The bodhrán: Ireland's oldest instrument – or its newest?

Irish Times

09-07-2025

When
Cathy Jordan
went on stage at this year's TG4 Gradam Ceoil concert it was as amhránaí an bhliain – singer of the year. But she closed the event accompanying herself on the bodhrán, so putting the Irish frame drum centre stage at an event that's an Oscars of trad.
This is significant, for the bodhrán is still viewed with a degree of scepticism within traditional music, despite its having for more than 50 years featured in practically all top-level ensembles, among them
The Bothy Band
,
De Danann
,
The Chieftains
,
Dervish
and Danú. It has also come to compete with the harp as a symbol of Ireland, appearing both on postage stamps and in our passports.
But the idea of the bodhrán as the oldest instrument in Ireland couldn't be more wrong: it's the newest.
No percussion was reported in Ireland at all until the English military introduced a drum at the end of the 16th century. Go back to a period as recent as the mid-20th century and there's little trace of the bodhrán as an instrument, and it was never played in any significant way as part of Irish dance music.
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As with most northern European music, melody was key in Ireland. There were a couple of recordings with tambourine in the 1920s, but a formal percussion role was established only in the decade or so that followed, with the jazz-style drum kit.
So it is surprising that the repopularisation of traditional music has come to be marked so visibly by the bodhrán: every class and ensemble, from the most casual to the most sophisticated, has a bodhrán player; professional soloists include
Gino Lupari
, Aimée Farrell Courtney, John Joe Kelly,
Rónán Ó Snodaigh
and Colm Murphy.
As technical virtuosity is at the pinnacle of all instrumental playing, and because Irish music is defined by melody, it is hardly surprising that there would be a reticence about percussion. Even so, that is something of a paradox, for though it is fashionable to denigrate bodhrán players, any top instrumentalist appreciates that a good one gives music a tremendous lift.
The ambiguity is best explained by a look at where this drum comes from, a complex story that until now has not been known.
The name is certainly old. The word 'bodhrán' was originally used for a device created thousands of years ago as a tool for winnowing grain, or for a container or tray. But as a percussion instrument, with the sophistication we know today, the bodhrán's traceable history doesn't begin until the earlier 1800s – and then the instrument appears only sporadically until the mid-20th century.
It had different names in each part of the country; bodhrán was the most common of those – with 25 spellings of the term in print from the late 19th century onwards.
Pronunciation of 'bodhrán' varies by region, the first syllable rhyming with either 'cow' or 'go', the second with either 'rawn' or 'ran'; the earliest audio recording of the term, from 1927, uses the latter in each case.
The first written record of the word 'bodhrán' – in a 16th-century medical manuscript that indicates its sound was hollow and resonant – was valuably explored in 2007 by Liam Ó Bharáin in
Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann
's Treoir magazine.
But it is how the bodhrán became a drum that is most interesting, a story that began with tambourines being played by commercial entertainers who toured Irish cities in the 1700s and 1800s.
Their usage was continued by black-and-white minstrels. These were white American musicians who, in an intrinsically racist concept, masqueraded as blacks, playing instruments that were purportedly the cultural territory of African-Americans: tambourine, bones, concertina or accordion, and banjo (only the latter of which was actually African).
Bands of these performers toured worldwide, coming to Ireland after the 1840s until the end of that century. Their music inspired widespread copycat performances in rural and urban parish halls around Ireland.
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The tambourines – which differ from today's bodhráin in that they include jingles or rattles – are frequently mentioned in Irish press reports, as indeed is their sale by the music trade.
The minstrel fashion outlived its originators, continuing until the 1930s; additionally, home-made tambourines came to be played as part of the marching format of the wren each December, but they were not a significant part of 'sit-down' music until after the 1950s.
The tambourine that was adopted by the American minstrels had already been a feature of polite-society musicmaking among young women in the 1700s. The origin of that goes back at least several thousand years to women's use of tambourines in southern Europe to celebrate deities such as Cybele, Ariadne and Aphrodite. (The instrument came to the English military courtesy of its army's adoption of Turkish music practices learned during the Crusades.)
A handful of historical references suggest that, from the 1800s onwards, Irish people used the utilitarian bodhrán as an improvised tambourine. As the modernisation of farming after the Famine rendered older tools and utensils obsolete, leading wits might have used the term 'bodhrán' to slag off home-made tambourines.
In any case, the UCD folklorist Kevin Danaher reported in 1947 that in some areas the terms 'bodhrán' and 'tambourine' were used interchangeably.
The bodhrán story for Irish music begins properly with
John B Keane
's inclusion of a tambourine player in his play Sive, which was performed at the Abbey Theatre in 1959.
Seán Ó Riada
, who was music director there, reportedly saw that drum and decided to include it in his music ensemble Ceoltóirí Chualann, which played for Song of the Anvil, a drama by Bryan MacMahon, the following year.
Using it without jingles, Ó Riada described the drum as a bodhrán, going on to popularise it hugely through his weekly Fleadh Cheoil an Radió show. So it was introduced island-wide, with interest sparked in the tambourine by Keane, then promoted nationally as the bodhrán by Ó Riada.
It quickly became a popular instrument, and although all older players knew it as a tambourine, they gradually got rid of the hallmark jingles, and a new coterie of skilled artisans emerged to create today's sophisticated bodhrán.
Keane and MacMahon strongly promoted the instrument as part of
wren-boy
competitions in west Limerick and north Kerry in the 1960s, and over that decade it became part of the fabric of national traditional-music revival, often criticised but nevertheless evolving a skills base that was serviced by new specialist makers such as Charlie Byrne of Tipperary.
I was inspired to write Beating Time: The Story of the Irish Bodhrán by seeing an engraving of the original bodhrán – recorded as a 'borrane' – in a travelogue from the early 1840s titled Ireland: Its Scenery, Character &c, by Samuel and Anna Hall.
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Aspects of the bodhrán story have of course been explored before – the practical side by Ó Bharáin and
Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin
, the spiritual dimension by Janet McCrickard and Layne Redmond. But none covers the vitally important 19th century.
Of course, it may be that a subliminal Irish drum tradition just went unreported, but the facts suggest that the bodhrán as it has developed realistically dates only as far back as Keane's play, after which it was promoted by Ó Riada, and the country got to hear it for the first time courtesy of Radio Éireann.
Beating Time: The Story of the Irish Bodhrán is published by Cork University Press