Actually though griots celebrate aristocratic genealogies they also preserve and perform the collective myths of the people, African chiefdoms were not clbutt stratified societies as in western Europe, and chiefly rule was very dependent on mbutt popular consent, and musical and oral poetry were often public performances and not confined to chiefly houses. And in Ireland there is no evidence that the aristocracy did not interact with peaseant dance music,

like that is not possible in a scattered rural community, and a harpist can't keepgoing without being paid (strings are expensive, instruments enormously more so). Anyone who took their harp on tour through the bogs of Mayo in the 1650s would have soon dumped it in a ditch

Well name one harper who threw his harp into a ditch in Mayo i.e. the above statement contains as many unsupported buttertions about cultural process and norms as you accusse me of purveying. I think it goes without saying that in reference to the origins of any folk practice whether we are talking about the banjo or Irish dance music we are always in the realm of speculation and inference in which primary historical data will be fragmentary

However Irish bardic poets and harpers were banished to the West Indies where many died of fever and poor conditions of indentured servitude. Exile to the West Indies was seen as a de facto rest sentence in this period.

As for the rest we may disagree on the particulars but you are also making arguments for some sort of hybridization process and thus confirm my point that similar hybridity was at work in the development of the banjo from African prototypes.

See Brendan Beathnach on the dating of the big reels and jigs in his Ceol Rince books and he was not referring to transcription dates.

Your point here was that the 17TH and 18th century witnessed a hybridization from multiple sources such as the European baroque, and I would add the bardic tradition. Do you think it merely vanished in thin air in an highly send oral cultureas unemployed harpers and singers sought new markets and audiences.

There was a travelling musician vocations within families and for disabled persons as well as a dancing masters, and the fact that the vocation of dancing masters originated in England only confirms my point about hybridization, nor would their musical practices would have been immune to indigenous Irish music and nor would tradition keepers in Ireland abstain from pursuing this type of profession .there is much written evidence of indigenous Irish dancing masters, do you thing their repertoire only derived from Playford and such English collections

I never claimed that the earlier harp music was preserved among the peasentry, that music all but vanished except what was collected by Bunting from the older itinerant players;, and mouth music was a primary form for preserving all sorts of rural musical memory,

See Alan Jabbour on the dissemination of violins in the 17trh and 18th century in British Isles and Americas On Saturday, November 29, 2003, at 10:30 PM, bogus address

N

There is no question that the fragmented survivors of this repression fled for sanctuary to the peasentry in the remote parts of the west of Ireland and then disseminated their musical traditions among this population, traditions that were once exclusively reserved for clan nobility.

There's a *lot* of question about it, and no positive evidence of any such process.

Thus historians are not surprised that the late 17th century and 18th century witnessed an explosion in rural Irish music composition, dancing, and instrument innovation.

W .

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