Rigby - (fancy meeting you here)
Traveller Mikeen McCarthy, who we recorded for about thirty years, was a singer and storyteller from a strong family background in both - as Travellers were a non literate group, their oral traditions were orally transmitted
AS a teenager, Mikeen participated with his mother in selling 'the ballads' which were basically songs from the oral repertoire put into print by either getting someone to write them down and taken into a local printer, or the customer reciting the song over the counter while the printer wrote them down
Mikeen would then go off and sell them at the local fairs and markets in rural Kerry
In Ireland, the trade was carried out almost exclusively by non-literate travellers, so in essence, it was an oral tradition on paper
In rural Ireland, the 'ballad' tradition was infinitely more influential than the urban based broadsides.
None of the 'ballads' had tunes attached to them, so the seller was expected to be able to teach them to the customer, if necessary
Most of the sellers were street singers anyway, who earned pennies around the streets and bars of rural towns apart from the trade
All the house based singers we recorded who had bought 'the ballads' told us that if they didn't have a tune for the song, they would use one they would use one from another song - this was in rural Ireland, of course, but I suspect that this would have been the case in rural England
Every single singer we asked told us that the tunes were secondary to the words of the song - they considered themselves storytellers whose stories happened to come with tunes.
We recorded two brothers in North Clare who gave us a couple of dozen traditional songs between them - over half a dozen of those songs were to the same tune.
This is our note to a track on the double CD, From Puck to Appleby' where Mikeen MacCarthy describes the trade of ballad selling and teching tunes
Jim Carroll
2 - Selling the Ballads (The Blind Beggar)   Mikeen McCarthy
Well er, around where my father came from like, he was very well known as being a singer, not a singer now for his living like, but a fireside singer, we'll call it, and what we call c?ilidhing now, going to houses. Well they were very fond of that song where he came from, he'd be like the young people today singing, buying those records, you know. But it got that popular around that area, travelled from parish to parish then; where he got it from I do not know.
So when I used be selling the ballads then like, and my mother, they used ask me, "Have you any of your father's songs?", you know, when we went in to where we were reared now, "Have you the Blind Beggar?", and I used say, "No."
"Why don't you get those printed?", they'd say, "Those are the songs you'd sell, and if you get them printed I'll buy about a dozen of them off you next time I meet you."
So that's how I got them in print then myself. My father write them out for me and I'd go in to the printing office then, then I'd get them printed.
Well they were the songs that did sing, and many a time after I went into the pubs after selling ballads like and things like that and I'd hear all the lads inside on a fair day now, we'll say markets and meetings, well when they'd have a few pints on them, 'tis then you'd hear my songs sung back again out of my ballads.
But I remember one day I was in Listowel Fair and I was selling ballads anyway. So I goes into a pub, I was fifteen years of age then - actually, I never wanted to pack it up, it was ashamed of the ladies I got, you know - but there was an American inside anyway, he wasn't back to Ireland I'd say for thirty years or something, he was saying.
So I sang that song now, The Blind Beggar, and he asked me to sing it again and every time I sang it he stuck a pound note into my top pocket.
He said, "Will you sing again?"
So I did, yeah. The pub was full all round like, what we call a nook now that time, a small bar, a private little bar off from the rest of the pub.
"And, will you sing it again?"
"I will; delighted" again, of course, another pound into my top pocket every time anyway. And the crowd was around, of course, and they were all throwing in two bobs apiece and a shilling apiece and I'd this pocket packed with silver money as well.
So he asked me, "Will you sing it for the last time."
Says I, "I'll keep singing it 'til morning if you want."
I'd six single pound notes in it when I came outside of the pub. I think I sold the rest of the ballads for half nothing to get away to the pictures".

The selling of printed song sheets, 'ballads', as they were known, was still very much a part of life right into the 1950s in rural Ireland. The trade at that time seemed to be fairly exclusively carried out by travellers who could be seen at the fairs and markets singing and selling them.
Not all the songs that appeared on these sheets were traditional; sentimental songs like Smiling Through and There's No Place Like Home, have been mentioned to us as being 'best sellers', and among the last titles to appear was The Pub with No Beer. However, they did have a profound effect on the preservation and circulation of many traditional songs. In Mikeen's case, one of the sources for the songs he sold, such as Bessie of Ballentown Brae and Bonny Bunch of Roses, was his father, Michael, who had a large repertoire of traditional songs and stories and was recognised as a singer and storyteller by members of both the travelling and settled communities around Cahirciveen in Co Kerry.
In his youth, Mikeen, along with his mother and other members of the family, sold the ballads around the pubs and fairs of Kerry and he has given us a great deal of valuable information regarding the production and distribution of these, which he started to sell around the age of twelve some time in the nineteen forties.
Ref: Michael McCarthy, Singer and Ballad Seller. Singer, Song and Scholar, Sheffield Academic Press,1986.