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Danny Boy (Derry Air) (Londonderry Air)
Traditional? Irish, Air “Derry Air” with lyrics by Fred F. Weatherly.
ARTIST: Bill Monroe CATEGORY: Fiddle and Instrumental Tunes DATE: Tune published in 1855; Lyrics 1913;
RECORDING INFO: Gael-Linn CEF 104, Matt Cranitch - "Eistigh Seal" Green Linnet SIF-107, Eugene O'Donnell - "The Foggy Dew" (1988). RCA 5798-2-RC, "James Galway and the Chieftains in Ireland" (1986). Carlton Showband. First Choice, TeeVee Ta-1028, LP (1975), cut#B.04; Greene, Richard. Duets, Rounder 0075, LP (1977), cut# 3; Lynch, Bob. From the Land of Carolan, CBS 84268, LP (1980), cut#B.06; McCann, Aine. Abbey Tavern. Traditional Ballads, Abbey Tavern ATP 102, LP (1970), cut#B.04; O'Donnell, Eugene; and James MacCafferty. Foggy Dew, Green Linnet SIF 1084C, Cas (1988), cut# 10; Sons of Erin. Progressive, Traditional, Revivalist Material, Dominion LPS 93065, LP (1970), cut# 11; Wise, Chubby (Robert R.). Chubby Wise and his Fiddle, Stoneway STY 104, LP (197?), cut#B.03; Wright, Oscar And Eugene. Oscar & Eugene Wright, Rounder 0089, LP (1978), cut# 6
OTHER NAMES: “Danny Boy” is one of over 100 songs composed to the tune- “Derry Air,” or "Londonderry Air." Other songs include "Maidin i mBeara," “O, Jeanie Dear” and "The Young Man's Dream."
SOURCES: Roche Collection, 1982; Vol. 1, pg. 16, No. 30; Silber-FSWB, p. 323, "Danny Boy" Fuld-WFM, p. 337, "Londonderry Air;" SHenry H3, p. 286, "The Londonderry Air;" Kuntz, Fiddler's Companion, http://www.ceolas.org/tunes/fc;
NOTES: (4/4 time). G Major. Standard. One part. One of the most famous Irish airs, known popularly as the tune for the song "Danny Boy" by Fred F. Weatherly (1848-1929), an Englishman, a lawyer, and author of the words of about 1500 songs including "The Holy City", also known as "Jerusalem." The melody has also been the vehicle for A.P. Graves' "Loves Wishes" (in Irish Songs and Ballads, 1882), Katherine Tynan's "Would God I were the tender apple blossom," and Terry Sullivan's "Acushla Mine." The melody was published for the first time in George Petrie's collection (1855), obtained from Miss Jane Ross of Limavady, County Derry, a collector who heard the air from a street musician. It is sometimes ascribed, apparently without substantiation, to the ancient chief harper of the chieftain Hugh O'Neill, the famous Rory dall O' Cahan. Pervious to the "Danny Boy" publication the song was known in Ireland, in English, as "My Love Nell." The late 19th century collector Dr. Joyce claimed the original song was Irish, and that the first line translates as:
Would God I were a little apple
Or one of the small daisies
Or a rose in the garden
Where thou art accustomed to walk alone;
In hope that thou wouldst pluck from me
Some wee little branch
Which thous wouldst hold in my right hand
Or in the breast of they robe
(Loesberg, Folksongs and Ballads Popular in Ireland, vol. 2, 1980).
The name Derry is Gaelic in origin and means an oak-wood. The "Danny Boy" lyrics proved particularly popular in the United States, where they were recorded by variety of singers from pop(Bing Crosby) to bluegrass (Bill Monroe). In England the generic name for this tune and its variations is "Dives and Lazarus." As far as is known, Weatherly never set foot in Ireland.(Kuntz, Fiddler's Companion, http://www.ceolas.org/tunes/fc).
HISTORY: Another name for the “Derry Air” tune is the Londonderry Air. This title has a certain political bias, since the name "Londonderry" is used to emphasize the ties between Northern Ireland and Britain (referring to the colonization of the area by English settlers in the early 17th century). Irish nationalists usually prefer to use "Derry", the original name of the Northern city and county. It appears that the title Air from County Derry was also used. The first appearance of the tune in print occurred in 1855, in Ancient Music of Ireland, published by the early collector George Petrie (1789-1866). The untitled melody, was supplied to Petrie by Miss Jane Ross of Limavady, County Londonderry, who claimed to have taken it down from the playing of an itinerant piper. This is the origin of the Londonderry Air name. Petrie states:
'For the following beautiful air I have to express my very grateful acknowledgement to Miss J. Ross, of N.-T.-Limavady, in the county of Londonderry—a lady who has made a large collection of the popular unpublished melodies of that county, which she has very kindly placed at my disposal, and which has added very considerably to the stock of tunes which I had previously acquired from that still very Irish county. I say still very Irish; for though it has been planted for more than two centuries by English and Scottish settlers, the old Irish race still forms the great majority of its peasant inhabitants; and there are few, if any, counties in which, with less foreign admixture, the ancient melodies of the country have been so extensively preserved. The name of the tune unfortunately was not ascertained by Miss Ross, who sent it to me with the simple remark that it was "very old," in the correctness of which statement I have no hesitation in expressing my perfect concurrence.'(Kuntz, Fiddler's Companion, http://www.ceolas.org/tunes/fc).
A great collector of the 1930s, Sam Henry, speculated that Miss Ross had collected the tune from a fiddler, Blind Jimmy McCurry, who was known to have been active in Limavady at the time. Jimmy's descendants have embraced this theory it enthusiastically, as seen on the PBS show Danny Boy: In Sunshine or in Shadow. (Kuntz, Fiddler's Companion, http://www.ceolas.org/tunes/fc).
As the tune grew in popularity, and at the same time traditional Irish music came to be more thoroughly researched, considerable doubt emerged about Miss Ross's story since no additional versions of the melody were encountered by other collectors. The structure of the tune is unlike any other traditional Irish tune, and it is not suited for words in any of the known Irish song meters. Miss Ross was unable to provide any supporting evidence (the name of the piper, for example), and the suspicion grew that she had composed it herself and was attempting to pass it off as a genuine Irish tune. (Kuntz, Fiddler's Companion, http://www.ceolas.org/tunes/fc).
The history of the tin whistle found on the website of the Clarke Company claims that the founder of the company, Robert Clarke, frequently played the tune while walking from Suffolk to Manchester in 1843. If true, this would be before Petrie's publication date of 1855. Perhaps somebody at the company can clarify this. (Kuntz, Fiddler's Companion, http://www.ceolas.org/tunes/fc).
The tune appears (twice) in the collection of Francis O'Neill, made among the Irish-American community in Chicago around the end of the 19th century: It's still worth mentioning that the tune had a life of its own in the tradition between Jane Ross's time and Frederic Weatherly's, as shown by Drimoleague Fair and Londonderry Love Song in O'Neill's. Both are settings of the same tune Miss Ross notated, complete with duple meter, half-cadence in the first part, high note in the second, etc., etc. If they got into circulation from musicians who read Londonderry Air in Petrie, they have undergone some alterations—more strikingly in Londonderry Love Song, where the last note of each phrase is changed to put the whole tune into minor mode. Drimoleague is in the south of County Cork, very close to where O'Neill grew up, and about as far away from Derry as one could get and still be on dry land. Since no other use of the Drimoleague Fair name is known, and O'Neill is known to have use printed sources including Petrie, it's highly likely that Petrie is the source and O'Neill gave it the name. (He often gave his own titles to untitled tunes.) The next piece of the puzzle appeared in 1934, when Anne Geddes Gilchrist published an article entitled "A New Light Upon the Londonderry Air" in the Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. She theorized that the tune was taken from a performance in which the performer was using extreme rubato, and this "so disguised the natural rhythm that the tune was wrongly noted down in common instead of triple time". If the prolonged notes occurring on the first beat of the bar are shortened "the tune falls at once and easily into a rhythm which instead of being unique in Irish folk-music is paralleled in scores of other Irish folk-tunes". Finally, in 1979, an article "New Dates for Old Songs 1766-1803", by Hugh Shields, appeared in Long Room (the journal of the library of Trinity College Dublin). Shields identified a tune in Edward Bunting's 1796 publication A General Collection of the Ancient Irish Music, entitled Aislean an Oigfear (in modern Irish Aisling an Ógfhir, "the young man's dream"), as being very close to the Gilchrist version of the Londonderry Air, except in the fourth phrase which "makes the Londonderry Air almost unsingable in traditional style while endearing it to virtuosos eager for effects of vocal expression". (This phrase does not, however, exceed the range of the pipes, so there is nothing to show it was not present in the original performance.)(Kuntz, Fiddler's Companion, http://www.ceolas.org/tunes/fc).
"Edward Bunting (1773-1843) was the pioneer collector of harp music whose career began in 1792 when he was hired to write down the tunes performed at the Belfast Harp Festival. It is to him (and to people working for him, particularly one Patrick Lynch) that we owe the preservation of much of the traditional Irish harp repertoire. Bunting noted Aislean an Oigfear from Denis Hempson (1697-1807), the very last traditional performer on the Irish wire-strung harp (who luckily lived to the age of 110, allowing Bunting to collect many of his tunes before his death), in Magilligan, County Derry—very near to Miss Jane Ross's home in Limavady." (Kuntz, Fiddler's Companion, http://www.ceolas.org/tunes/fc).
"In his 1840 work, A Collection of the Ancient Music of Ireland, Bunting discusses the characteristics of typical Irish melodies, stating "The Young Man's Dream, and the air of The Green Woods of Truigha, might be suggested as answering more nearly to the Editor's conception of such a standard than any others with which he is acquainted". So after more than a century, Miss Ross has been vindicated, although her skill as a transcriber is perhaps called into question." (Kuntz, Fiddler's Companion, http://www.ceolas.org/tunes/fc).
LRYICS:
Oh Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling
From glen to glen, and down the mountain side
The summer's gone, and all the flowers are dying
'Tis you, 'tis you must go and I must bide.
But come you back when summer's in the meadow
Or when the valley's hushed and white with snow
‘Tis I'll be there in sunshine or in shadow
Oh Danny boy, oh Danny boy, I love you so.
And if you come, when all the flowers are dying
And I am dead, as dead I well may be
You'll come and find the place where I am lying
And kneel and say an "Ave" there for me.
And I shall hear, tho' soft you tread above me
And all my dreams will warm and sweeter be
If you'll not fail to tell me that you love me
I simply sleep in peace until you come to me.
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