The Dance Music of Ireland (1907)
O'Neill's previous book, Music of Ireland (1903), was a success, despite it not selling as well as the author had hoped. O'Neill returned to the subject four years later with a slate of 1001 dance tunes, curated for those who were looking for an entrée into traditional Irish music, as well as for those traditional musicians who were keen on new repertoire. Again, it should be stated that most traditional musicians would not be familiar with learning dance tunes from notes on a piece of paper - it was an oral tradition in which players learned by ear. Yet O'Neill (as Mike O'Malley points out in his forthcoming Ethnomusicology Ireland article with this author) was an enforcer of rules. And the "unruly" business of traditional music needed an enforcer of rules, or so O'Neill thought.
Maybe O'Neill borrowed the idea rom the work of Francis James Child, as he ironed out 305 folk ballads from England and Scotland into "urtexts" in his 1860 anthology The Child Ballads. Maybe it was his intent to bring these folk tunes to the parlors of those who had influence in Irish-American and Irish circles as Ireland was in a folk revival before its Uprising a decade later. Maybe this was a hobby that O'Neill used to escape the difficulties of police work. In any case "The 1001" (as it was called in trad circles) became a major source for traditional tunes, which are still echoing in Irish music sessions around the world. Many of the tunes in O'Neill's first two books made mention of the musician from whose playing the tune was transcribed. As a number of researchers have noted though, many tunes were also lifted or interpreted from previously published collections, and tune names (as is often the case in trad music) were flighty. [Ciaran Carson, in his book Last Night’s Fun, notes that tune names are particularly slippery in the moment: “A: What do you call that? B: Ask my father. A: ‘Ask My Father’?” (p. 13)]
