Music and Song: Tom Munnelly’s View of Ownership

Abstract

In the tradition of Irish traditional music, ownership of music is vague and sometimes contested. Tunes are not generally associated with a “composer”, but, if identified with anyone at all, are generally associated with the person most well-known for performing them, or a person identified with a tune, or a particular version thereof. This article will examine some of the songs and performances/singers in the collection of the late Tom Munnelly (1944–2007), collector of the most extensive collection of English-language songs in Ireland and not only an avid collector but also a very talented singer. Of primary concern will be Tom Munnelly’s attitude to song and its ownership, shedding light on a field long contested and much debated. Drawing on Tom Munnelly’s field recordings of specific songs, the article will endeavour to shed fresh light on how traditional music in Ireland is viewed.

1. Background

The title for this article—“Music and Song: Tom Munnelly’s View of Ownership”—was drawn from an idea that I have been working with for some time, and on the subject of which, indeed, I gave the keynote address for the annual conference of the International Conference on Traditional Music and Dance, Ireland, in 2022—“Who Owns the Songs?”1 I have for some time been pondering the idea that of all the performative contexts that ethnomusicologists consider, singing is uniquely of the self. The energy that produces song is one’s very life breath; the instrument (or the primary sound producer, as Hornbostel and Sachs referred to it) is the voice box; its medium is at the nexus of music and language—our two primary auditory means of communication—and its realisation results from the intersection of memory and creativity, a primary source of meaning and identity. In this article I wish to address, through song, some of the central and more recent debates on identity in ethnomusicology, often posited as a series of oppositions: insider–outsider, ownership–interpretation, traditional–commercial, and self–other. I am, therefore, most particularly engaged with identity as articulated through music, for, as Simon Frith has remarked:

“Music constructs our sense of identity through the direct experience it offers of the body, time and sociability, experiences which enable us to place ourselves in imaginative cultural narratives.” 2023, cited in “Who Owns the Songs? Songs, Singers and Ownership” Ethnomusicology Ireland 8: 21–29.2

Where those cultural narratives are contested, there develops a fulcrum where musical identity is uniquely and critically articulated. This is a concern that has exercised scholars in ethnomusicology and related fields in recent articles and books (Arjun Appadurai (1988), Ronald V. Bettig (1996), Rosemary J. Coombe (1998), and Simon Frith (1996); cited examples drawn from letters A to F of the alphabet); it has been addressed by some young and established scholars in the field, as well as by some powerful world organisations (see, for example, UNESCO’s (1989) Recommendation on the Safeguarding of Traditional Culture and Folklore, Paris, UNESCO, https://www.unesco.org/en/legal-affairs/recommendation-safeguarding-traditional-culture-and-folklore, accessed on 1 February 2025).

The primary concern that I have here has evolved from that which I have articulated elsewhere (See notes 1 above) but developed further, as it concerns the capture of an individual’s voice. While a transcription may be “mine” (or some other scholar’s), it remains to consider in detail, who owns the voice that reproduces the song? Can anyone play the voice of someone long dead, in whatever context, without regard to the person who owns the voice, that indefinably personal part of our identity?

2. Tom Munnelly’s Song Collection

In order to ground our discussion in particular, I am drawing from primary documents on a song collection that I have been working with for some time now, which was amassed by the late folklorist and collector, Tom Munnelly. Tom Munnelly (1944–2007), a young Dublin man who worked as a machinist and commercial knitter but who was passionately interested in song, was employed in September 1971 on a pilot scheme, instituted by Breandán Breathnach under the auspices of the Departments of Education and Finance, to collect traditional song. Initial findings from the pilot scheme were so successful that, in March 1972, the establishment of an archive of Irish folk music was authorised by the Minister for Education in his department. Under this scheme Munnelly made one- or two-week field trips to various parts of the country before returning to Dublin to deposit his materials in the archive. The scheme was subsequently officially instituted or recognised (from 1974), and Munnelly was seconded to Roinn Bhéaloideas Éireann (The Irish Folklore Department) at University College Dublin. In this capacity, Tom Munnelly amassed the largest collection of English-language traditional songs ever collected by an individual in Ireland (https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Tom+Munnelly+collection, accessed on 17 September 2025).

If tradition and ownership are at odds in this context, there also exist several other serious disjunctures here (Radano 2010):

• Tom Munnelly was a professional song collector (he had worked, for example, with the American folklorist Kenneth Goldstein and also with D.K. Wilgus on his collection of Irish songs)3 and was also an accomplished traditional singer and scholar of Irish traditional (English-language) song, but while he worked for the Department of Irish Folklore, he was not a trained folklorist.
• While Tom was an accomplished singer, scholar, and collector of songs, he was literate neither in reading music nor in transcribing.
• When the songs were “transcribed” therefore for the National Folklore Collection, although the songs were listed as “transcribed”, when I explored the collection, to my dismay, only the lyrics of the songs had been transcribed, but a song is clearly much more than a poem, and as a result of this mode of transcription, no details of song shape or singing style were available from these transcriptions. There is occasionally some indication of the tune type to which they were sung, but no details of melody or singing style (some minimal details and judgments as to the worth of individual songs were later supplied by the then music inspector, Pádraig Ó Máille).
• I came to this collection as an ethnomusicologist deeply interested in music sound and its meaning, but I had never before conducted fieldwork through an interpreter, much less tried to “edit” or “produce” someone else’s fieldwork.
• Finally, while it is standard ethnomusicological practice to secure permissions for release of any recordings, Tom’s practice, which seemed to be in line with the discipline of Folklore at the time, was to promise to the singers from whom he collected songs that they would be deposited in the Folklore Archive in Dublin but would never be released without the singer’s consent. Tom viewed this as a critical modus operandi, as he explained to me in an interview in 2002:

Tom Munnelly interview, 25 August 2002, at his home in Miltown Malbay, Co. Clare.

“Now I found this [release form] to be an absolute disaster! You see, it sets up a barrier. I always say to the people I record “you still own it, and nothing will be done, it will not be used without your permission as far as publication goes. It’ll be up there, it’ll be like in a bank, but if anyone wants to take it out for publication, you still own it.” And I have always tried to honour that as well. But as soon as you put in a form…I did actually try that, when I did a little bit there for Peter Kennedy [..] but it just changed the situation utterly.”

3. Documents Consulted

In preparing this article, I revisited a wide variety of documents that I have relating to Tom Munnelly—field diaries, recordings, publications and talks, and interviews that I was fortunate enough to conduct with him. In one of those documents, I found the following quotation:

Munnelly, Tom, 2000. Keynote address for the Slieve Gullion Festival of Traditional Singing (Mullaghbawn, Co. Armagh).

“There is a form of song among the Sami people of Lapland that is called a yoik, in which you actually sing about an individual. The song does not only describe the person in question. To the singer the song is the person. […] One may draw an analogy with [Irish] singers for whom the songs were so important that, in a manner of speaking, the songs and the singer were inseparable. On two occasions, separated by several years and many miles, I was told independently by people from whom I was collecting “I have always been poor and I’ll probably die poor. The only thing I am rich in is songs, and I am glad I can pass them on.”

This quotation illustrates several important facets of Tom’s exceptional engagement with song: his vast knowledge of songs from a variety of different traditions; his valuing of song above mere material possessions; his respect for the singers from whom he collected4 (quoting directly what some might consider a throwaway statement: “I have always been poor and I’ll probably die poor. The only thing I am rich in is songs, and I am glad I can pass them on.”); and how important he viewed collecting those songs from singers (sometimes of mixed ability, but rich in songs). I, myself, was particularly struck by this statement because, while I have for several years been exploring the idea that, in a very real sense, in singing—using one’s life breath to call forth music and text (as well as other singers and past performances)—one sings oneself (Fosler-Lussier 2020a). Additionally, of course, 19th-century anthropologists found that Native American people distrusted photography, suspecting it of taking a part of an individual’s soul5; more potentially destructive is capturing an individual’s singing, thereby capturing the individual’s life breath.

Before I came to know Tom personally, I had encountered him through his field diaries and the many hours of wonderful recordings that he collected and deposited in the National Folklore Collection at University College Dublin. While I have written on this topic in some detail (See notes 1 above), I will not pursue the specificity of these documents here. Suffice it to say that Tom was dedicated to recording specific renditions of songs and ensuring that those would be safely deposited in the archives for posterity.6 The issue of song ownership did not, however, seem to have greatly concerned him. Irish traditional music is understood to be held in trust by generation after generation, and while singers or performers may be identified with a particular tune or rendition thereof (or even have the tune named in their honour), this does not imply either composition or ownership in the way that it may in other traditions (Fosler-Lussier 2020c).

I first encountered African American religious music, for example, the area in which my primary research was based, through exposure to spirituals in a variety of Irish performance contexts from church to school and voluntary choirs (Titon 2016). Before pursuing serious study in this area, I explored commercial recordings of this repertoire so as to be versed in the tradition before I entered “the field”. But while detailed accounts of the recordings were provided (especially in recordings by the Library of Congress, for example), little, if any, account of the singers was detailed, yet the recordings were three-dimensional versions of the singers. These were not simply two-dimensional representations of people as images, but reproductions of them and their performances that encompassed their very life force. In Tom’s words, the songs were the singers: “The songs and the singer were inseparable.”7

4. Personal Encounters

Over the course of his career, Tom’s love for song, especially in its capacity to tell stories (“[the good singers were] purveyors and conveyors of the older ballads, because they kept them alive for what they were, good pieces of storytelling”8), gradually led him to become disillusioned with the state of live performance of song and view it as in serious decline.

“It was definitely an event to have somebody around who was interested in the songs. That’s a situation that has long since disappeared, anywhere.”

(See notes 8 above)

The current revival in traditional music and singing (where one can attend a festival in some area of the country virtually every weekend, at least in the summer) would give the lie to this assertion, but it gives credence to Tom’s view of the urgency of the situation at the time. In the interview, I pursued this idea of ownership of song with Tom, particularly regarding his extensive collection of recordings.

Interview with Tom Munnelly at his home, Miltown Malbay, Sunday 25 August, 2002, 4:30 p.m.

Author—“I suppose I’m coming to it from a different perspective, because for an Ethnomusicologist part of your training is field ethics, and when you go collecting you are conscious that what you are collecting is part of the lifeblood of the people you are collecting it from, and therefore you never really view it as owning it yourself, and therefore if you want to reproduce it in any shape or form, you need a written release from the person. I would never dream of releasing a recording of a deacon that I’ve recorded in Mississippi without getting a written release from him, because it’s his voice, it’s his song, that’s the way he sings it.”

Ton Munnelly [hereafter TM]—“I would feel awkward about that author, because, one of the best books for anybody coming into collecting is Sandy Ive’s book, The Tape-recorded Interview (Ives 1995). And he is very strong, as I think most American collectors are, on release forms. Now I found this to be an absolute disaster! You see, it sets up a barrier. I always say to the people I record “you still own it, and nothing will be done, it will not be used without your permission as far as publication goes. It’ll be up there, it’ll be like in a bank, but it anyone wants to take it out for publication, you still own it.” And I have always tried to honour that as well. But as soon as you put in a form…I did actually try that, when I did a little bit there for Peter Kennedy […], but it just changed the situation utterly. So, I do not understand how these things work. Have you done that yourself?”

After some contemplation (not to mention answering the question directly, which response should be self-evident here), I pursued this issue further with Tom.

Author […]—“But I have a certain issue, say with somebody like Big Jim9. Let’s see, I talked with Séamas Ó Catháin10, I said to him, “who owns these recordings? Is it Tom’s because he put it on tape, is it the Department’s because they house it, is it Big Jim’s because it’s his voice, it’s his voice or his family’s, who owns it?” And his [Séamas Ó Catháin’s] reaction was very much “we own it, and if we decide to publish it, I don’t want to set a precedent by asking his family for a release”.”

Tom’s reaction to this assertion was very straightforward and characteristically frank:

TM—“Well no, I would not ask his family.”

TS—“So if that person is deceased, that’s where it stops?”

TM—“That’s where it stops, yeah.”

Unable, however, to let this assertion go, I pursued it further.

Author—“But if the person were still alive?”

TM—“I would not dream of publishing without their permission.”

Author—“So you don’t have a problem with say Big Jim’s granddaughter suddenly hearing her grandfather singing on tape, which she didn’t know was in public circulation?”

TM—“I would try and honour it by, not asking permission, but were there any immediate relatives, I would certainly make sure that they got a copy of the material. But I would not give them a holding voice.”11

Author—“So, you speak obviously as someone who is passionate about song, do you view the collection as yours?”

TM—[interrupts immediately] “Absolutely not! Certainly it’s the Department of Irish Folklore’s because I am aware that the Department of Irish Folklore has given me a bloody good living for so many years, doing exactly what I wanted to do. I might feel paternalistic towards them [the recordings and other materials], and obviously would want to see them well-treated and honoured and I wouldn’t have problems with that, but quite definitely I would see them primarily as the, that my function all the time was to get them, to put them in an archive, and make them available to people like myself who come looking.”

Like many of these early recordings, Tom Munnelly’s recordings show, as he saw it, a song tradition on the verge of collapse. These singers were part of a society where songs had been a natural medium of entertainment and storytelling before they had been superseded by recordings and television. The average age of the singers was about sixty (many of the more interesting singers, in terms of both repertoire and style, were well over seventy), and some had not sung in a decade, as there was no longer any audience for their art. Most of these singers are now deceased, and, apart from Munnelly’s field tapes, the songs they sang have vanished with them. Tom Munnelly’s recordings that remain have now largely been digitised and can be found at:

The National Folklore Collection, Digital VRLA, Folksong https://digital.ucd.ie/?q=dc.subject:%22Folk%20songs--Ireland%22 (accessed on 18 February 2025) Songs from the Tom Munnelly Collection, 1971–72.

5. Song Ownership

I come to the final, and for me probably the most critical, concern that I wish to explore in this article: who owns the songs, the voice, and the interpretations (Johansson and Berge 2014)? And more immediately, how did Tom Munnelly view that ownership? Writing in 2014 (on the subject of Australian Tiwi song), Genieve Campbell articulates these concerns thus:

Hearing their own voices or those of ancestors or deceased loved ones has had a powerful effect on some Tiwi people. There have also been strong (positive and negative) sentimental reactions to songs with subject matter pertaining to Tiwi social history. More than with just the recordings themselves, there has been a powerful sense amongst Tiwi listeners that, with their ‘trapped’ voices being back on the islands, a tangible, almost physical part of the ancestors has been returned home (Campbell 2014).

There exist differing understandings and opinions regarding the cultural, physical, and intellectual ownership of traditional song material (Fosler-Lussier 2020b). The moral and legal rights of ‘traditional owners’ and non-traditional copyright holders (where they exist), the archive (in this case the National Folklore Collection), the collector (in this case Tom Munnelly), and those who have funded his research and collecting are an issue that is an ongoing underlying concern for me (Cole 2019).

An essential issue is, of course, who owns the voice, once recorded, and this is a much more profound question (although closely related to) than that which I have been discussing in relation to songs, and most critically, how did the collector Tom Munnelly view song ownership? Many of us, as ethnomusicologists, have field tapes that inform our work, teaching, and publications, and that we guard jealously. They give veracity and authenticity to what we present, neither translated nor interpreted through us, but providing an accurate record of those whom we showcase. These are critically important documents because, as Elias and Lichterman remark:

“Speech norms put into practice a group’s assumptions about what appropriate speech is in the group context.”

(Eliasoph and Lichterman 2003)

This, naturally, includes the language in which one chooses to converse or sing, as I have discussed elsewhere (Smith 2014). Nevertheless, the picture is more multi-faceted because, as Jeffrey Alexander and Philip Smith identify:

“In the public arena, actors commonly invoke a shared code that identifies them.”

(Alexander and Smith 1993)

6. Conclusions

Questions regarding ownership of traditional music (in other situations, instrumental music, for example) have been raised amongst various traditional stakeholders with regard to individual and/or family associations. Particular (recorded) songs, or singers, and, therefore, the use of those recordings and the documentation, transcription, and translation of the songs, as well as the issue of the appropriateness of releasing a recording of a deceased father, grandfather, brother, sister, son, or daughter, are issues that deserve much more detailed examination.

There is a fundamental difference, it seems to me (as I have argued elsewhere (See notes 1 above)), between publishing a transcription of an individual’s rendition of a song and releasing the voice of a deceased relative, who has not approved that release, for anyone to access for whatever ends. Tom Munnelly took these concerns seriously and, while I may not agree wholeheartedly with him, envisioned a clear division between a commercial recording and a voluntary recording (but not necessarily accompanied by a formal release). It is inarguable that there is something uniquely special about the human voice as belonging to each individual, governed literally by the breath that gives us life. In song we have a unique intersection of the two primary auditory modes of human communication: music and language. In a very real sense, our voice, an extension of our life’s breath, is a singularly unique expression of our identity.

These are issues that Tom Munnelly considered seriously and that, indeed, warrant our serious consideration, not in legal (copyright) terms, but in how we approach another’s voice, whatever that may express, and to whom we perceive a recording of that to belong. I myself have released field recordings that I made of performances at Clear Creek Missionary Baptist Church in Oxford, Mississippi, U.S.A. (Smith 1988, 2004), but these were always made with prior written releases in place.12 In a music tradition where ownership of music is neither attributed nor (generally) contested, ownership of a voice on a recording is surely an issue that deserves serious consideration and one to which the song collector Tom Munnelly (for that is primarily what he recorded) gave grave consideration.