Going to the Well for Water presents the diaries kept by Séamus Ennis on nineteen trips to collect songs and tunes for the Irish Folklore Commission in Irish-speaking areas, mainly in the Western counties, between July 1942 and July 1946. Written in Irish, the diaries have been translated into English and annotated by Ríonach Uí Ógáin, Director of Ireland’s National Folklore Collection. Séamus Ennis is best known today as a virtuoso performer on the uilleann pipes and as presenter of the BBC’s As I Roved Out program throughout the 1950s. However, he was also a folklorist par excellence, and only 26 years old when he began work on this project. Ennis’s strong work ethic and remarkable productivity resulted in hundreds of song and tune transcriptions, while the emotional intensity of his accounts of music and musicians underscores his belief (shared by his informants) in the worthiness of the project. The diary entries, intended as a record for Ennis’s employers, give a straightforward account of the collector’s activities. A typical entry might refer to writing letters and copying transcriptions, weather, mealtimes, trips to the post office, visits to potential informants, swimming, and evenings of conversation and music. Although ethnographic descriptions of the kind we might expect from an ethnomusicologist are given on only a handful of occasions, the editor’s inclusion of excerpts from Ennis’s letters to his employers and his folklore texts helps to fill this gap. Ennis was guided in his work by Irish Folklore Commission’s archivist, Seán Ó Súilleabháin, who compiled the Handbook of Irish Folklore. Ennis’s rejection of songs in English or those evidently learned from published texts reflects the Commission’s view that the ‘true lineage’ of Irish culture is transmitted orally and in the Irish language. His fine musical and linguistic skills are evident in his ability to transcribe song airs and instrumental tunes by ear after only one or two hearings (much of his work was carried out without the assistance, or the hindrance, of a temperamental Ediphone recorder) and in the rapid extension of his school Irish to fluency in several regional dialects. Ennis’s diaries reveal his ability to charm and reassure potential informants, as when he writes of a visit to a woman who has many songs. She said she was not in the mood for singing and I said that was not why I had come, but to indicate my high opinion of her by visiting her before asking her for songs. She liked that and told me to come again another day (p. 191). The diaries vividly convey the rhythm and grain of life in rural Ireland during the years of World War 2, ‘The Emergency’ and characterised by isolation and deprivation. The private use of cars was banned and many materials and commodities were unavailable. Ennis’s experience reflects these conditions, with many entries mentioning repairs to his bicycle or shoes and daily reports on the weather, which frequently curtailed his outings to musicians or saw him drenched. It becomes apparent that Ennis’s success as a collector benefited greatly from his talent for friendship and as an entertainer. He appears to have been in many ways a model paying guest, happy to spend hours mending a clock or a pair of boots for his new friends, digging their potatoes or bringing in turf, filling in government forms, teaching tunes or entertaining his hosts with conversation and music at night visits, house parties and concerts that frequently lasted until the early hours. He swam in the ocean and took part in sailing and fishing expeditions and went along to lantern slides, missions and funerals. The diaries are supplemented by informative footnotes and a biographical index listing the material collected from each of Ennis’s informants, while places, subjects, music and songs are all separately indexed, making it a useful guide to the National Folklore Collection’s archive. This is not a book for the general reader, nor for those looking for the fruits of Ennis’s collecting work. The musical examples are largely for illustration (reproductions of song transcriptions with only one of many verses) while the diary entries are more engaging for their sum than their parts. The reader’s enjoyment will be enhanced by an interest in Ireland’s social history or in musical ethnography. Readers expecting a detailed ethnographic account of Ennis’s encounters with his informants and their lives will be disappointed, however, for those details lie in the main elsewhere. Similarly, while this handsomely produced volume includes many photographs and reproductions of a small number of Ennis’s transcriptions of songs and tunes, his collections, including the biographical and ethnographic detail Uí Ógáin draws on for her notes and appendixes, remain unpublished in the archives of the Irish National Folklore Collection.

Going to The Well for Water : The Seamus Ennis Field Diary 1942-46 , meticulously edited and translated into English by Ríonach uí Ógáin, is a stupendous production, full of insight, gusto and intrepidity on the part of the author – and it comes complete with its editor’s valuable end-notes, and with evocative images (mostly old photographs) on nearly every page. Full review http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2009/1128/1224259585306.html Write a Review Name (Required) Email (Required, will not be published) Your Review All reviews need to be approved by CUP before being published Forthcoming Books NEW Published Books 2010 Books Art & Architecture Books on Cork Cookbooks Current Affairs Film Studies Geography General History Journals Literature Music Politics, Philosophy & Law Travel Women's Studies Atrium Attic Information for AuthorsOut of Print BooksSign up for Our NewsletterThe CatalogueIrish Studiesadministration CUP Blog Follow CUP on Twitter The Cork University Press helps to nurture the distinctiveness of local, regional and national cultures and extends the reach of UCC to national and international communities making evident the University’s commitment to the broad dissemination of knowledge and ideas.

This book is a gift, one that ought to be warmly received by all who study Ireland, Irish culture, traditional music, language, and history. It is valuable not because it presents us with a new argument about Ireland, or because there is a clear plotline that carries us along. This is after all a translated collection of Seamus Ennis’s field notes, not a novel or a history text or an ethnography. There is no academic conclusion or narrative to give us signposts as we follow Ennis around through the western counties of Ireland in the mid- 1940s on a quest for traditional music and song. What we do get instead is rich text filled with raw, first-hand experience and descriptions of daily life in western Ireland in the middle of the last century. And while a collection of field notes is not a typical genre for many of us to pick up off the bookshelves, Going to the Well for Water is a very enjoyable read. There are many reasons for this. The book is a powerful character study of Seamus Ennis himself, a portrait painted with his own brush, and carefully translated and annotated by Ríonach uí Ógáin. Seamus Ennis was easily one of the most prominent collectors of traditional Irish art forms of the twentieth century, and in Going to the Well for Water we are privileged enough to be drawn into his world. It feels as though we are walking alongside Ennis as he travels from county to county, from community to community, meeting local people and listening to their music. Ennis is our tour guide, and we are given the rare opportunity of looking over his shoulder as he does his work. He was a thorough researcher and fieldworker, and it is clear that while he was a collector of traditional Irish music and song he was also steeped in the traditions himself. Several times on his travels he is asked to adjudicate competitions, and he regularly feels obliged to play music (on varying instruments) or sing songs for people. His Irish language skills are equally as impressive, and he makes every effort to learn local dialects. Clearly, Ennis was not just a brilliant musician, scholar, and collector; he was also a respectful, responsible one too. He often helps people with their daily work. Along the way he fishes, farms, stacks turf, makes haycocks, helps repair a sail, and fixes people’s shoes. Academic writing has become increasingly reflexive and self-aware, and the publication of Ennis’s field diary follows this trend. This is especially interesting in this case because ethnographers and folklorists from Ennis’s era were notably striving to be as objective as possible in their work. It was fairly taboo to include one’s own experiences in the final published product. In the name of ‘good science’, studies of Irish culture from Ennis’s day typically focus on structures: social structures, musical structures, political structures, etc. Patterns and events were what one sought out, analysed and wrote about, not the idiosyncratic, the serendipitous, or the non-events of actual, lived social life. Today, we recognise that in our line of work one can never achieve a pure scientific objectivity because we ourselves are always part of the lens through which we analyse and interpret our subject matter. We also recognise that refracting our analyses through our own subjective perspectives can yield productive results of their own. This collection breathes that subjective voice back into our understanding of mid-century Irish culture. Part of this comes simply in the form of Ennis’s own daily trials and tribulations. There’s a lot of bicycle repair, shoe repair, letters to be written, desperate trips to the store for tobacco, a good deal of swimming and fishing, worries about not finding lodging, missing ferry boats and having to stay another day somewhere, going to Mass, and going to ‘the pictures’. None of this should be seen as a distraction though; rather, it is part of the point. Indeed, postgraduate students heading out to their first fieldwork ought to read a book like this one. So many passages reminded me of the wonderful experiences and taxing frustrations I had in my own fieldwork: no one is home when you want them to be even if you’ve scheduled an appointment. Illnesses creep in and take you away from your work. Some weeks are frustratingly unproductive, and then suddenly interesting things come flooding in to make you feel like the greatest ethnographer in the world. A 9-to-5 workday is out of the question and one ends up feeling simultaneously elated and overwhelmed by the endless and exhausting opportunities to observe and record. At the same time, the material one has collected never feels like quite enough. There is yet another reason why this volume is so enjoyable to read. The editor has done a wonderful job illustrating the text with maps, excerpts of Ennis’s handwritten notes, drawings, postcards, and also historical and contemporary photographs. All of this makes the inevitably repetitive nature of Ennis’s diary-making come to life. The handwritten examples from his field notes aren’t simply decorative (although Ennis’s handwritten Irish is beautiful). They create a sense of immediacy. For example, in one passage Ennis discusses helping his friend (and prolific tradition-bearer), Colm O Caodhain, tie the knots onto a sail, and in his notes he draws an illustration (208–9). This is not superfluous material for our understanding of Ennis’s fieldwork. It is part and parcel of it. Ríonach uí Ógáin also provides us with a well-researched introduction, thorough footnotes, and, following, the translated collection of Ennis’s field notes, an extensive biography of the ‘tradition bearers’ Ennis meets on his travels. In her introduction, Ríonach uí Ógáin explains that her purposes for publishing this book were to, first, make Ennis’s diaries more accessible, and secondly, to relay the experience of his fieldwork – not merely the results of it – to the reader. In these regards, Going to the Well for Water is a great success, a rare treat.