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HAHN: American folk music richer because of Irish |
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Monday, 21 December 2009 |
There are times when I think that in a previous incarnation I must have been an Irish colleen. I wish it were so, but while I don’t know all that much about my ancestry, reason tells me there is not one drop of Irish blood in my veins — no red hair or brogue anywhere. What a shame. I would have made a good Irish lassie.
I love music of all kinds from country to opera, but my all-time favorite is Irish music. It speaks to me as no other music does. My favorite is “Danny Boy.” Not only is it one of the most familiar, but it is also one of the most enigmatic songs in the genre.
I learned the song before I started to school. I guess I heard Bing Crosby singing it on the radio. Or maybe it was Dennis Day on The Jack Benny Show. When my own children were infants, I sang it as a lullaby to them and later to my grandchildren.
When my husband’s barbershop singing group performed the song in one of their programs some years back, we got interested in the meaning of the song. Who was Danny? Was the song about somebody’s lover, or maybe a child? Who is the narrator? The lover? A mother’s or father’s son? Where was Danny going? Why was he leaving? Would he return to see the narrator again?
The history of the song has become long and twisted as it has moved through time and much of the information we have doesn’t help us with definitive answers to those questions, but it does provide a deeper appreciation of the simple melody. Here is some of what we know:
About the tune: There is some evidence that the tune was written by Rory Dall O’Cahan, a blind Irish harpist who lived sometime between 1560 and 1660. O’Cahan was well-known for the music he composed for the harp.
About 1600 the O’Cahan’s land was confiscated by the British. This angered Blind Rory, as he was called. Legend says that Rory went to the village pub to wash away his anger with some good old Irish whiskey. He imbibed too much and as he was staggering home along the riverside, he fell down in the grass. There he heard the little people (fairies) playing a haunting melody on a harp.
After he sobered up, he wrote down the melody he had heard the fairies playing. It is this melody that we know today as “Danny Boy.”
The tune itself is actually called “Londonderry Air,” referring to the northern Irish county by that name. (It is said that Londoners resented that name because it sounded like “London’s Derriere,” so instead, they referred to it as “the air from the County Derry.”)
A collector of Irish folk tunes, Jane Ross was one of the first to bring the tune to the attention of the public. She is thought by some to have heard another blind harpist named Blind Jimmy McCurry playing the tune. Others think Miss Ross may have composed the music herself. In any case, whoever composed the tune, it was first a melody for the harp and then for the pipes.
So when were the words added? Again, no one knows for sure. There are more than a 100 sets of lyrics for the tune. “Danny Boy” is only one, albeit the most famous one. Some of these lyrics are most certainly older than “Danny Boy.”
It is possible that a lady named Margaret Weatherly heard Irish prospectors digging gold in Colorado singing some of the many lyrics for the music. She persuaded them to write down the music. She sent it to her brother Fred, a lawyer in England.
Fred was also a composer. (One of his many compositions is “The Holy City.”) He had earlier penned the words to Danny Boy for another melody, but the result was a total flop. When he applied them to the tune his sister had sent him, they worked beautifully.
A friend of Fred’s named Alfred Percival Graves, also wrote some words to the same tune. This miffed Fred and the two became rivals over whose song was the best. (I don’t know whose song won.)
There has been much discussion concerning the identity of the narrator of the song. For many years I thought it was being sung by a young Irish girl whose lover was going to war. And perhaps that is true. When the country was conscripting soldiers, they would send pipers out into the country side; all the men within the sound of the pipes were supposed to put down their tools and follow the pipers to the ships and then into battle.
More likely, however, the song is narrated by a parent, probably a father, whose son is going away to America seeking employment. During the middle of the 19th century, the great potato famine wiped out crops all across Ireland. The young Irish men migrated to America in droves looking for work.
And our American folk music is richer for this experience.
Alma Joyce Hahn taught in the Benton schools for more than 30 years. Her column appears each Monday.
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