Conference Agenda

In southwest Wisconsin, a small but impactful Cornish-American community has cultivated a repertoire of music collected in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Cornwall in southwest Britain. At events like the annual Cornish Festival and Celtic Celebration in Mineral Point, Wisconsin, one frequently hears songs collected by British scholars like Ralph Dunstan (1857–1933) and Sabine Baring-Gould (1834–1924). During three years of ethnographic fieldwork in Wisconsin and Cornwall, I have found that musical communities in both places have cultivated a similar knowledge of many of these songs, partly because of shared memories of emigration realized through song. This paper investigates the ways in which Dunstan and Baring-Gould’s work contributed to a newly defined “Cornish Celtic folk” culture among the Cornish in Britain and those abroad in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During this period, classificatory frameworks were entangled with transnational “Celtic” movements that relied on shifting concepts of race, culture, and eventually, nationalism. It was a folk culture that was co-created alongside the elite culture of music scholarship and the popular culture of notated music, and Dunstan and Baring-Gould’s work demonstrates many of the marked shifts that occurred at the time. Drawing on philosopher Alexis Shotwell’s concept of “unforgetting” (2016), I ask what the work of these collectors does for musical communities in the present day and what it could do to enable a more holistic view of the Cornish colonization of North America. Drawing on folklorist Emily Hilliard’s ideas on “visionary folklore” (2022), I ask how this music could generate possibilities for a more just and inclusive future. This research utilizes interviews, participant observation, and archival work alongside scholars including Martin Stokes, Philip Bohlman, David Hesmondhalgh, Alan Dundes, José Muñoz, Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, and Banu Subramaniam, to inform an understanding of community singing’s impact on concepts of colonialism, race, ethnicity, and cultural memory. Songs have been used to make and remake concepts of the Cornish Celtic folk many times throughout the last two centuries, and this work suggests an opportunity to remake or to unmake those concepts through collective action.

The Inishowen Singers' Weekend Festival, held annually in Ballyliffin, County Donegal, serves as a vital site for the preservation and reinvention of Irish singing traditions. Bringing together singers from around the world, the festival functions as a living archive, where oral traditions are performed, adapted, and reinterpreted. This research examines how traditional songs act as embodied oral histories or “vehicles of memory” (Confino, 1997), mediating grief, shaping identity, and linking generations.

Through participant observation and interviews, this study explores how contemporary performers navigate tradition and innovation, blending historical material with modern influences to address cultural and social issues. Thinking alongside Hirsch and Smith (2002), a central focus is the role of women singers, whose contributions to Irish song have often been overlooked in textual archives but remain essential to its continuity. By engaging in both formal and informal singing spaces, women actively shape cultural memory and challenge traditional narratives of musical heritage.

Drawing on Diana Taylor’s analysis of archives and repertoire (2003), this paper examines how festivals function as performative archives. By bridging ethnomusicology and performance studies, it explores how festival spaces cultivate community, mentorship, and intergenerational transmission of song traditions. Whether through structured workshops or informal pub sessions, performances become sites of cultural work, reinforcing collective identity.

Ultimately, this study positions the Inishowen Singers' Weekend Festival as a key site of cultural memory work, where music links past and present, reinforcing a deeply rooted yet evolving sense of place and belonging. The festival is a site of transfer (Connerton, 1989) where individuals and groups reassert their identities by recalling a shared past through the performance of songs. While there is no written archive of these pieces, the repeated performances of the repertoire each year ensures a lasting embodiment of Irish cultural history.