Old Tunes, New Licks

Because my partner, Neil O'Neill is a Celtic folksinger, my ad-hoc job is to sleuth out the provenance of traditional Scottish and Irish folksongs, collect variants, and to write the liner notes. What I've learned is that new song lyrics are often set to old tunes or melodies, and updated every generation, and that the song is a compilation of melody or tune, and lyrics (words). 

The ballad our family traditionally sings at every funeral, Danny Boy, is a melody from an old Irish air "discovered" by a sister-in-law in the goldmines of Colorado [what was she doing in the mines?], Londonderry Air (AKA "Air from County Derry" or "Derry Air"), with words written by a London barrister and lyricist in 1910—a prime example of melodic borrowing.

Frederic Weatherly gave the ancient Irish tune, updated with his new lyrics to Elsie Griffin, who made it one of the most popular songs in the new century (first record was made in 1915). So we tend to think of him as the author and composer of Danny Boy. But he didn't compose the melody of the song, just the lyrics. 

The story goes that the original air was collected from a blind fiddler by Jane Ross of Limavady in Northern Ireland, and published by musicologist and antiquarian, George Petrie in 1855, The Ancient Music of Ireland, by the Society for the Preservation and Publication of the Melodies of Ireland.

World famous song Danny Boy is taken from a melody composed by O’Cahan bard Rory Dall O’Cahan. The original version concerns the passing of the Chief Cooey-na-Gall whose death brought an end to a long line of O’Cahan chiefs in Northern Ireland. —Wiki

Folksingers have been swapping tunes and lyrics for eons—sometimes, in their travels, the bits get separated from each other—a muffled line becomes a mondegreen, oftentimes new songs arise from the ashes of the old.

Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl O' Moray
And Lady Mondegreen.

So much for laying the poor old dead Earl of Moray down on the green. And what about Lady Mondegreen? She had some melons. A Cuban favorite: José can you see by the dawn's early light? Imagine a rainbow Hendrix: 'S'cuse me while I kiss this guy. Who knew that Kumbaya is really Come by Here—oh Lord.

Our family simply slaughters the lyrics to Háva Nagíla at weddings. Gawd only know what we're boisterously singing while mangling the Grapevine. (Mondegreens in Hebrew are called watermelons.) Malachy McCourt thought The Hail Mary rosary phrase "amongst women" was "a monk swimming", which became the title of his book. Neil, who was an altar boy in Scotland, thought the Latin mea culpea was "Mexican cowboy." OK, so maybe he was stretching it a bit.

Many Irish songs and melodies that traveled to the New World morphed into what we think of as American songs—sometimes with watermelon mondegreens intact.

An Irish song of exile that I like to trot out—my main party piece—Siúil a Rún, morphed into lyrical variants, Johnny Has Gone for a Soldier, and Buttermilk Hill when it was popularized on the shores of Americay during the American Revolution—which anchors the American versions of the song to the 18th c.

But the Irish Siúil a Rún (made famous by Clannad and Celtic Woman) is probably older than that—it may refer to The Battle of Kinsale (England's conquest of Gaelic Ireland—a siege lost by one of Neil O'Neill's ancestors, Aodh Mór Ó Néill, (Hugh) Earl of Tyrone), giving it a provenance date sometime after 1600.

Aodh Mór Uî Néill—Hugh The Great O'Neill (c. 1550 - 1616)

Controversy surrounds the song's age and origin as Siúil a Rún is a bilingual song. Some say that because the song is bilingual, that the Gaelic chorus was forged in later. But many translated Gaelic songs kept their original chorus lyrics intact—in most cases, they became nonsense phrases. That's how we get Irish scat-singing licks. All those diddilum-derry-downs, and rinkle-um-doo-das (or caleno custure mes) are lost language fragments. (derry/doire is oak tree; rince is to dance). The same concept holds true for old melodies.

Cailín Óg a Stór is a traditional Irish melody (publ. 1582) may be the source of Pistol's cryptic line in Henry V, "Calen O custure". It is part of a broadside collection from 1584. The poem "The Croppy Boy" was set to this music, and it was later used for the tune of "Lord Franklin", which was the basis for the Bob Dylan song "Bob Dylan's Dream".

Add to that blatant borrower's list, Dylan's hit: With God on Our Side. Like, dude, so you stole the melody, changed some words, it's still our friggin' song. Ya didn't think we'd notice? 

The melody of Dylan's With God on Our Side is identical to The Patriot Game, with Irish lyrics written by Dominic Behan. The tune was borrowed from a traditional Irish folk song, The Merry Month of May. "Behan called Dylan a plagiarist and a thief, but Dylan never responded to Behan's claims." —Wiki

That would be borstal bhoy, Brendan Behan's babby brother, folks. The first two stanzas of Behan and Dylan's songs are nearly identical. Of course, Behan, himself, was lifting the tune from an earlier tradition.

Sule Agra, a 17th century Irish variant of Siúil a Rún, with its phoenetic Irish chorus, and the related tune, Sweet William (ca. 1688), probably both derive from Siúil a Rún—not the other way around—because the Gaelic chorus is intact in Siúil a Rún, and not gibberish.

(Reverse engineering is another possibility—the Gaelic could've been cobbled onto the English translation during the Romantic movement during the 18th c. But I think not, because the gibbered Gaelic version has such an ancient date.) However, the spinning wheel reference in all the variants suggests the 19th c. It too could've been added. 

Then we have the American Revolution variants i mentioned earlier: Johnny Has Gone for a Soldier, and Buttermilk Hill. Though lyrics tend to be updated to fit the metadata of every generation, the song, or should I say, the tune, remains the same.

The melody of Canadian folksinger Gordon Lightfoot's The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, recorded in December 1975, seems to suggest a similar pattern. What came first, Lightfoot's melody of The Wreck of the Edmund FG, or the Irish melody associated with Bobby Sands' Back Home in Derry?

I think what happened is that the melody itself (not Gordon's fabulous song lyrics) was based on an older Irish dirge—after all the ship had an Irish name, Fitzgerald, so an Irish melody was fitting. Also, many Canadian folksongs are from the Irish and Scottish folksong repetoire.

Don't get me wrong—I adore the music of Gordon Lightfoot and the The Wreck of the Edmund FG was a haunting song. I committed his early songs to memory, though my voice wasn't as good (or as deep) as his. Early Morning Rain and Me and Bobby McGee, were among the first songs I learned on the guitar. I also committed hundreds of Irish rebel songs to memory as well. So, I was well-versed in folk music lyrics. (Which led me circuitously to poetry.)

Lightfoot was no stranger to Irish folk music, as a child performer, his first public tune was Too Ra Loo Ra Loo Ral (An Irish Lullaby). He was influenced by the American songwriter, Stephen Foster. When Lightfoot moved to Hollywood for two years in 1958, he was also influenced by the folk music of Pete Seeger, and The Weavers who had a vast Irish and Scottish music repertoire. 

In late November 1975 Lightfoot had read a Newsweek magazine article about the loss of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, which sank during a severe storm on November 10 with the loss of all 29 crew members. His song, "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald", released in 1976, reached number two on the United States Billboard charts... [his lyrics came from the article]—Wiki

No man is an island and no song comes full-blown out of a musician's head from the void. What came before influences new art.

(NB I found this in an obituary upon the death of Lightfoot, May 1, 2023, “ I already had a melody in my mind and it was from an old Irish dirge that I heard when I was about three and a half years old.”) mean to steal the melody, it was already in existence. Whether or not he ever heard the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, we will never know. But Bobby Sands would have known the melody. I rest my case.

Gordon Lightfoot - The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

During the 1960s and 70s folksingers were raiding traditional music wholesale—Irish music was the hardest hit—most North American singer-songwriters did not credit their sources. At least two of my folk heroes Judy Collins and Joan Baez noted their folksongs as "traditional," but as Behan noted, Bob Dylan was among the most arrogant of songthieves.

Raymond McCartney Mural, Bogside, Derry, Northern Ireland. "This Mural Is Dedicated To The H Block & Armagh Prison Struggle and In Memory of Bobby Sands, Kevin Lynch, Frank Hughes, Kieron Doherty, Raymond McCreesh, Tom McElwee, Patsy O'Hare, Michael Devine, Martin Hurson, Joe McDonnell." —Wiki

When Neil was casting about for new songs to learn, I turned him onto Christy Moore's ballad, Back Home in Derry. At one point, I found a reference to the original poem, The Voyage by Marcella, and though I can't for the life of me—find it now, I remember that it was circa 1976.

Bobby Sands was first imprisoned for five years at Long Kesh; Gordon Lightfoot's song was released in 1976; Sands was then re-imprisoned in 1976. There was a six-month hiatus where Bobby was a free man, so technically he could've heard Lightfoot's song (though access to American music wasn't as readily available in Ireland in those days). But Sands was kept busy with IRA Volunteer activity, as Belfast was in the midst of a civil war.

During his time in prison Bobby was a voracious reader not just of Irish, but of world history, and he emerged from the prison in March 1976 as a radical republican dedicated to an Irish Socialist Republic. In Twinbrook he helped form a tenants association and a youth club whilst still working as a full-time IRA Volunteer.

However, six months later he was arrested on active-service following a bomb attack on a furniture warehouse. There was a gun battle between the IRA unit and the RUC and two of Bobby’s comrades were wounded. One shortarm was caught in the car and the four occupants were all charged with ‘illegal’ possession. —Extracts from 'Prison Poems' by Bobby Sands (1991)

From Christy Moore's homepage:

I was playing in Derry and staying with The Barrett Family. After my gig we were gathered in Chamberlain St having a banter and drinking tea when a bit of singing broke out. A lad, just home from The Blocks, sang these verses and subsequently wrote out the words for me. At the time the name Bobby Sands was not known to the world as it is today. The following night I played in Bellaghy where the same process took place when I stayed with Scullion. Later on he "sang" McIlhatton for me and told me it had been written by Bobby Sands with whom he had shared a cell while "On the Blanket". The name was becoming known to me. He used the air of The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald from Gordon Lightfoot, an air which I suspect has earlier origins. My version of Bobby's song is shorter than the original. —Christy Moore

Christy says it himself: "an air which I suspect has earlier origins."

From Gordon Lightfoot's website board thread by podunklander (no link):

Gordon had incorporated the use of or otherwise was influenced by a traditional, Irish "dirge" (as he has referred to it as such) when composing the music for "The Wreck...".

Someone else noted that the ballad was a traditional formula used in songwriting. Another Lightfoot fan, Colm Scullion posted in May of 2009:

I've been reading with interest the comments on Back home in Derry by Bobby Sands  and I thought I might help . I shared a cell in HBlock 3 with Bobby during the no wash protest. I remember Bobby writing the song for all the Derrymen in the wing. He was a fan of Gordon Lightfoot and borrowed the air and sang it out the door as we were not allowed out of the cells.Christy Moore got the song from a Derry man called Ferguson, a couple of nights later I first met Christy and gave him McIlhatton. Thats how it happened, Colm Scullion, BallyScullion.

Is this the same Scullion mentioned in Christy's liner notes (above)? The cellmate who later "gave" Christy Moore Bobby Sands' songs? Pretty amazing story, if true. A fitting tribute on the 28th anniversary of Bobby Sands' death. Colm Scullion concludes with:

That about covers it. I had 3 songs and a poem, the poem he wrote after i'd told him a story of a local united irishman. I offered Christy TWOTEF but he had received it the previous night so I gave him Mcelhatton and sad song for susan. 28 years dead tuesday past,

Bobby was in prison and in solitary confinement for his most of his entire adult life. Not a lot of American radio stations were broadcasting top chart songs in Long Kesh prison. Unless it was during that brief six-month of freedom between consecutive prison sentences that he became familiar with Lightfoot's song. Why would Colm "give" Christy The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald? when the song in question was Back Home in Derry? I suppose another prisoner could've brought the Lightfoot song into prison and taught his cellmates and Back Home in Derry could have been retrofitted into the melody.

But if Lightfoot had composed the entire melody (air) from scratch, surely the music industry, would've been all up in arms and brought massive litigation against Christy Moore for stealing the melody. It never happened.

THE TUNE BORROWERS

Robert Tannahill (1774 – 1810) was a Scottish poet from Paisley (down the road from where Neil was born). Known as the 'Weaver Poet', his music and poetry was contemporary with that of Robert Burns (1759 – 1796). —Wiki 

Musicians have been borrowing and adapting melodies from the folk tradition for eons. Much of Robert Burns work is "adapted." 

Burns also collected folk songs from across Scotland, revising or adapting them: "Auld Lang Syne"; "Scots Wha Hae"; "A Red, Red Rose"; "A Man's A Man for A' That"; "To a Louse"; "To a Mouse"; "The Battle of Sherramuir"; "Tam o' Shanter"; and "Ae Fond Kiss".—Wiki

Few are familiar with the copyright infringement story of the Ulster the McPeakes who sued Rod Stewart for "stealing" Wild Mountain Thyme, which is a variant of a traditional Scottish song that they claimed to have copyrighted some of the arrangements. Of course, everybody who was a folksinger had already recorded it. 

While there is a copyright asserted by English Folk Dance and Song Society Publications, who published it for Francis McPeake in 1957, there is a continuing controversy about the actual ownership of the song. However, when the McPeake family took Rod Stewart to court in the early 1990’s for their due royalties of his cover of the song, not only did they not receive royalties but the defense’s case alleged that McPeake Senior seemed to have plagiarized Robert Tannahill’s version. —Rod Stewart vrs The Mcpeakes

The McPeakes dropped their claim for breach of copyright (and therefore any claims to ownership) once Stewart’s record company’s brief cited the Robert Tannahill song, ‘The Braes o’ Balquhidder’ whose lyrics can be found here (http://www.tannahillweavers.com/lyrics/1146lyr5.htm). —Rod Stewart vrs The Mcpeakes

The plot thickens.

Francis McPeake (the elder, born in 1885, and patriarch of the gifted Belfast musical family) learned the song from his uncle as a boy, and introduced it to the modern Celtic music community on the 1952 recording "The Rights of Man", made for the BBC (archive #18290, Folktrax #176). Before the recording, Francis had an interesting chat with Sean O’Baoill in which he speaks to the song’s origins….

"To tell you the truth it was an uncle of mine… he really came from Dungannon, and he got a good many old songs like that, and I used to hear that very often, only to tell you the truth, I hadn’t the last verse of it. But it was a thing from my boyhoods days I always liked… and started to work it on the pipes and liked to sing it. I don’t know whether it’s a Scotch one or not, it may, you know be a kind of a planter type you see, something in the nature of that." —Rod Stewart vrs The Mcpeakes

Hmm, so Francis McPeake HEARD Wild Mountain Thyme (or Will You Go, Lassie, Go?) from an uncle (circa 1890—public domain) and his heirs claimed it as his own work in 1990—having added some new words and lyric arrangements. That's some Trojan horse of a copyright dispute. Oh my aching head.

McPeake's lyrics are a variant of the song "The Braes of Balquhither" by Scottish poet Robert Tannahill (1774-1810), a contemporary of Robert Burns. Tannahill's original song, first published in R. A. Smith's Scottish Minstrel (1821–24), is about the hills (braes) around Balquhidder near Lochearnhead. Like Burns, Tannahill collected and adapted traditional songs, and "The Braes of Balquhither" may have been based on the traditional song "The Braes o' Bowhether". —Wiki

Of course the two Rabbies (Burns and Tannahill) were said to have lifted tunes and lyrics from Habbie Simpson (1550–1620), the piper-weaver-poet from Kilbarchan, the next village down the road. Burns was an inveterate lifter of verse and melody. The famous Burns stanza is known as "the standard Habbie." But I digress.  

I've never found a liner note saying that the Back Home in Derry melody was used by kind permission of Gordon Lightfoot. All the folksingers who've recorded Back Home in Derry, are they paying royalties to the Bobby Sands estate, or to Gordon Lightfoot? Or both? Talk about complicated.

If Christy Moore had lifted the entire melody from The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, I'm fairly certain that Gordon Lightfoot would've taken some legal action—if this quote is any indication.

In April 1987, Lightfoot filed a lawsuit against composer Michael Masser, claiming that Masser's melody for the song "The Greatest Love of All"—recorded by George Benson (1977) and Whitney Houston (1985)—stole 24 bars from Lightfoot's 1971 hit song "If You Could Read My Mind." Lightfoot later stated that he did not want people thinking that he had stolen his melody from Masser. —Wiki

Someone also noted on Gordon Lightfoot's fanpage that Bobby Sands couldn't have had the musical chops to create a melody like Lightfoot's, but there are photos of a young Bobby Sands playing guitar. And you know the Irish when it comes to song and story. Still, I suspect Gordon's melody derives from an earlier Irish tradition.

The only way to resolve this mystery is for someone to find an antecedent copy of the melody that predates 1976. I may also be completely wrong. Maybe the melody came full-blown out of Gordon's head after all and traveled back to its imagined ancestral homeland by way of H-Block, Long Kesh Prison, in Derry.

There's a rumor of a clan gathering in Montana next July, perhaps my friend Dulcie, who's married to Gordon's 2nd cousin, Zane, can get me the lowdown. Until then, I leave you with two Irish variants of an amazing melody.

Back Home In Derry

Author: Bobby Sands (who published under the pen name Marcella—his sister. The song, which chronicles the forced deportation of Irish rebels to Australia and Tasmania, recorded by Christy in 1984, was banned as a terrorist's song. So it got little airplay. Christy wrote "despite it being banned it has entered the national repertoire and has been recorded by a thousand ballad bands and will long outlive its detractors and severest critics.")

Am Em
In 1803 we sailed out to sea
G D Am
Out from the sweet town of Derry
Am Em
For Australia bound if we didn't all drown
G D Am
And the marks of our fetters we carried
Am Em
In our rusty iron chains we sighed for our weans
Am Em
Our good women we left in sorrow
Am Em
As the mainsails unfurled, our curses we hurled
G D Am
On the English, and thoughts of tomorrow

CHORUS

C G Am G Am
Oh..... I wish I was back home in Derry
C G Am G Am
Oh..... I wish I was back home in Derry

At the mouth of the Foyle, bid farewell to the soil
As down below decks we were lying
O'Doherty screamed, woken out of a dream
By a vision of bold Robert dying
The sun burned cruel as we dished out the gruel
Dan O'Connor was down with a fever
Sixty rebels today bound for Botany Bay
How many will meet their reciever

CHORUS

I cursed them to hell as her bow fought the swell
Our ship danced like a moth in the firelight
White horses rode high as the devil passed by
Taking souls to Hades by twilight
Five weeks out to sea, we were now forty-three
Our comrades we buried each morning
In our own slime we were lost in a time
Of endless night without dawning

CHORUS

Van Diemen's land is a hell for a man
To live out his whole life in slavery
Where the climate is raw and the gun makes the law
Neither wind nor rain care for bravery
Twenty years have gone by, I've ended my bond
My comrades ghosts walk behind me
A rebel I came - I'm still the same
On the cold winters night you will find me

Back Home in Derry - Christy Moore (Live at the Festival Theatre)
Back Home in Derry - Christy Moore

NOTES:
Some Mother's Son is a 1996 film written and directed by Terry George, (In the Name of the Father), co-written by Jim Sheridan. John Lynch – Bobby Sands. The hunger strike lead to the deaths of 10 prisoners, who refused to wear prison uniforms to emphasize their identity as political (and not criminal) prisoners. With Helen Mirren and Fionnula Flanagan the mothers who faced the moral dilemma. We were conflicted while watching the film as Neil ONeill's friend, Kate Perry played a prison guard's wife.

Bobby Sands: Writings from Prison — Sands, the 27-year-old leader of IRA prisoners in Belfast's Long Kesh Prison was elected to the British Parliament while behind bars, became the first of 10 prisoners to die of self-imposed hunger, protesting the Thatcher government's treatment of IRA inmates as criminal, not political, prisoners. Fleeting hopes for peace in the mid-'90s and recent books (e.g., Before the Dawn by Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein, who contributes a foreword here) and films (particularly Some Mother's Son, which portrays the mothers' campaign to save the hunger strikers) increase the appeal of Sands' prison writings. Of this book, the longest section, "One Day in My Life," details the prisoners' treatment; the other, "Skylark Sing Your Lonely Song," includes poetry, essays, and the diary Sands kept for the first 17 days of the fast (he died on day 66). Though Sands won't replace Yeats or Shaw in the Irish canon, his reflections have moments of eloquence that will appeal to readers concerned about Northern Ireland's "troubles." —Mary Carroll

Songs & Lyrics

Extracts from 'Prison Poems' by Bobby Sands (1991)

Bobby Sands Tribute page

The Danny Boy Trivia Collection—a lot of it's spurious information (it is a collection), but worth a look. See Fred Weatherley's own description of how he came to write Danny Boy. Though it's possible that Weatherly wrote at least 3000 songs in his lifetime (that's the equivalent of a song a week), one suspects that not all the tunes were his original melodies or compositions. Or maybe the litigation business was slow.)

I have a longer piece on Danny Boy in this blog too (still under construction.