A Pretty Maid Milking Her Cow: A Song History

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In Ireland the song is best known as "Cailín Deas Crúite na mBó," but the Irish words serve mainly as a refrain, and most of the song is sung in English.[1] The Traditional Ballad Index, which files it as Roud 3139, summarizes the story as a man on a summer morning who hears a woman singing at the milking and asks who she is.[2] It records the song from Ireland, the American Midwest and Newfoundland.[2] The earliest date the Index gives comes from an English broadside: it dates the song to before 1835 from a sheet printed by G. Walker of Durham sometime between 1797 and 1834, and later sheets under an anglicized form of the Irish title came from printers in Dublin and Glasgow.[2] The tune collections treat the melody as an Irish air, with early printings in O'Farrell's Pocket Companion (about 1805) and Smollet Holden's Dublin collection (about 1810),[3] and in John Mulholland's Ancient Irish Airs (Belfast, 1810).[1] Whether the song itself began in Ireland or England is not settled by the sources consulted here, which pair an Irish air with an English printed text.[1][2]

Engraving of a young woman with a pail standing beside cattle, with a man in a hat leaning on a staff

Lucas van Leyden, The Milkmaid, engraving, 1510. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the song.

Thomas Moore's "The Song of O'Ruark" was set to the melody, and the 1895 Stanford edition of Moore's Irish Melodies still names the air "The Pretty Girl Milking Her Cow."[4] According to the Traditional Tune Archive, the song was worked into Dion Boucicault's melodrama The Colleen Bawn, first staged in New York in 1860, and Judy Garland sang a version of it in the 1940 film Little Nellie Kelly.[3] In Pennsylvania the folklorist George Korson collected a humorous parody about a maid milking her goat, sung to the same air by a miner, Daniel Walsh.[5]

The Ballad Index lists a Berliner disc of the song by J. W. Myers from the late 1890s,[2] and the Irish Traditional Music Archive includes the air, played on the uilleann pipes, in its playlist of cylinder recordings by the Irish-American piper Patsy Touhey.[6] Later field recordings include Martha Gillen of Antrim, recorded by Seamus Ennis for the BBC in 1954, and Tom Lenihan of Miltown Malbay, County Clare, recorded in his home in 1976.[5] Christy Moore included it on The Iron Behind the Velvet (1978), having learned it from the piper Leo Rowsome.[1] The air has been widely recorded by instrumentalists: fiddlers, pipers and accordion players have recorded it, as have bands such as Danú and Altan.[7]

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Sources

  1. Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Cailín Deas Crúidte na mBó".
  2. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Pretty Girl Milking Her Cow, The".
  3. Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Pretty Maid Milking the Cow (2)".
  4. Library Ireland: "The song of O'Ruark. Air: The pretty girl milking her cow" (Moore's Irish Melodies, ed. Stanford, 1895).
  5. Clare County Library: "Cailín Deas Crúite na mBó" (Tom Lenihan).
  6. Irish Traditional Music Archive: "Patsy Touhey, Irish-American Piper on Cylinder, 1900s".
  7. irishtune.info: "Cailín Deas Crúite na mBó".