Singing the self: song, memory and identity: three views from Tom Munnelly’s field diaries for the Department of Irish Folklore

Abstract

Drawing on primary documents from the Tom Munnelly collection in the Irish Folk Music Section of the National Folklore Collection at University College Dublin, this article offers three brief snapshots of fieldwork encounters and their documentation. I examine issues of recording, contemporaneous recollection, and retrospective evocation, placing fieldwork at the centre of the endeavours of ethnomusicologists and folklorists, and interrogating the relationships and reflections that these field documents may evoke many decades after the initial encounter. The article is focused on Tom Munnelly’s English-language song collecting, but the issues raised – identity, language, memory, relationships and respect – could fruitfully be examined in almost any field encounter. I demonstrate that the field documents we leave behind can teach us more about ourselves (and others) as collectors, and about those from whom we collect than can, perhaps, the learned theories we develop around them.