The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #138595   Message #4152240
Posted By: Ross Campbell
07-Sep-22 - 04:54 PM
Thread Name: Peter Kennedy's Folktrax recordings
Subject: RE: Peter Kennedy's Folktrax recordings
Hi, Joe
My partner Celia Briar has today given me a copy of a flyer for the Leitrim Larks Project, subtitled Vol. 1 September 1, 2022.
The front page consists of a replication of the Folktrax catalogue page for Thomas Moran, a Leitrim ballad singer whose songs were collected in 1954 by Seamus Ennis for the BBC. The flyer includes the following link -
FTX-076 - THE BONNY BUNCH OF ROSES THOMAS MORAN
which gave me some hope that the cassete/cd might still be accessible in some form.
However the "order" link at the foot of the page leads only to a defunct Camsco address.
I understand the folktrax-archive site is a re-construction of Peter Kennedy's own catalogue, provided as an online resource to at least show the extent of Kennedy's work and notes. The actual recordings appear to be in the BBC Sound Archive, to which Topic records seem to have licensed access. Sadly there seems to be no intent to reproduce any of the collections as arranged by Kennedy, rather they are cherry-picking from the archive to produce themed sets in Topic's Voice of the People series (a laudable project in itself).

Apologies if this is stuff you're already aware of.

The Leitrim Larks project is to teach songs from a collection of over 500 local songs. There is a meeting in Drumshanbo tomorrow night (Thursday 8 September) which I shall try to attend (I'm currently near Enniskillen, about twenty miles away) and will let you know anything else I can find out.
Ross