive.

“It is my father playing. It is an Argentinian waltz and he is playing it on an accordion that I brought him back from Argentina,” she says.

She goes on to say her father was born there. “There is a lot of Irish people in Argentina. His parents were Irish but they had emigrated when he was born.”

It is an easy and casual explanation and you forget the woman speaking in Merrion Square, Dublin, is 101 years old – born in 1915 soon after her father had inherited a farm in Co Longford.

“The farm came with the stipulation that my father not sell it for five years and of course in that five years he met my mother and married. I told my father his uncle had done his work well. My father called me a cheeky monkey,” she says, laughing.

It was a time when people “rambled” to each other’s homes to play music.

But Anne was a rambler of a different sort.

Tape recorder

A qualified schoolteacher, she went to England two days before the outbreak of the second World War and then left for America in 1949. In New York, she bought a wheel-to-wheel tape recorder, then a novelty, which she brought home to south Longford in 1954.

The recorder is now also in the hands of the archive and is pride of place in its current exhibition Recording the Tradition: Sound Technology and Irish Traditional Music that runs as part of Heritage Week until tomorrow.

Initially the device could only be used in her brother’s house – rural electrification had not yet reached the house she was brought up in and there were, at that time, no battery hook-ups for electrical appliances such as her recorder.

Playing music

She recalls the ramblers who would go from house to house playing music.

“My father was a rambler. He used to go next door to the Greens to play every night – I used to say they saw more of him than we did. But I was not a rambler,” she says.

“I hadn’t a tune in my head,” she says.

“I did learn to play the accordion, but mostly I recorded. I didn’t do it to make a collection. I just recorded people.”

Byrne’s collection is now thought to be the oldest privately recorded collection of traditional music in Ireland, according to Jackie Small of the archive.

RTÉ is understood to have started collecting traditional music in 1949, just five years before Byrne.