Buddy Fury's: A Song History
"Buddy Fury's," also spelled "Buddy Furey's," is an Irish polka in 2/4 time.[1][2] Buddy Furey was a County Limerick musician, and the name was chosen by the Limerick-born fiddler Martin Mulvihill, who called the polka after the first person he heard playing it.[1][3] Mulvihill, born in Ballygoughlin in 1923, moved to England in 1951 and to New York in 1971, ran a school for young traditional musicians in the Bronx, and was named a National Heritage Fellow by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1984.[3]
Thomas Rowlandson, Irish Jaunting Car, hand-colored etching, 1814. Shown for its Irish subject; it has no connection to the tune.
Mulvihill recorded the polka on Traditional Irish Fiddling from County Limerick, a Green Linnet album from about 1978, where the Kinard Polka follows it.[1][2] It then appeared in print in Breandán Breathnach's Ceol Rince na hÉireann 3 (1985), in Mulvihill's own First Collection of Traditional Irish Music (1986) as "Buddy Fury's Polka," and in Bill Black's Music's the Very Best Thing (1996).[1][2] Black and Mulvihill give it in A major, while Breathnach treats it as A Mixolydian, and its first strain is related to the sword-dance tune "Three Jolly Sheepskins."[1][2]
Aaron O'Rourke includes it in Irish Session Tunes, Volume 2, a mountain dulcimer collection of jigs, reels and polkas commonly played at Irish sessions, in DAD tuning with fast and slow demonstration tracks, published by Fingers Of Steel.[4] The same book also has the Kinard Polka, its partner on Mulvihill's recording.[4][2]
Sources
- Traditional Tune Archive: "Buddy Furey's Polka".
- irishtune.info: "Buddy Furey's".
- National Endowment for the Arts: "Martin Mulvihill".
- Fingers Of Steel: "Aaron O'Rourke, Irish Session Tunes, Volume 2".
- Image: Thomas Rowlandson, Irish Jaunting Car, hand-colored etching, 1814. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.