Irish music on double-strung instruments

7 July 20267 July 2026 Cary KarpLeave a comment

A new four-part series produced by the Irish national television channel TG4, Blas Bluegrass, documents the popularity there of American old-time and bluegrass music. A scene in the first episode (starting at 17m 55s) is devoted to the late Chris Twomey, an Irish singer and multi-instrumentalist who became a noteworthy exponent of the autoharp. The clip shows one such of his instruments in a display case at The Corner House pub in Cork City.

The series is presented by Enda Scahill, one of the country’s leading tenor banjo and mandolin players. I’m as interested in those instruments as in the autoharp, all of which appear in the series. An earlier post discusses a crackpot combined autoharp-banjo patented in the US in 1892. The preceding three posts (aggregated here) deal with a widely manufactured hybrid banjo mandolin rooted in a US patent issued in August 1882 — just three months after the US patent for the autoharp. The present text takes a look at the musical proximity of the autoharp and mandolin, segueing into its discussion with a few additional background details.

This post’s banner image shows a large chromatically tuned autoharp with 21 bars, built in Sweden circa 1898 (Photo: Scenkonstmuseet, cat. no. M4011 — under my curatorial care at the precursor Swedish National Music Museum for over 20 years). The upper 66 of its 73 strings are tuned as unison pairs, also termed double-strung courses. The distance between the strings in each pair is smaller than the distance separating adjacent courses. In zither parlance this is termed mandolin-style stringing.

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Musical Instruments

The 4-string banjolin

16 June 20262 July 2026 Cary KarpLeave a comment

This is the final installment in a discussion about the banjo mandolin (aka mandolin banjo depending on the musical context). It is anchored in two independent US patents, from 1882 and 1885. The latter was issued to John Farris, who named his variant a banjolin. Both patents are detailed in the first part of this series along with the instrument’s initial commercial manifestations.

It entered into the realm of Irish traditional dance music early on, and the second part examines how its use there ultimately abated. The present text deals with a 4-string form of the instrument, briefly noted previously, and looks into a tutorial manual specifically for it. That book does not directly address Irish-style performance, but provides a relevant description of the instrument’s technical capabilities, including practical details about its setup.

By the end of the 19th century, banjo mandolins were available from several manufacturers. It was “to all intents and purposes a mandolin, being strung and fretted to the exact mandolin scale” but with the body of a small banjo. Farris’s design fits that description, with eight strings arranged in unison pairs. His patent was issued on 7 April 1885 (US315135) and he advertised the new instrument shortly thereafter in The Hartford County Directory for 1885–86.

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Musical Instruments

Banjolins, taterbugs, and bouzoukis

2 June 20261 July 2026 Cary KarpLeave a comment

The preceding post examined early audible evidence of the mandolin in the performance of Irish traditional music (ITM). The first attested association is on two wax cylinders recorded ca. 1905. Each begins with an announcement of the tune being “played on the violin, mandolin, and fife, by Messrs. Cronin, Kiley, and O’Neill.” The post then considered the richer subsequent evidence of the banjo mandolin in the same musical environment and concluded that Thomas Kiley played that type of mandolin on the recordings.

The present text continues with an identical situation just over a half century later. On the occasion of the National Festival of Traditional Irish Music and Song (Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann) in Dungarvan, Co. Waterford, in 1957, Frank Wisenor was recorded playing several tunes on what was announced as a mandolin. Four of them were in a small group and two solo.

The way the recordings were announced suggests that they were of entries in the All-Ireland Championship competition held at the Fleadh. Snippets from all can be heard here. A solo performance of the reel, The Sligo Maid, indicates with particular clarity that Wisenor was playing a banjo mandolin.

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Musical Instruments

The Connemara Fiddle

19 May 20261 July 2026 Cary KarpLeave a comment

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.

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