Seamus Ennis on the Pipers Corner, Marlborough Street.
Seán O’Casey’s public house is no more. I always presumed it took its name from the playwright, who was something of a devout teetotaler, a habit he acquired from labour leader Jim Larkin.
While O’Casey’s name no longer graces the street, it was a pleasant surprise to pass recently and see the familiar Séamus Ennis gazing down. Born in Finglas (where a street today carries his name) in 1919, Ennis was a giant of Irish traditional and folk music, both as a performer and a collector of songs and tunes.
From 1942 to 1947, Ennis traveled rural Ireland on bicycle. At the age of twenty-three, he began his journey to capture the vanishing oral and folk traditions of rural Ireland. As Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin has noted, “his only tools were a pen, a satchel of music sheets and a tin whistle to verify his transcriptions.” By the time Ennis had completed his work for the Irish Folklore Commission, he had amassed more than 2,000 pieces of material, “an achievement unsurpassed by any of his predecessors in the field.”
Ennis photographed in 1955.
As a masterful player of the uileann pipes, Ennis helped to found Na Píobairí Uileann, and demonstrated his abilities as a player on a number of important records, beginning with 1959’s The Bonny Bunch of Roses. The striking LP cover shows Ennis playing before an audience of children in Dublin’s Phoenix Park, one of several great images of Ennis contained in the Ritchie-Pickow Collection, striking images of 1950s Ireland today hosted online by NUI Galway.
Later, Ennis championed emerging traditional acts like Planxty, believing that just as he had collected a tradition, it had to be maintained and handed on. In Leagues O’Toole’s history of Planxty, the masterful piper Liam O’Flynn recalled that “Séamus was so willing to part with all the information he had, whether it was tunes or techniques or whatever. There’s that desire to pass it on.” Séamus would leave his pipes, more than a century old, to Liam in his will.
Ennis died in 1982 at the Naul in North County Dublin. There were many words of praise, perhaps the finest coming from musician and broadcaster Tony MacMahon, who has recalled how “he made me realise music is magic and a spiritual experience. It cannot be taught in any university. It is beyond that.”
