Holy crap, thanks. These will go well with the
Dunn Family Collection and the
Patsy Touhey cylinder recordings. Touhey is featured prominently on all of these, I think he made more homemade cylinders than Michael Coleman made commercial 78s, he must have been one of the most prolific home recording artists of the time - definitely the king of trad music.
I've had dubs of some of these for years now, Touhey playing Drowsie Maggie etc and the sound hasn't improved drastically with these new dubs, even though they use lasers to read the cylinders; but much of this music is new to me. The story is many of these records were stored in a damp barn attic for years, messing up the grooves in the wax; Breandan Breathnach attempted to dub them in the 60s and couldn't get some of them to play at all. Great that we can now hear them all, recordings like this are a link to another time.
Most of these are recordings made by Fr. Henebry himself too, not O'Neill - there are a few of those as well, gifts sent by O'Neill, who later complained in a letter how Henebry never sent thanks. Some of the recordings of Touhey are announced that they are for "John Henebry," this was the Fr.'s pipemaking brother. I guess some of those are in here as well.