Daniel Gomes is Assistant Professor of English at Bakersfield College. He has published on the Irish literary response to the Spanish Civil War, as well as W. B. Yeats’s use of mythology, and he is working on a book about Irish politics and the ballad genre.
In 1947, Brian George, the head of the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Central Programme Operations, hired Séamus Ennis to help record traditional music throughout Ireland. Ennis was ideally suited for the task. Born in Finglas, North County Dublin, Ennis had become renowned as a uilleann pipe player, a talent inherited from his father, James. Ennis’s musical aptitude was matched by his scrupulousness as a collector. Over the previous five years he became one of the principal fieldworkers for the Irish Folklore Commission. Ennis’s rapport with source musicians was a vital asset to George, himself a singer who hailed from Donegal. Having long envisioned the broadcasting service as a leading collector of folk song and music, George hoped a strong yield of Irish field recordings would persuade the BBC London headquarters to invest in systematically recording all of Britain and Ireland.