O’Mealy’s hornpipe

A unique tune from a batch of 1943 recordings made by a marvelous Westmeath/Belfast piper/pipemaker, R.L. O’Mealy. These recordings may be heard here: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/music/index.html A bit of film of R.L. from 1938 turned up in recent years on YouTube, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGhM6MueWbE This excellent hornpipe may be a composition of O’Meal(l)y’s, but that isn’t known for certain. Vol 3 of the piping organization the Sean Reid Society was dedicated to O’Mealy (he spelt his name in different ways on different occasions) and his work, including surviving transcriptions, he doesn’t seem to have been much of a composer so this could as well be a tune from his family, which was chockablock with pipers.

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This is a really lovely hornpipe. Thanks for posting it, and thanks for the background information.

Glad you like it. Someone else had transcribed it already actually, but they didn’t take it down from O’Mealy’s playing, or didn’t take much effort to notate what he played.

They say Liam O’Flynn first heard the O’Mealy recordings on a nth-generation dub, where multiple copying of the tape had sped the pitch up a mile; he didn’t recognize it as pipes, thought it was a calliope!