I was listening to Kate Rusby's "Hourglass" CD today, listening to the yummy percusion on a couple of the cuts, and it started me thinking. The bodhran is a traditional instrument, right? And Celtic music, in particular, is often quite percussive, right?

So ... given that the ancestry of many a U.S. citizen is Irish and Scots, and that this music is full of drumming, what the heck happened to all those drums? By the time the music crossed the ocean and ended up in Appalachia or in Southern music, generally, and certainly in what we have thought of for years as "Irish" music, the percussion seems to have gotten lost.

I've read lots and lots of pioneer diaries and I know for a fact that the whites in the Westward migration in this country, who were for the most part Irish and Scots immigrants, were very frightened of the drumming of both the African slaves and freedmen, and of the Native Americans. Granted, because they were traipsing across other people's land, they might have had a reason or two to wonder if the drums were beating out the sound of their own demise. But still, it seems as though the percussive aspect of their own music would have traveled with them.

So, what happened?

WW