Cooley's Reel: A Song History
"Cooley's Reel" is a two-part Irish reel in E Dorian that carries the name of Joe Cooley (1924–1973), a button accordion player from Peterswell, County Galway, who played for a time with the Tulla Céilí Band.[1][2][3] Who actually made it is disputed, and irishtune.info leaves the question open between Cooley and the accordionist Joe Mills.[1][2] One account, from Charlie Piggott and Fintan Vallely's Blooming Meadows (1998) as summarized by the Traditional Tune Archive, has Joe and his brother Séamus, as teenagers in the 1940s, hearing an old concertina player at a County Clare house session and rebuilding the reel at home from what they could recall, with Séamus assigning the first part to Joe and the turn to himself.[1]
Accordion, wood, mother-of-pearl, leather and paper, possibly Belgian, ca. 1890. An accordion of an earlier day, shown for its subject; it has no connection to the tune or to Joe Cooley.
Joe Mills, a founding member of east Galway's Aughrim Slopes Céilí Band who emigrated to the United States in 1958, maintained that he had composed the reel, which he called "Luttrell's Pass," and that he had taught it to Cooley.[4] That title recalls a route near the battlefield of Aughrim (1691) by which the Jacobite cavalry commander Henry Luttrell withdrew his forces, and Luttrell was later accused of treachery.[1] The Traditional Tune Archive also cites David Taylor's attribution of the reel to John McGrath (1900–1955), a County Mayo and New York fiddler, while noting that no other source seems to support it.[1]
The earliest recording irishtune.info lists is a 1949 one by the Tulla Céilí Band with Cooley on accordion; Michael Gorman's 1958 recording adds a third part and presents the tune as his own composition, "Put the Cake in the Dresser."[2] Other titles include "The Tulla Reel" and "Fiddler Leahy's."[1][2] As of October 2026 it heads irishtune.info's ranking of the reels most often played by the site's members.[5] Mark Gilston includes it in Irish Tunes For Dulcimer, Volume 2, a sheet-music collection of Irish tunes arranged for solo mountain dulcimer in DAD tuning.[6]
Sources
- The Traditional Tune Archive: "Cooley's Reel (1)".
- irishtune.info: "Cooley's".
- Comhaltas Archive: "Cooley's Reel".
- Irish Traditional Music Archive: "Joe Mills".
- irishtune.info: "Top Session Reels".
- Mark Gilston: "Irish Tunes For Dulcimer, Volume 2".
- Image: Accordion, wood, mother-of-pearl, leather and paper, possibly Belgian, ca. 1890. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.