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In 1947, Brian George, the head of the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Central Programme Operations, hired Séamus Ennis to help record traditional music throughout Ireland. Ennis was ideally suited for the task. Born in Finglas, North County Dublin, Ennis had become renowned as a uilleann pipe player, a talent inherited from his father, James. Ennis’s musical aptitude was matched by his scrupulousness as a collector. Over the previous five years he became one of the principal fieldworkers for the Irish Folklore Commission. Ennis’s rapport with source musicians was a vital asset to George, himself a singer who hailed from Donegal. Having long envisioned the broadcasting service as a leading collector of folk song and music, George hoped a strong yield of Irish field recordings would persuade the BBC London headquarters to invest in systematically recording all of Britain and Ireland. To that end, the Irish recording trip succeeded. According to the founder of the BBC Sound Archive, Marie Slocombe, the roughly one hundred recordings from Ennis and George’s trial project “confirmed the belief that much material of interest to broadcasting, as well as of scientific folklore value, still remained to be recorded, even in these over-urbanised islands.” Following another Irish pilot venture in 1949, the BBC launched an ambitious five-year recording project in 1952 supervised by Slocombe and George, the Folk Music and Dialect Recording Scheme.
