Captain O'Kane: A Song History
"Captain O'Kane" is a minor-key air in 6/8 time that has long been credited to the blind harper Turlough O'Carolan (1670–1738), said to have written it for his friend Captain O'Kane, or O'Cahan, a sportsman from a prominent County Antrim family whose nickname was "Slasher O'Kane."[1] That story rests on James Hardiman's Irish Minstrelsy of 1831, which named Carolan as the composer roughly a century after the harper's death.[2] Donal O'Sullivan, Carolan's twentieth-century editor, located no earlier document naming Carolan as composer, yet accepted the tune as his on the strength of Hardiman's remark and its resemblance to the harper's other work, numbering it 133 in his 1958 edition; he could learn nothing more about the captain himself.[1] The Traditional Tune Archive's notes on the related song state that no evidence supports Hardiman's credit, so the attribution is best regarded as traditional rather than proven.[3]
Ernest Meissonier, Mounted Hussar, red wax, wood, metal, leather and cord, 1866–75. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). A hussar, shown for the tune's other name, "The Wounded Hussar"; it has no connection to the tune.
The tune was in print well before Hardiman: McGlashan's collection of about 1786 has it as "Captain Oakhain," and it turns up in Aird's Selection (1788), Niel Gow's fourth collection, and O'Farrell's pipe collections of around 1800.[1] Later Irish printings include Haverty's One Hundred Irish Airs (1859) and Francis O'Neill's Music of Ireland (1903, No. 627).[1]
The melody is also known as "The Wounded Hussar," after a poem generally attributed to the Scottish poet Thomas Campbell, said to date from 1799, and included in his collected poems; one Traditional Tune Archive page names an Alexander Campbell instead, so sources differ on that point.[1][2][3][4] Smith's Irish Minstrel (Edinburgh, 1825) printed words and air together and named the poem's hero "Captain Henry O'Kain," but the notes at Mainly Norfolk suggest Campbell had contemporary European wars in mind and that the hero's name was simply borrowed from the tune title by conjecture.[2] When the words and this air were first joined is uncertain; the folk-song scholar Malcolm Douglas, cited by the Traditional Tune Archive, placed it no earlier than 1822.[3] In Ireland the Kerry fiddler Pádraig O'Keeffe played it as a slow air he called "Banks of the Danube," Séamus Ennis learned it from him, and it is now treated as part of the Sliabh Luachra repertoire.[2][3]
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