Anne Gannon is the earliest known person to make tape recordings of Irish traditional music in Ireland as a private individual, entirely on her personal initiative and unsupported by any institution. This playlist presents highlights from her collection, which is now a unique archival treasure.

In fact, the Anne Gannon collection has a double distinction: as well as being the birth of tape recording by private individuals in Ireland, it also contains a unique musical expression of the connection between Ireland and Argentina
Anne Gannon was born in Carrigeen, Legan, Co. Longford, in 1915—which makes her the spirited centenarian that she now is. In 1954 she returned home during a period of working in the USA with a reel-to-reel recording machine that she’d acquired in New York. She immediately began making recordings of local traditional musicians, foremost among them her father, Bernard Gannon, an accordion player who had been born among the Irish-Argentine diaspora in Argentina in 1881. As a young man, he had inherited a farm in Carrigeen, and moved to Ireland, where he settled down and raised a family. Anne was the seventh of 17 children. (She later became Anne Byrne when she married, and settled in Ardagh, Co. Longford.)

All his life, Bernard Gannon continued to play on his accordion the Argentine music that he’d picked up in his youth and brought with him to Ireland. Later he added Irish tunes to his repertoire; these he picked up from local musicians, particularly from his brother-in-law, the fiddle player Christopher ‘Kit’ Kelly. Of the many recordings that Anne made, perhaps the most fascinating are those of the infectiously happy Argentine polkas and waltzes of her father, who performed with impressive elegance and skill, despite his advancing years. These are the only recordings made in Ireland of the folk music played among the sizeable Irish diaspora in Argentina in the 19th century
The other musicians featured in our playlist are also local to the collector’s home area in Co. Longford. ‘Kit’ Kelly—an uncle of the collector—here plays a hornpipe, ‘Kit’s Dream’, that he himself composed. Fiddle player Joe Callaghan is the fine musician after whom the Edgeworthstown branch of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann is now named. The duet Jim Dolan (uilleann pipes) and Mike Keena (fiddle) were also notable figures in the strong local music tradition.

Recently, in her 100th year—and more than 60 years after recording her first tape—the pioneering collector Anne Gannon donated her unique collection, as well as her original tape recorder, to the Irish Traditional Music Archive.

ITMA would like to express its profound gratitude to the collector Anne Byrne (née Gannon) and her daughter Úna; and also to Trish Finnan, Anne Greene, and Tom Greene.