Francis O’Neill provided detailed biographical information about the contributors to his collections of Irish traditional music, in a book titled Irish Minstrels and Musicians, published in 1913. The fiddler Edward Cronin was one of the more prolific of them. He was a native of County Tipperary, born about 1838, who emigrated to Troy, New York, before settling in Chicago. With reference to Cronin’s residence there, O’Neill observed that:
Visits to his home were fraught with pleasure, especially when he played in concert with two young friends from Troy – Patrick Clancy on the flute and Thomas F. Kiley on the mandolin. Clancy, Mrs. Cronin’s nephew, possessed a most wonderful voice, powerful and mellow, and to our unscientific ear the most delightful we had ever heard. On the violin the genial “Tom” Kiley swung the bow with a freedom which many professionals might envy. “The Connemara Fiddle,” as we facetiously termed the mandolin, was his favorite instrument, however. In playing Irish dance music he displayed a facility of execution almost inconceivable. To him “The Flogging Reel,” a lively, three-part dance tune, with its turns and graces, presented no more difficulties than “Home, Sweet Home.”
Kiley’s use of the mandolin is also attested prior to the publication of this chronicle. Spoken introductions on two wax cylinder recordings announce that the tune is “played on the violin, mandolin, and fife, by Messrs. Cronin, Kiley, and O’Neill.” The date of those recordings makes them the earliest association of the mandolin with Irish traditional music that has yet come to light.
The 1900 US Census lists a Patrick Clancy, born in New York in 1880, living with his Irish-born father and half-Irish mother in the city of Troy in that state. There is also a listing for Thomas F. Kiley, born in New York in 1884, likewise living in Troy with his Irish parents. Even if they were not the individuals O’Neill had in mind, the family relationship between Mrs. Cronin and the designated Clancy would explain his traveling between Troy and Chicago to visit her.
Kiley joined him on at least one such occasion. Whether during its course or at a separate gathering, Cronin, Kiley, and O’Neill made the cited recordings. The spoken introductions also name the tunes and state their source to be O’Neill’s Music of Ireland. If this can correctly be taken to indicate that his next collection, The Dance Music of Ireland, had yet to appear, the recordings would have been made in the interval between their respective publication dates in 1903 and 1907.
The wax cylinders are now held in the National Folklore Collection at the University College of Dublin Library and were copied onto acetate discs in 1947. Those discs have been digitized and the corresponding tracks are online with background information here and here. The audio files are also linked directly, underneath the printed version of the tune as it appears in the 1903 collection.
One of them is the hornpipe, The Boys of Blue Hill. The published transcription makes no indication of ornamentation. It was left to be added in performance, as has been common practice all along.
In contrast, the transcription of the reel, The Fermoy Lasses, includes exceptionally detailed ornamentation. That heard on the recording is on the same level of intricacy but differs from the printed version, as does the melody at a few points, doubtless reflecting Cronin’s preferences.
The fiddle is the dominant instrument on both recordings but it might be wondered if the fife isn’t actually a tin whistle. (Judgment on that is best deferred until hearing the recording further below where a piccolo is unquestionably used.) The third instrument plays in far tighter lockstep with the fiddle, and requires careful listening to recognize as a separate voice.
The problem is that, to my ear, it doesn’t sound like a mandolin. Kiley was otherwise a fiddler but clearly did not play one on the recordings. The central question therefore becomes what type of mandolin he used for them.
The instrument was at the height of a wave of popularity in the US when the recordings were made. It began in 1880 with a performance in NYC by an ensemble called The Spanish Students, on a celebrated concert tour of Europe and the Americas. The group featured an instrument called a bandurria – a flat-backed relative of the familiar bowl-backed Neapolitan mandolin, but strung with five pairs of strings rather than the mandolin’s four.
A newspaper review of the concert referred to the bandurrias as mandolins, opening the door for an advance by aficionados and manufacturers of the Italian instrument. Clubs dedicated to it were sprouting up across the US during Kiley’s childhood. A full-blown mandolin craze was raging when he would have decided to harness it for Irish traditional music.
A collection published in 1912 lists the instrument among those for which it was intended. It was compiled by Francis Roche with the title, Collection of Irish Airs, Marches and Dance Tunes Compiled and Arranged for Violin, Mandoline, Flute, or Pipes. This tied the mandolin to Irish traditional music in the second decade of the 20th century, just as the wax cylinders did in the first.
By the end of the 19th century, efforts were well underway at making the mandolin accessible to players of other instruments. On 15 August 1882, US Patent no. 262564 was granted to Benjamin Bradbury for a “Banjo” with a shortened neck. It was drawn with five pairs of strings but the description allows for “any suitable number…in duplicate.”
The object of this invention is to give to the banjo a softness and purity of tone resembling and approximating to that of the violin, and also to so reduce the length and diameter of the staff [i.e. neck] that the strings may be manipulated with the fingers of the left hand throughout the whole range of octaves usual in the instrument, thereby enabling the latter to be used in the production of substantially the same range and class of music as the violin itself…whereby the power of the instrument is increased and the tones of its strings are advantageously modified to give a softer and more impressive sound.
A similar design appears in US Patent no. 315135 for a “Stringed Musical Instrument” granted to John Farris on 7 April 1885. It claims a “stringed instrument having some points of similarity to the banjo, and some other points of similarity to the mandolin.” The design places what is explicitly a mandolin neck on a small banjo rim to create a “banjolin.” Its bridge spans fully across the head, with an adjustable soundpost underneath it, marked P in the drawing, which:
…when placed nearly or precisely under the bridge D, gives the instrument a firmness and fineness of tone to which the banjo is a stranger. The tone of the banjolin may be varied at will in respect of fineness by moving the post P relatively to the bridge D, or by pressing the top of the post with more or with less force against the under surface of the membrane C. Q is the piece of tortoise-shell used to vibrate the strings in the same manner that the strings of a mandolin are played upon.
At some time prior to 1888, Farris replaced the double-strings on his banjolin with single strings. He manufactured them in soprano, alto, tenor, and bass sizes. To attain the alleged popularity in London, production would have commenced not long after the 1885 patent date.
The claim that all were tuned GDAE (from the lowest to the highest string) implies that each size was an octave lower than the one above it. This would result in an implausibly large bass instrument. At least two of the sizes would more reasonably have been separated by a smaller interval and tuned accordingly.
This is clarified in a later banjo catalog that will be detailed after a few further remarks about the double-strung banjo mandolin. By whatever circumstance, the basic elements of the Farris design became effectively generic long before the expiration of either his or Bradbury’s patents. An article in the 28 May 1898 edition of The Music Trade Review covers the following implementation:
This instrument, as shown, is to all intents and purposes a mandolin, being strung and fretted to the exact mandolin scale. It has two distinct qualities of tone – one for parlor use, or soft playing, the other for loud and effective public performances, such as are given on the stage. The change in tone is created by the use of a small damper. The new instrument has a seven-inch German silver rim…
What appears to be the same design was added to the musical instruments sold by the Chicago-based Sears, Roebuck, and Co. in their Fall 1899 catalog. However, the large difference between its price and that charged by other suppliers suggests that the damping device was not part of the less expensive alternative. (This post’s banner image comes from the Fall 1915 edition.)
Other manufacturers began advertising banjo mandolins during the first decade of the 20th century. There was no noteworthy change to the shared design other than an increase in the diameter of the rim. This is seen in the Spring 1909 Sears catalog, where a model with a ten inch rim was added to the earlier seven inch one.
The now familiar tenor banjo arrived on the scene just one year earlier. Hopping over the details of that instrument’s burgeoning status to the 1923 catalog of the Vega Banjo Company – which was also its initial manufacturer – we find a detailed clarification of the relationship between all of these instruments.
Any style of the eight string Mandolin Banjos as described and illustrated on the following pages can be had in the single or four string Mandolin Banjo. The eight string instrument is used more by Mandolin players. Although it has more volume of tone it does not cut through so much as the single string in a dance orchestra. An orchestra of seven or eight pieces should have two Mandolin Banjos, or one Tenor Banjo at least. …
Violinists, Cornetists and players of other orchestral instruments will find the single or four string Mandolin Banjo the easiest to learn and play. Its strings are tuned and pitched the same as a Violin, being E, A, D and G. …
The Vega Tenor Banjo has single strings and is tuned to the Viola or Tenor pitch, one fifth below the strings of the violin or mandolin, the strings of the Tenor Banjo being A, D, G and C. The Tenor Banjo has a larger head and longer neck than the Mandolin Banjo and its tone quality is about three times greater. … The Tenor Banjo takes the lead part in the modern dance orchestra, playing first violin parts.
Michael Gaffney performed widely on a double-strung banjo mandolin during the 1920s, in a style typified by the recording of The Fermoy Lasses excerpted below. He made it in 1925 together with the flute player, John McKenna, who the record label lists as playing a piccolo (again sounding very much like a tin whistle).
McKenna ornaments his part in the same idiomatic fashion that a present-day Irish flute player might. In contrast, Gaffney doesn’t use ornamentation at all. He also refrains from it when playing the tenor banjo, which he did in both céilí band and solo performance beginning in the 1930s. This is well illustrated in the following recording made in 1934 of the jigs, The Night Cap and Mysteries of Knock.
This spartan style was common but not invariable in céilí bands, where banjo mandolins were regularly included into the 1960s. The next photo shows Francis McCusker holding an instrument of Bradbury’s basic design. It was taken in the early days of The McCusker Brothers Céilí Band, which was formed in the late 1930s and remained active in its initial configuration until the late 1960s. “Francie” is seen with the same instrument in later photos. His brother Kevin played the piccolo in the group and was its featured member.
The piccolo and banjo mandolin are heard in a set of reels, McKenna’s–The Tinker’s Apron–The Antrim, in a field recording of the group made in 1952.
Perhaps the best known of the Irish banjo mandolin players, Willie Joe Power, won an All-Ireland Fleadh Cheoil Championship on it in 1957. (This was in the miscellaneous instruments category; separate banjo and mandolin categories were established later.) He is heard with the fiddler Sean Maguire on an album recorded by the Four Star Quartet in 1962, available online with background commentary. Here is a track from it with a particularly illustrative set of reels beginning with Hand Me Down the Tackle:
Maguire again uses a battery of ornaments while Power restricts himself to the triplet, and follows the fiddle closely through the entire tune. If I listen to Kiley’s recording of The Fermoy Lasses considering the possibility of his playing a banjo mandolin in the same manner behind Cronin’s fiddling, it strikes me that that’s exactly what he’s doing. The banjo attribute is even clearer in The Boys of Blue Hill, but the recordings were too early for the tenor banjo to be a candidate. Other than the expectation triggered by the announcement of Kiley playing a mandolin, there would be nothing surprising about it being the louder variant – that’s what it was designed for.
This raises a question about whether the coinage “Connemara fiddle” denoted anything out of the ordinary about his mandolin, or was simply a tongue-in-cheek indication of its introduction into the realm of Irish traditional music. O’Neill tells us that in any case Kiley was able to execute a range of traditional ornaments on his mandolin: “To him The Flogging Reel…with its turns and graces, presented no more difficulties than Home, Sweet Home.”
The published transcription of The Flogging Reel is as extensively ornamented as the one of The Fermoy Lasses, and notated in the same manner.
Kiley would have approached this tune from the perspective of a fiddler. Here is a recording on that instrument made by Frank O’Higgins in 1938.
The ornament O’Neill called a turn is now termed a roll. One is seen under the long slur in each of the three first measures in the preceding transcription. The first measure in the second part shows an alternate way of notating it, marking its rhythmic character when starting directly on the beat.
O’Neill used this tune to illustrate Kiley’s “facility of execution almost inconceivable” on the mandolin. The full range of ornaments seen in its transcription would therefore all but certainly have been heard in Kiley’s solo performances, both on the mandolin and the banjo mandolin — “to all intents and purposes a mandolin.”
The roll is the most intricate and characteristic of these ornaments but its execution varies markedly from instrument to instrument, as does the regularity of its use. Irish traditional mandolin players currently employ it rather sparsely, instead favoring triplets. To round off the present outing, here is Martin Howley demonstrating a range of ornaments in a classroom performance of the reel, Ormond Sound.
The next post continues the discussion of the banjo mandolin nearer the end of its heyday, along with the instruments that supplanted it in the mainstream performance of traditional Irish dance tunes. It includes further demonstrations of intricate ornamentation on the mandolin and its larger cousin, the bouzouki.