Obituaries: Hugh Edwin Shields (1929-2008)

Lays, Balhds, Come-All-Yes and Other Songs (1993), which describes almost a thousand years of song repertory and performance practice in an Ireland whose population moved, during that time, as a result of conquest and language shift, from being Irish, through being resentful British subjects, to becoming citizens of a post-colonial state. Hugh's combination of literary skill and interest in orality led to a series of articles exploring the ways in which certain literary figures - W B. Yeats, Padraic Colum, Oliver Goldsmith, William Allingham, and James Joyce - had employed folk songs in their work; and to an interest in how ballad sheets and cheap songbooks functioned in a limitedly literate society, and as an aid to oral transmission.