[1][2] A native of Surrey, he was educated at Bedford Grammar School and Lincoln College, Oxford.
[2][4]His Ballyvourney collection featured as numbers 23–25 of the Journal of the Folk Song Society, 1920–21.
[3] This collection consists of almost a hundred songs, with original texts, prose translations and annotations, constituting incomparably the finest collection published in our time of Irish songs noted from oral tradition.
[3] His other works of scholarship are varied, and includes his edition of Annals of Connacht (1944), his magnum opus.
A lecture was given by Iarla Ó Lionáird on his Muskery Collection in Cork University on 30 January 2014.