Clodagh Finn: Musician and publisher preserved centuries of Irish traditional music

This St Patrick's Day, let's remember Charlotte Milligan Fox who travelled around Ireland in the early 1900s to record and publish ancient Irish tunes

Charlotte Milligan Fox using a phonograph to record a fiddler at Curraghmore estate in Co Waterford in the early part of the 20th century. See below for the full photo. File picture: Queen’s University Belfast

It would have been quite the sight; three women travelling around Ireland with a phonograph in the early years of the 20th century, recording the folk songs played by pipers and fiddlers.

Charlotte Milligan Fox is now described as an ethnomusicologist, but in her day she was best known as a musician and founding member of the Irish Folk Song Society who did so much to collect, preserve, and publish the folk songs of Ireland.