Somebody asked me last week what Star of the County Down is actually ABOUT, and I started typing an answer in the forum and it got so long I had to stop and make it a blog post instead. So here we are. Sorry, Niamh from Dundalk, this is your fault.
Right. The meaning. It's the simplest meaning in the whole catalogue, and that's exactly why it's so good. A young fella is walking along a road — near Banbridge town, in the County Down, on a fine July day — and he sees a girl. That's it. That's the event. He sees her and he's GONE. Down he goes. He doesn't know her name properly at first, doesn't say two words to her, but he's already planning the wedding in his head and worrying that some other lad will get there before him. The whole song is a man falling in love at the side of a road and being completely, helplessly delighted about it.
Her name's Rosie. Rosie McCann, from the banks of the Bann. (The Bann's the river. Banbridge, bridge over the Bann, you see how it goes.) And he calls her the star of the County Down, and the line that everyone remembers — the line that does the work — is "from Bantry Bay up to Derry Quay and from Galway to Dublin town, no maid I've seen like the brown colleen that I met in the County Down." He's measuring her against the whole island. The entire country, corner to corner, and she wins. That's not a small compliment. That's a man losing the run of himself in the nicest possible way.
What I love about it — and I've sung this song maybe four hundred times — is how honest the longing is. He's not smooth. He admits he made a fool of himself. There's a verse where he's basically standing there like an eejit, hat in hand, and he resolves that next time there's a dance or a fair he'll be there shaved and brushed and trying to catch her eye. He hasn't WON anything yet. The song ends with him hoping. That's why it lands. It's not a song about having the girl. It's a song about wanting her so badly you'd reorganise your whole life on the strength of one walk down a road.
Now. The tune. This is the bit that gets people, and the bit I actually wanted to write about, because here's where it gets gas.
That gorgeous, swaying, almost hymn-like melody you're singing Star of the County Down to? It isn't Irish. Or — careful — it isn't ONLY Irish. The air is called Kingsfold, and it's an old folk tune that turns up all over these islands under a dozen different coats. It was floating around England and Ireland and Scotland for ages, the way these things do, getting picked up and put down and reshaped, before anyone pinned a single name on it.
The English know it best as a HYMN tune. Vaughan Williams — the composer, a man who went round the countryside in the early 1900s actually collecting these old airs off real people before they vanished — he heard a version of it and set it to a hymn called "I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say," and named the tune Kingsfold after a little place in Sussex where he came across it. So you've Irish folk singing about Rosie McCann and English congregations singing about Jesus, and underneath, the SAME tune. Same bones. I find that genuinely lovely. The melody doesn't care what words you hang on it. It just wants to be sung.
And it's not only those two. The same air, or one close enough to be its cousin, shows up under English ballads like "Dives and Lazarus." It's one of those tunes that's older than any of the songs sitting on top of it. The lyric of Star of the County Down is the young one — early 1900s, more or less, Cathal McGarvey usually gets the credit for the words we sing — but the music he set it to was already ancient when he got to it. He didn't write a tune. He found a beautiful old door and put his own house behind it. That's how a lot of the best ones work, honestly. Nobody invents from nothing. You inherit the melody and you give it new people to be about.
This is the thing I keep banging on about on this whole site, so forgive me. The songs we love are SHARED. They've been borrowed and traded back and forth across the Irish Sea for centuries, and trying to slap a flag on any one of them usually just means you haven't dug deep enough yet. The Rattlin' Bog does the same — it's got Scottish cousins, French cousins, the lot. (If you want the deep end on how these tunes travel, I rambled about exactly that over in the bit on cumulative songs, which is a whole other rabbit hole.) A tune crosses a sea, picks up new words, and becomes somebody else's heart song without ever telling them where it's been. Kingsfold's been doing it longer than most.
So that's Star of the County Down. A boy, a road in July, a brown-haired girl called Rosie, and a melody that's older than the words and probably older than the country. Go and sing it. Sing it slow — people rush it, don't rush it, let it sway. And if you want the words to learn off, they're sitting over in the lyrics and I'll be putting the full entry up in the songbook shortly. There's a queue. There's always a queue.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002
P.S. — I tried explaining the Kingsfold thing to Rattlin' the cat by humming "I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say" and then switching mid-bar into "from Bantry Bay up to Derry Quay" to PROVE it's the same tune. He listened to the whole demonstration. Then he yawned, so wide I could see his back teeth, and left. A hard crowd, the cat. Eleven years and he's never once been impressed.