The Story of The Black Book

The photocopied pages of sheet music were of poor quality, without cover pages, artwork, notices or anything else that might identify the original source of the pages. The only explanatory text included with the sheet music was 4 separate pages of acknowledgments atributing tunes to such well known traditinal Irish musicians such as Charlie Lennon, Dennis Murphy, Jim McHugh, Matt Malloy, Michael Gorman, Mick O’Connor, Paddy Cronin, Paddy Ryan, Sean McGuire, Sean Ryan, Tommy Peoples and Willie Clancy, to name but a few.

The photocopies came from Toronto and were in a black duo-tang cover or binder. It was called, simply, "The Toronto Black Book".

A bunch of us living in Peterborough Ontario were enthralled with traditional Irish music and we were hungry for tunes, especially tunes played by the experienced session players from well beyond our little Patch. The fellow who brought The Black Book to us in Peterborough in the mid-1980's got it from Kim Vincent. (Kim passed away in December 2009).

We don't know who originally brought this collection to Toronto or who made photocopies for others to pass around to enjoy. It was indeed widely passed around and became an important "foundation" collection for clutches of players of traditional Irish music throughout southern Ontario and other parts of Canada.

In the spirit of openly sharing traditional material The Black Book was digitized in September 2006 and made available here at no cost and without any financial benefit to me or any other party.

Page numbers and an index have been added to the electronic version. Tune names in the index are as they appear in the collection.

Some time around 2012 I became aware of a cross reference of tunes together with The Session index number, Alan Ng’s Irish Traditional Music Tune Index reference number, as well as Nigel Gatherer’s extensive list of alternative titles and background histories of the tunes.

These references provide many interesting insights into the tunes found in the collection and pointed to the likely source of the original photocopies of The Black Book as being the tunes that were collected from sessions and contemporary players by Bulmer and Sharpley set down in the 1974 "Music from Ireland".

After extensive searching I could find no evidence that Music from Ireland was in print, available for purchase, or that might demonstrate this representation of traditional Irish tunes was protected by a viable copyright in Canada or elsewhere. This remains the case today.