ecairol/oneills-irish-tunes-1850

O'Neill's Irish Tunes (1850)

1,849 traditional Irish tunes in ABC notation, transcribed from Captain Francis O'Neill's O'Neill's Music of Ireland: 1850 Melodies (Chicago, 1903). Each row is one tune: title, type, key, meter, and the full ABC source.

Dataset structure

Field	Type	Description
tune_id	string	Stable id, e.g. oneills1850-1 (tune number in the original book)
name	string	Tune title
tune_type	string	Rhythm/category: reel, jig, slip jig, hornpipe, air, march, waltz, slide, long dance, carolan
key	string	Musical key, ABC K: field (e.g. Gm)
meter	string	Time signature, ABC M: field (e.g. 2/4)
abc_notation	string	Full ABC tune, headers and melody
source	string	Provenance of the ABC transcription
license	string	License of the ABC transcription
region	string	Ireland
type_source	string	abc_header (from the transcription's R: field) or oneill_index (backfilled, see below)

Example:

{
  "tune_id": "oneills1850-1",
  "name": "The Enchanted Valley",
  "tune_type": "air",
  "key": "Gm",
  "meter": "2/4",
  "abc_notation": "X: 1\nT: The Enchanted Valley\nM: 2/4\n...",
  "source": "O'Neill's Music of Ireland (1850), https://github.com/folkies/oneill",
  "license": "Public domain (published 1903; ABC transcription by volunteer contributors, 1996-1999)",
  "region": "Ireland",
  "type_source": "oneill_index"
}

Source data

• ABC transcription: a volunteer effort (1996-1999) coordinated by John Chambers, transcribing every tune in O'Neill's 1903 book into ABC notation. Source repository: folkies/oneill. Original index: https://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/music/book/ONeills/.
• Tune type: only 778 of 1,849 tunes carry a R: (rhythm) field in the ABC source. The remaining 1,071 were backfilled from David Moulton's tune-title index, donated to irishtune.info for public use (2003).

The two type sources disagree on about 2% of the tunes that have both: O'Neill grouped tunes by book section (e.g. an "Airs" section built from song lyrics), while the ABC transcribers' R: field reflects the actual notated meter. Where both exist, this dataset keeps the ABC header value and marks it type_source: abc_header. Filter on type_source if you need only one taxonomy.

Licensing

• The original tunes and O'Neill's 1903 collection are in the public domain.
• The ABC transcription (folkies/oneill) carries no separate license claim; it is a faithful mechanical rendering of public-domain sheet music.
• The tune-type index (Moulton / irishtune.info) is donated for public use. Its page asks that you cite the source when sharing information derived from it — done here via the oneill_index credit above.

No portion of this dataset was sourced from TheSession.org; its data license prohibits LLM-related processing and was intentionally avoided.

Known limitations

• Melody only, no chord annotations or harmonization.
• Historic transcription: possible OCR/proofreading errors remain from the original 1996-1999 effort. One tune (1646) was dropped for malformed headers.
• tune_type values are book-section groupings for ~58% of rows, not independently verified per-tune rhythm classification.

Citation

Francis O'Neill and James O'Neill. O'Neill's Music of Ireland: 1850
Melodies. Chicago, 1903.

ABC transcription: John Chambers et al., 1996-1999.
https://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/music/book/ONeills/

Tune-type index: David Moulton, irishtune.info, 2003.
https://www.irishtune.info/public/oneill.htm