Right. I've been putting this one off for about three years, and I'll tell you why in a minute. But a fella emailed the shrine last week — Tom, from somewhere outside Boston, lovely man — asking if I'd "settle a family argument" about where Danny Boy comes from. His brother-in-law insists it's "the most Irish song there is." Tom thinks it was written by an Englishman who never set foot in Ireland. And the maddening thing, Tom, the thing that's going to make your Christmas dinner worse not better, is that you're BOTH right. Sort of. Lads, this song is a mess. A beautiful mess.
Let me start with the tune, because the tune is the honest part.
The melody is called the Londonderry Air, and it's properly old — properly, genuinely Irish, no asterisk. The first time anyone wrote it down was 1855, by a woman named Jane Ross from Limavady in County Derry. The story she gave, and I've no reason to doubt the heart of it even if the edges are fuzzy, is that she heard it played by a travelling fiddler passing through the town. She jotted it onto paper and sent it on to a collector named George Petrie, and Petrie published it in a book of Irish airs, and that's that. That's the whole provenance. One fiddler, one street, one woman with a sharp ear, and no name for the tune at all. So it got filed under "Air from County Londonderry," which is a fierce boring name for one of the most heart-stopping melodies ever set down, but there you go.
Now. Here's where it gets gas. There's a whole school of thought — and I half believe it — that the tune Jane Ross wrote down isn't QUITE right. Some musicologists reckon she mis-noted the rhythm, that the air as it's played today owes part of its shape to her honest mistake on a piece of paper one afternoon in the 1850s. So the most famous Irish melody in the world might be, in part, a transcription error. I love that. That's so human it hurts.
So that's the tune. Old, Irish, beautiful, slightly accidental. Where's the Englishman?
The Englishman is Frederic Weatherly. And here's the bit that makes the trad purists go quiet and stare into their pints. Weatherly was a barrister — a LAWYER — from Somerset. England. He wrote songs as a sideline, and he was prolific, churned out hundreds of the things. In 1910 he wrote a set of words called "Danny Boy" set to a completely different, forgettable tune. It went nowhere. Stone dead.
Then his sister-in-law, Margaret, who'd emigrated to America, sent him a copy of the Londonderry Air. Weatherly took one look at his orphaned "Danny Boy" lyric, realised the words fit this Irish air like they were poured into it, tweaked a line or two, and in 1913 published the version we all know. He never came to Ireland. As far as anyone can tell, he never heard the tune played in a Derry street by a passing fiddler. He heard it on a piece of paper posted from the States. An English lawyer, an Irish air he got in the mail, and a lyric he'd written for something else entirely. That's the origin of the most "Irish" song in the world. (I'm not exaggerating. That's it.)
And this is exactly why some Irish people can't stand it.
I want to be honest with you here, because this is the bit the tourist websites skip. There are sessions where if you start up Danny Boy you will get a look. A specific look. Some of it is plain over-familiarity — the song's been done to death at funerals and on St. Patrick's Day by every American tenor with a microphone and a notion. Some of it is the words themselves: there's a school of thought that the lyric is actually written from a mother or a lover saying goodbye, possibly to a lad going off to war or emigrating, and that the famous "I shall sleep in peace until you come to me" is about lying in the GRAVE waiting. Which is gorgeous. But it's also been sentimentalised into syrup so often that the real grief in it gets lost. And some of it, if we're being dead honest, is just that an Englishman wrote the words, and for some lads that's a thorn that won't come out.
Me? I think the snobbery is a bit much. I do. A song doesn't care where its author was born. The tune is Irish to its bones, and Weatherly, whatever his passport said, heard something true in it and found words that didn't insult it. That's not nothing. That's the whole job, really.
There's a thing I keep coming back to, running this shrine. The song I love most — you can read our take on the Rattlin' Bog's own murky history — has no author either, just generations of mouths. Folk songs are a relay race where everybody drops the baton and somebody else picks up a slightly different baton and runs on. Danny Boy is the same story, just with names attached: a nameless fiddler, a sharp-eared woman, a collector, a Somerset barrister, his sister-in-law in America. Five people who never sat in a room together made one song. If you want the full lyrics and a proper bit of background I've put Danny Boy in the songbook, and while you're there have a look at The Parting Glass, which is the song I'd actually rather hear at a sad goodbye, but that's a row for another day.
So, Tom — tell your brother-in-law he's right, the song is deeply Irish. Then tell him an English lawyer wrote the words and never visited. Then leave the room. You'll thank me.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002
P.S. — Rattlin the cat sat on my keyboard for the entire fourth paragraph and added forty-one letter j's, which I have removed, but I want it on the record that she had OPINIONS about this post.