Patsy Touhey
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Patrick J. Touhey (1865-1923) was a celebrated American player of the uilleann pipes. His innovative technique and phrasing, his travels back and forth to play on the variety and vaudeville stage, and his recordings made his style influential among Irish-American pipers. To a great extent, he can be seen as the greatest contributor to a distinctive American style.
“Patsy” Touhey was born in February 1865, near Loughrea, County Galway, Ireland. His father James and his uncle Martin were accomplished local players. The family arrived in Boston around 1868, and his father arranged for Patsy's instruction from Bartley Murphy of Mayo. However at the age of ten Patsy lost his father and awhile later he laid the pipes aside.
In his late teens he strayed into a Bowery music hall where John Eagan, the “White Piper” of Galway, was engaged. Enthralled by Eagan’s virtuosity he took up the instrument again, and with tutelage from Eagan and Billy Taylor of Philadelphia, became a master.
He toured the East with Irish variety and theatre, including Jeremiah Cohan’s Irish Hibernia, in which he played for the step-dancing of young George M. Cohan, and William Powers' Ivy Leaf company. At the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago he played at the Irish Village, one of two rival Irish pavillions, and was later engaged for the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis (Louisiana Purchase Exposition). He starred in vaudeville skits, trading jokes with his wife Mary and their partner Charles Burke. The shows included slapstick, low-brow gags, Irish nostalgia, and a piping finale to which Mary danced.
Captain Francis O’Neill, the prominent compiler of Irish dance tunes, called him, “the genial wizard of the Irish pipers . . . A stranger to jealousy, his comments are never sarcastic or unkind, neither does he display any tendency to monopolize attention in company when other musicians are present.”
Touhey played left-handed, in a mirror image of the typical position, using concert-pitch instruments made by the Taylor brothers of Philadelphia. In performing dance music, he played fast but deviated from strict tempo to bring out the character of the tune. He used the regulators (three keyed pipes lying under the heel of the hand) not to keep the rhythm, but to emphasize the broader structure of the piece. He combined legato passages with "tight" (staccato) ornaments -- runs, triplets and backstitching -- as well as crans, all executed with the highest proficiency. However, he didn't employ certain ornaments in common use today, such as raising the chanter off the knee to swell a note's volume and intensity. In these ways his style contrasts with the prominent influences on current piping who stayed in Ireland -- Willie Clancy, Johnny Doran, Seamus Ennis, John Potts, and Leo Rowsome.
On some surviving recordings Touhey would switch smoothly from a jig to a reel. Another device was to end his performance with a well-known American piece, like “Turkey in the Straw”, performed in piping style. “He takes the audience by storm,” wrote Captain O’Neill, “even when composed of mixed nationalities.”
His music can be heard on three 78rpm sides recorded by Victor in 1921: two medleys of reels and one of jigs. A fourth medley comprising the Stack of Barley and other hornpipes was recorded but not released. An earlier negotiation with Edison had fallen through over money, but Touhey advertised a list of 150 tunes and recorded the cylinders one by one at home, filling orders at $10 per dozen. Several dozen of these survive, and a few more examples of his playing can be heard on cylinders made by Captain O’Neill. The two sources can be differentiated as either Touhey or O'Neill's voice introduces the player and the piece.
It was one of O'Neill's cylinders that prompted the Gaelic scholar Father Richard Henebry to declare, “[Touhey’s performance] has the life of a reel and the terrible pathos of a caoine. It represents to me human man climbing the empyrean heights, and when he had almost succeeded, then tumbling, tumbling down to hell, and expressing his sense of eternal failure on the way. The Homeric ballads and the new Brooklyn Bridge are great, but Patsy Touhey’s rendering of ‘The Shaskeen Reel’ is a far bigger achievement.”
Some others, notably Brother Gildas O’Shea of Kerry, disdained Touhey’s style as outside the piping tradition. Asked whether Touhey's recordings had influenced his own playing, Gildas replied, "No, I was learning the pipes at the time." However generally pipers were in awe of Touhey's playing; Seamus Ennis, writing in the liner notes of Dublin fiddler Tommy Potts's Liffey Banks LP, said that he and his father considered Touhey's playing "hyper-phenomenal," and that he considered Touhey "the best of the men who came before my father."
Touhey lived on Bristow Street in the Bronx, New York, and maintained a summer house in East Haddam, Connecticut. He died on January 10, 1923, and is buried in St. Raymond’s Cemetery in the Bronx. He left no progeny but several pupils, including Michael Carney and Michael Morris. His style can be heard in the playing of many others, most of whom were either born in or spent considerable time in the United States, including Michael Gallagher, Paddy Lavin, Tom Busby, Tom Ennis, Hugh McCormick, Eddie Mullaney, Joe Shannon and Andy Conroy.
Tom Busby was a student of Carney's and described the style of these pipers in various articles and letters printed in An Piobarie, the newsletter of Na Piobari Uilleann. This close-fingered way of playing Busby always described as the Connaught style of piping. The style of these American-based players does differ in various ways from that of players recorded in Ireland, but the possibly unique features of an American style are hard to discern now, due to the lack of recorded evidence.
