John Docherty video of 1972 programme

[michael sam wild]

Well worth watching this programme for lovers of Irish traditional music and good links to other historic film.

 

Edited February 10, 2010 by michael sam wild

[Molly Roberts]

Amazing stuff! Thanks so much for posting the link.

[Henrik Müller]

Wonderful, Michael

- programs that dwell more than two minutes on a subject are a joy to watch.

/Henrik

[michael sam wild]

I'm glad ypu like them as much as I do. I listen to all sorts of players and instruments and find you have to get into their environmental, social and cultuarl contaext as much as you can. When I was a young chap I went travelling round our Islands and got to know some amazing people. Often the music and songs were incidental to meeting on a hill, in a pub or doing a job. I didn't have much cash or technical knowledge to record stuff and I was travelling light. Still the memories are there

 

I think it's amazing how these older films and recordings are now being dug out and digitised and shared.

 

I wish I'd hung on to so many of those old tape recordings and photos etc but time has taken its toll.

 

Doc Rowe who is a great folk recorder told me once how much of the archives at our BBC were dumped or recorded over and how people were having to smuggle it out. . It was heartbreaking.

 

I often think how productive it would be if a mobile archive unit could travel round and help people get out their old material and record it digitally. I am always loathe to hand stuff over to folklorists or historians because I've lost so much stuff, people can be quite aquisitive and thoughtless. I even saw a book of my fathers from his time in the Spanish Civil War which I lent someone , it was on eBay and getting well bid up. Fortunately I managed to stop it and get it back!

 

Maybe it's the magpie tendency of collectors.

 

 

i hope the new move towards cloud computing won't mean that stuff is lost if YouTube etc crash!