Conor first heard this reel from a recording of the Belfast piper and broadcaster, Robbie Hannon. This recording was taken from the 1984 RTÉ programme, The Long Note. According to the Dublin piper, Mick O’Brien, Johnny Doran transcribed a version of this tune in a manuscript known as Free Spirits, chronicling the lives of the famous Irish travelling families and their influence on Irish traditional music over many decades. My Love is in America has been interpreted by many of the great virtuoso musicians including Tommy Potts. It was attributed to Delaney by O’Neill. It is unclear whether O’Neill was alluding to the Tullamore piper, Bernard ‘Barney’ Delaney, or Ballinasloe piper, Denis Delaney but the collector’s interaction with the former in Chicago would suggest that the Tullamore piper was the one.

Colonel Fraser is one of the ‘big’ tunes in the Irish traditional repertoire and a particular favourite of pipers. Like so many of that group of tunes regarded as offering more scope to the player, this reel was sourced by O’ Neill from the much cited fiddler, John Mc Fadden. Mc Fadden was a native of Carrowmorenear Westport in Co. Mayo, where his father and brother were also fiddlers. The chief encountered Mc Fadden in person for the first time in 1897 at a Chicago wedding and from there a close association between the two developed. Mc Fadden was also a well-known duet partner of Sergeant James Early, another of the collector’s primary sources for tunes. It is perhaps not surprising, given the number of ‘big tunes’ that are accredited by O’Neill to Mc Fadden, that the collector wrote of Mc Fadden as follows:’ The facility with which Mc Fadden learns new tunes is only equalled by his versatility in improvising variations as he plays them. So chronic has the latter practice grown that it is a matter of no little difficulty to reduce his playing to musical notation’. O’ Neill went on to state that ‘possessing the gift of composition as well as execution, Mc Fadden is the author of many fine dance tunes, composed without the aid of notes or memoranda, depending altogether on his memory for their retention. ’ It is therefore possible that many of the ‘Mc Fadden sourced’ tunes in O’ Neill’s works were compositions of the Mayo man.