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.

We don’t know the exact date of this stunning photograph showing her at work, notebook in hand, but we know she was recording a fiddler at Curraghmore estate in Waterford at the time.

Speaking of dates, she comes to mind ahead of St Patrick’s Day because it had particular resonance in her life. It marked her birthday in Omagh in 1864, and her marriage to solicitor Charles Fox in 1892 (she wore green velvet on her wedding day).

Perhaps, most notably, March 17 was also the day this important but under-celebrated woman helped to organise the Grand Irish Concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London.

It was a “magical evening”, the posters advertising the concert in the early years of the last century tell us. In its 150-year history, the famous Royal Albert Hall has hosted everything from opera stars and suffragette rallies to the famous Proms, but on St Patrick’s Day it became Irish for the evening.

Charlotte Milligan Fox played a pivotal role in maintaining the living tradition: One of the songs she collected and published in 1906 features in the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem's breakthrough 1962 live album, 'In Person at Carnegie Hall'. File picture

In 1904, for instance, Hugh O’Neill, champion Irish dancer from Limerick, performed at the famous venue with its amphitheatre design and stack balconies that sat up to 6,000 people. Some 5,000 of those places were available for a shilling, the publicity notice said.

The programmes were varied. They included not only Irish musicians, but several international names such as Australian contralto Ada Crossley.

How many of us know the name Charlotte Milligan Fox, though? She was a key figure in the Irish music revival. She was a musician, composer and performer as well as a dedicated collector of Irish music who discovered a “treasure trove” of early Irish harp music.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start at the beginning in Omagh, Co Tyrone. She was the first of 11 children born to Charlotte Milligan and her husband Seaton Milligan, an antiquarian and businessman, in 1864. Her sister — and fellow music collector — Alice Milligan would go on to become a poet, playwright, and founder of the nationalist magazine Shan Van Vocht.

Charlotte, however, took a different path. She showed an early gift for music and, after encouragement from the parish organist, went to study abroad. She spent two years studying at the Frankfurt Conservatoire. After that, in 1883, she spent a year at the Royal College of Music in London and then went to the Milan Conservatoire.

Charlotte Milligan Fox using the latest media technology, the phonograph, to record a fiddler at Curraghmore estate in Co Waterford in the early part of the 20th century. File picture: QUB

Her interest, however, lay in traditional Irish music. After she married, she settled in London and mixed with the likes of WB Yeats and other members of the Irish Literary Society. 

In 1905, she helped found the Irish Folk Song Society and with her sisters, Alice and Edith, set off on a tour of Ireland collecting songs and tunes.

In 1906, she published arrangements for some of those tunes with words written by her sisters Alice and Edith (later Wheeler). Edith’s lyrics to the song ‘My Singing Bird’ would later be sung by the Clancy Brothers at Carnegie Hall in New York in 1962.  

Charlotte’s most important act of retrieval was yet to come, however. And it happened entirely by accident, as she recounts in the preface of her book, Annals of the Irish Harpers.

She was buying a harp for the daughter of a friend at a leading London warehouse when it came into her head to ask the attendant if any old wandering harpers still came in to buy strings.

He said no, but told her of a gentleman who had bought a harp for his house because his grandfather had preserved the music of the ancient Irish harpers. Her heart skipped a beat.

When she asked, the attendant gave her the man’s name and address, Louis MacRory of Battersea (no GDPR then). She wrote to Dr MacRory and was invited to visit.

“On my arrival at the doctor’s house, he met me with the abrupt remark: ‘Now I hope you are an Irish woman, for I think someone from Ireland should handle my grandfather’s papers.’

He was delighted to hear she had come from Belfast — the family lived there at one time — as that was where Irish music collector and musician, Edward Bunting, had conducted most of his work listening to the last of the Irish minstrels in the 18th century. Charlotte later wrote: 

It is a somewhat remarkable fact that the capital of the Ulster Plantation Colony should have been the scene of such efforts to preserve the relics of the civilisation of native Gaeldom.

She did not expect to find much, but grew more and more absorbed when she saw the vast numbers of musical notebooks, letters, faded documents and unpublished airs that had survived.

She pored over the material for many months and then set about putting it all down in Annals of the Irish Harpers: “The time is ripe to recall Bunting’s labour and claim for him a full meed [portion] of fame,” she wrote.

We might say the same of her. She not only retrieved Bunting’s work but brought it to a wide audience. In 1911, she toured America giving lectures on the man himself, and his work transcribing the Belfast Harp Festival in 1792. 

“I found interest in the subject keen," she wrote.

Where the world’s folk music is studied and compared, that of Ireland’s is assured of due attention.

She did much to ensure it got that due attention during her own life — and afterwards, when she bequeathed the Bunting Collection to Queen’s University Belfast.

Now, it’s time to ensure the woman herself gets due attention as one of the leading figures of the Irish music revival. St Patrick’s Day, with its focus on Irish traditions of all kinds, provides an ideal opportunity, although any attempt to remember her is likely to get crowded out in the cacophony of international celebrations.

There is another date in March when we could commemorate Charlotte Milligan Fox. She died on March 25, 1916, and is buried in Drumragh, Omagh. When that day comes around, let’s pay her a long overdue tribute.