Castle Island: A Song History

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"Castle Island" is one of the tunes in DulciWhistle, John Keane and Karen Keane's 33-page book of duets for mountain dulcimer and pennywhistle, or tin whistle, published by Fingers Of Steel.[1] The listing presents every tune in the book as an original by the pair, without saying which of them wrote this one.[1] From Shreveport, Louisiana, the Keanes are music educators with more than seventy years of teaching between them, and they compose for the mountain dulcimer and Native American flute.[2][3] The sources consulted here give no account of where the tune's title came from.[1][2][3]

Sketchbook drawing in gray wash of a ruined castle with a round, battlemented tower

Samuel Prout, Sketchbook: "Ruined Castle", graphite with gray and brown wash, 1814. Shown for the castle in the title; it has no connection to the tune or to Castleisland.

The title shares its name with Castleisland, a town in County Kerry, Ireland, whose Irish name is Oileán Ciarraí; an Ordnance Survey letter of 1841 explained that name as "the Island of Kerry," and the two-word spelling "Castle Island" is recorded for 1768.[4][5] An 1887 gazetteer put the town on the River Maine in east Kerry, eleven miles southeast of Tralee, and mentioned castle ruins by the river.[6] An Irish reel also called "Castle Island" was printed in Francis O'Neill's Music of Ireland of 1903, but the book's listing offers the Keanes' tune as one of their own originals, and the sources consulted here do not connect it with that reel or with the town.[7][1]

Our book that contains the song "Castle Island"

Sources

  1. Fingers Of Steel: "John Keane And Karen Keane, DulciWhistle".
  2. DulcimerDownloads: "John Keane".
  3. DulcimerDownloads: "Karen Keane".
  4. Placenames Database of Ireland (logainm.ie): "Oileán Ciarraí/Castleisland" (town).
  5. Placenames Database of Ireland (logainm.ie): "Oileán Ciarraí/Castleisland" (civil parish).
  6. A Vision of Ireland through Time (University of Portsmouth): "History of Castleisland".
  7. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Castle Island".
  8. Image: Samuel Prout, Sketchbook: "Ruined Castle", graphite with gray and brown wash, 1814. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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