James Duncan was a traditional Irish harper in the 18th century. But since he was still alive in 1792, he was active during my Long 19th Century study period (1792 – 1909) and so I should try to say something useful about what he was doing from 1792 onwards.
I think we first meet James Duncan right at the beginning of my study period, when he came to Belfast to play at the gathering of the traditional Irish harpers in the Assembly Rooms (the old Exchange Rooms), from Wednesday 11th through to Saturday 14th June 1792. My header image shows a view of the Exchange Rooms building, before it was rebuilt in the 19th century, from R. M. Young Old Belfast (1896) p196
In the newspaper report of the meeting, which was printed after the second day of the meeting, all the harpers are listed along with the tunes they had played. James Duncan is listed last of all:
JAMES DUNCAN – from the co. of Down, aged 45.
Belfast News Letter, Fri 13 Jul 1792 p3
Played – Molly Astore – date and author unknown.
Morning Star – the same
Catherine Tyrrel – the same
Now if we believe this information then we can calculate that James Duncan must have been born in 1746-7. We are told he was from County Down.
Also, we are given three tune titles that he is said to have played at the meeting. Molly Astore is easy enough; it is the old harp air of Mailí Bheag Ó, later recycled into Thomas Moore’s song “The Harp that Once”. I wrote up the 18th century sources for this tune as part of my Transcriptions Project. Catherine Tyrrell is also straightforward; it is the traditional tune of Caitlín Triall, or Kitty Tyrrell. I also wrote up the early sources for this tune. The Morning Star is much less easy to identify though, since there are a number of tunes with this or similar titles. I discussed this in my write up of the traditional harp tune “Dawn of Day”.
of St John’s College, Cambridge
The harper and tradition-bearer William Carr was also at the Belfast meeting, and then many years later in 1807, he remembered the other harpers who had been there. He did not say very much about any of them.
James Duncan Co Down played very Moderately (since Dead)
Angela Byrne (ed), A scientific Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour (2018) p303
I think that all we can take from William Carr’s reminiscences is that he did not think James Duncan played particularly well; and that he knew that James Duncan had died already by 1807.
The harper and tradition-bearer Arthur O’Neill was also at the meeting in Belfast in 1792, and in his Memoirs written about 1808, Arthur O’Neill also remembered James Duncan being there. O’Neill’s description of the Belfast meeting was not in his initial rough draft of his Memoirs (Queen’s University Belfast, Special Collections, MS4.46). The only mention of Duncan in the rough version of the Memoirs is a description of him going to the 3rd Granard meeting of harpers. Arthur O’Neill got the dates wrong, and says the 3rd meeting was in 1783, but we can check the newspaper adverts to see that the 3rd meeting was actually in 1786 (Dublin Evening Post Thu 27 Jul 1786, cited in Seán ‘Donnelly, an 18th century harp medley’, Ceol na hÉireann no.1, 1993 p29-30). I want to ignore all of this because it is before the beginning of my study period (1792 – 1909), but we can tell from it that James Duncan was already playing the harp and going to harpers’ gatherings in 1786.
Arthur O’Neill lists James Duncan amongst the attendees of the 1792 Belfast meeting in the neat version of his Memoirs (QUB SC MS4.14 p69) but he does not add anything to the bare name in a list.
Arthur O’Neil gives a mini-biography of James Duncan a few pages later in the neat revised version of his Memoirs. He says:
James Duncan. This Gentleman was descended of respectable Parents in the County of Down, and was taught to learn the Harp, only, as a qualifying branch of his education, for which Instrument he had a particular partiality
QUB SC MS4.14 p79-80; printed in C M Fox, Annals (1911) p125for. He was principally instructed by a Harry Fitzsimons a professor of the Harp, under whom he made a very considble proficiency. His Embarrassment in life was the chief cause of his becoming an itinerant Harper for some years. He was deeply engaged in a Law suit with some of his family, and the Imoluments arising from his performances were the principal means of defraying the expenses of it, and the Law suit terminated in his favour, and obtained his property in the possession of which he lately died. I met him in Belfast in 1792, on the occasion already mentioned, and his Gentlemanly conduct induced me to form an uncommon opinion of him, and was much grieved, when coming to Belfast afterwards, I made his part of the Country my way to call on him, when I was informed of his death. He was an excellent performer. But knew very little of ancient Irish airs. He played a great Variety of modern airs very well.
Thirty years later, Edward Bunting used this manuscript of Arthur O’Neill’s unpublished Memoirs when writing a paraphrase of this information in his 1840 book (intro p81). Bunting adds that “his [legal] suit … was still pending at the time of the Meeting at Belfast, in 1792”, and that he “died about 1800”. I don’t know Bunting’s sources for these two statements so I don’t know how much we can trust them.
Arthur O’Neill’s account has a lot of very useful information for us. Arthur O’Neill was quite a strict “insider” judge of other harpers’ abilities; so it is significant that he describes James Duncan as “an excellent performer”. But his comments about him not knowing many “ancient Irish” tunes, only “modern” tunes, is interesting. Perhaps it was this that William Carr was picking up on? It is also not clear what tunes Arthur O’Neill would categorise as “ancient” and which as “modern”. Which of these two categories would O’Neill place the three tunes listed in the newspaper into? I would presume “ancient Irish”, but it is not entirely clear.
The information about James Duncan’s lineage is very interesting as well, because we don’t have loads of information about how this earlier generation of traditional Irish harpers learned the harp. We see that James Duncan learned from the County Down harper, Harry Fitzsimons, “as a qualifying branch of his education”, i.e. that it was a part of James Duncan’s general private education as a son of a wealthy landowning family. We can compare this to the way that Arthur O’Neill himself was employed at the MacDonnell household in the Glens of Antrim in the 1780s, to teach the three sons of the household, including Dr James MacDonnell. None of those three brothers took to it; but James Duncan obviously did and played well enough to be able to go professional when he fell on hard times.
Arthur O’Neill tells us about Harry Fitzsimons and his son Harry Junior immediately after the text about Duncan. They were also from County Down and were both excellent performers; the father was a decent man but the son was a terrible womaniser, and Arthur O’Neill tells with relish how the son had “debauch’d” a Lady in Galway, and then while staying with a patron in County Cavan, got three of the servant girls pregnant. I have not covered the two Harry Fitzsimons in my Long 19th Century project because they were I think already dead by 1792. I would imagine that James Duncan’s time learning the traditional wire-strung Irish harp with Harry Fitzsimons senior, was before the time of the son’s scandals.
The legal case
Arthur O’Neill tells us that James Duncan was not trained up to be a professional harper; but that he was a good enough performer that when he came on hard times he was able to go out on the road and earn enough money not only to live, but also to pay his legal bills for his law suit.
Arthur O’Neill says that James Duncan “was deeply engaged in a law suit with some of his family”. Bunting says that the law suit was “for the recovery of his parental property”. It looks like this was a kind of inheritance dispute; presumably James Duncan’s father had died, and the family estates which (so he thought) should have gone directly to him, instead went to some other relative. And so there was expensive legal fees, and in the end the case was decided in favour of James Duncan, and against the relatives, and James Duncan got possession of the estates.
At this time, these estates were a big thing, because the rent from the tenants on the estates were how the landed gentry were wealthy, getting big passive unearned incomes to live in luxury.
Now it strikes me that there ought to be records of this legal case. I have had a quick look at the Irish Chancery Court records, but I don’t see anything that leaps out at me – there are a few James Duncans involved in cases in the 1780s and 1790s but nothing seems obvious, and I don’t know how to follow any of this up. We need a legal historian to help us out here!
I’m also not finding any references to Duncan landowners in the late 18th century in County Down. Without knowing who James Duncan is trying to get the lands off of, it is hard to dig any further on this. But again it should be possible to find the case, and to then find where the estates were, and then to find them on a map and see the house etc.
Other mentions of his name
We should also look at two other tiny mentions of James Duncan’s name, though I don’t think they actually give us any information.
Belfast Library, FJ Bigger Archive, Envelope V6, contains a sheet of paper that was written by Thomas Hughes, apparently from Arthur O’Neil’s dictation, probably in 1808. It includes the sketches of Arthur O’Neill “thinking” and “laughing or smiling” and saying “Mick how does me coat fit me”. On each side of the first sheet is a list of harpers; the name “Duncan” appears in both lists. But we knew anyway that Arthur O’Neil knew James Duncan so there is no new information here.
Queen’s University Belfast MS4.13 is one of Edward Bunting’s late piano manuscripts, from the late 1830s. They are not in Bunting’s handwriting, and I think they were done for him by editors, as part of the preparation of the 1840 printed book. On p45 there is a list of harpers’ names, again in someone else’s handwriting. Each harper’s name also has the place they were from. One of the lines reads “James Duncan Down”. I wonder if this was a list of harpers’ names, which could be used to randomly select names to put with tunes to give them false attribution provenances. Otherwise I don’t know what the purpose of this list might have been; and it does not give us any useful information.
Attribution tags
As usual for the harpers who were active in 1792 and who went to Belfast, we have attribution tags written by Edward Bunting into his piano arrangement manuscripts and printed books, labelling that tune as being “from” James Duncan. Now we cannot take these tags literally; they are written against Edward Bunting’s piano arrangements, usually decades after Bunting met the supposed informant. But we might think it is possible that Bunting is telling us that he made a live field notation from listening to a traditional performance by James Duncan on wire-strung Irish harp. But it also seems that in some cases Bunting is indicating merely that the tune in question was part of the harper’s repertory; and in some cases I think he was just inventing attributions almost 50 years after the fact in order to make his piano books look more authoritative. Bunting did not keep good records and we can see sometimes how he misremembers or fabricates memories of things that had happened in the past.
But we should still look through these attribution tags in case they can tell us anything useful about James Duncan.
We can usefully divide these attribution tags into early and late groups. The early attribution tags are in Edward Bunting’s two-volume piano manuscript titled Ancient and Modern, which is now Queen’s University Belfast, Special Collections, MS4.33.3 (vol 1) and MS4.33.2 (vol 2). This book of piano arrangements in Edward Bunting’s handwriting seems to have been compiled in 1798, but was never published. Many of the tunes have attribution tags written by them, which may date from that time Of course it is possible that some or all of these attribution tags were added many years later; I don’t know how we might tell. I tend to assume these attributions date from c.1798, which was only a few years after Bunting’s main field collecting trips.
The late attribution tags were written into piano arrangements in the late 1830s and early 1840s, which is over 40 years after the collecting trips. Some were written by editors in to the late 1830s piano manuscripts (QUB SC MS4.13 and MS4.27); some were printed in the index to the 1840 book; and some were written by Bunting in the early 1840s into his own copies of the earlier (1797 & 1809) printed books. These late tags often conflict with earlier ones, and I tend to be very distrustful of these late attribution tags unless we have earlier corroborating evidence.
The only early attribution tag we have for James Duncan is for the tune of Ailí Gheal Chiúin Ní Chearbhaill / the Pearl of the Irish Nation. This interesting county Down tune and song air was collected by Edward Bunting from a harper, and I wrote up his live transcription notation (which is preserved in QUB SC MS4.29 p204). As usual, there is no attribution tag in the field transcription notebook, but the early piano arrangement in QUB SC MS4.33.3 p51 is tagged “From James Duncan County Down”. It seems possible that Duncan played the tune on the harp for Edward Bunting, who wrote the live “dots” in MS4.29 p204 as Duncan played. Edward Bunting published a piano arrangement in his 1809 book; in the early 1840s he added the attribution tag “O Neil, harp” in pen to his own copy of the printed book.
The other attribution tags for James Duncan are all late, and two of them are contradicted by early tags. The tune of Bacach buidhe na léimne / the Lame yellow beggar is attributed to James Duncan in a late attribution tag one of the late 1830s piano manuscripts (QUB SC MS4.27 f9v). Two other late attribution tags say the tune came from the harper Daniel Black (QUB SC MS4.13 f5v, and the 1840 index p.xi). The early attribution tag (QUB SC MS4.33.3 p8), which I would trust the most, says the tune was collected from Charles Byrne.
The tune of Grá na mban Óg / James Plunkett has all of the late attribution tags saying that it came from James Duncan in 1792 (QUB SC MS4.13 f39v; MS4.27 f15r, and 1840 index p.xi). But these are contradicted by the early attribution tag saying it was collected from Charles Byrne (QUB SC MS4.33.2 p31)
The tune of The Jolly Ploughman has no early attribution tag and no early notations in the manuscripts; we only have late piano arrangements and late attribution tags. In one of the piano albums it is tagged “Coleraine 1796” (QUB SC MS27 f14v); the other two late attribution tags say it came from James Duncan in 1792 (QUB SC MS13 f7r, and 1840 index p.xi). But I would not pay too much attention to these attributions from the late 1830s and early 1840s.
Conclusion
I think the most interesting and significant thing about James Duncan from the point of view of my Long 19th Century Project, is his legal case and his legal victory and him subsequently switching from being a professional Irish harper to being a Gentleman harper.
I think there is a lot of scope for further research here. We need to find a legal dispute over the inheritance of a landed estate in County Down in the 1780s and 1790s, between different branches of the same family; where the landowner died, and his son (James Duncan) contested the inheritance, and won the case.
If anyone finds references to such a case, we can put them in the comments below!