Our main interest has always been traditional song and associated arts, traditional music, tales and folklore. We were singers at and organisers of folk clubs from the late 1960s to the early 1990s, booking not only singers but musicians such as piper Tom McCarthy and fiddler Bobby Casey from West Clare, who were living in London then.

We first met in London in 1969 as members of The Critics Group, a singers’ workshop run by charismatic singer, songwriter, actor, playwright and collector, Ewan MacColl, a formative influence on us both.

In 1973, we chanced to hear a radio review of a recently-published book which included a chapter written by Wexford Traveller ‘Pop’s’ Johnny Connors. Johnny was camped on a site in West London, just a few miles from our home. Finding Johnny set us on a course of recording songs and talk from Irish Travellers in and around London, which was to continue for nearly thirty years. This was not a difficult task. We had no idea just how many Irish Travellers there were in London and we were somewhat overwhelmed by the number of singers with songs. Finally we felt it necessary to concentrate on two only in order to record not just the songs and stories, but also information on Travelling life and lore.

All the Travellers we met were incredibly generous and humorous people, despite living in somewhat poor conditions and meeting frequently with harassment from the authorities. After they had established we were neither police nor social workers, they took to referring to us as “the students” and that is what we were, learning about Travelling life and lore. A selection of Traveller songs, stories and talk can be heard on the double C.D, ‘From Puck to Appleby’, issued by ‘Musical Tradition Records’, England in 2003.

I973 also saw us on our first recording trip to County Clare, work which we carried on in tandem with our collecting from Travellers right up to the present day, though nowadays not as productively as most of the older generation of singers have passed on. Again, songs were the main impetus which led us to such as Ollie Conway in Mullagh. Ollie not only sang for us but brought other singers to his pub to meet us and give us their songs, a tremendous start to our recording in Clare.

At a music session in Quilty, fiddle player Junior Crehan approached us when he noted our interest in the music and offered to give us “a few tunes” one evening at the Crosses of Annagh; he also gave us songs, stories and much talk on that and many succeeding occasions.

We had been unable to meet up that year with the singer Tom Lenihan from Knockbrack, whom we had been told about by friends back in England, so we determined to return at a later date. This we did in 1974, when we came for the second Willie Clancy Summer School and, luckily, met up with Tom Munnelly, a collector for the Folklore Department at UCD. Tom organised the marvellous Friday afternoon sessions with the older singers during the W.C.S.S. and he kindly took us out with him on several of his collecting trips around West Clare and introduced us to some of his singers. We were immediately impressed that, rather than being intimidated by intrusive collectors armed with modern technology, as had been suggested to us on several occasions, the singers we met had no problem whatever in dealing with two sets of microphones and tape-recorders and took them in their stride.

It was 1976 before we met Tom Lenihan and struck up a friendship with him and his wife Margaret which lasted right up to their deaths: Margaret in 1983, Tom in 1990. The result of our first four nights’ recording sessions with Tom was the Topic album, ‘Paddy’s Panacea’, issued in 1978.

From that time on, we came to Clare annually, visiting singers and recording songs, stories and talk, initially camping at Spanish Point but eventually (and thankfully) being loaned use of a cottage.

Tom Lenihan and a number of other Clare singers were included in the monumental 20 volume Topic series, ‘Voice of the People’ in 1999 and, thanks to the Dublin singers’ club, An Goilín, a double C.D of our recordings, ‘Around the Hills of Clare’, was issued in 2004. ‘Around the Hills of Clare’, and ‘From Puck to Appleby’ are readily available and usually on sale at Custy’s Music Shop in Ennis. ‘Paddy’s Panacea’ was later reissued by Ossian Records. All profits from our albums are automatically donated to the Irish Traditional Music Archive in Merrion Square, Dublin.

Over the years, we also continued to record musicians and Traveller singers in London before finally being able to move to Miltown Malbay permanently in 1998.

If we learned anything over the thirty years or so we spent recording singers and storytellers, it was that the songs and stories we first set out to find were only a small part of a larger picture. There has been a huge amount of collecting traditional songs, music and stories in these islands over the last century, yet we know very little about the people who made them and sang them; why they sang them and what makes them important enough to have been held on to and passed on from one generation to the other down the centuries. This is largely because the songs have been treated as collectibles rather than what they actually are - part of the lives and histories of the people who sang them. There have been perfectly legitimate reasons why this has happened: lack of time and resources, an acute shortage of full-time collectors, and above all, the feeling that the songs and stories were rapidly disappearing as those who possessed them died, and so must be saved urgently; collector Tom Munnelly described his work as ‘A race with the undertaker’.

If it is true, as we believe it is, that the songs and stories are an important part of our culture and history, it is equally so for the reminiscences, work practices, beliefs, customs, experiences, vernacular and traditions, and, just like the songs and stories, the opportunity to learn about these from the people who absorbed, practised and experienced them at first hand is rapidly disappearing.

Each visit added to our understanding and enjoyment of the wonderful richness of the Clare tradition: the storytelling, the set-dancing at Gleesons in Coore and, of course, the music. Throughout the years our work has been made easy and enjoyable by the warmth and friendliness afforded to a couple of strangers. Anything we have achieved has been made possible and pleasurable by the people of Clare.