Denis Murphy's Slide: A Song History

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"Denis Murphy's Slide" is a slide in 12/8 time, classed by the Traditional Tune Archive as a West Kerry tune and associated there with the Sliabh Luachra fiddler whose name it carries.[1] Denis Murphy (1910–1974), a native of Lisheen in County Kerry, and his sister Julia Clifford (1914–1997) were the most celebrated pupils of the travelling music teacher Pádraig O'Keeffe.[2][3][4] Murphy spent much of the period from 1942 to 1965 in New York, where his playing sat easily beside the Sligo-style fiddling of the Bronx; the Irish Traditional Music Archive counts him among the foremost exponents of the region's polka and slide repertoire.[4] (Sources differ on his birth year: the Traditional Tune Archive's note gives both 1912 and 1910, while the Irish Traditional Music Archive and University College Cork give 1910.)[1][2][4][5]

Photochrom of a road winding through the Gap of Dunloe, County Kerry, about 1890-1900

Gap of Dunloe, Killarney, County Kerry, Ireland. Photochrom print, Detroit Publishing Co., about 1890–1900. Library of Congress. No known restrictions on publication. Shown for its Kerry setting only.

The sources consulted here link the tune to Murphy but do not say he composed it, and it also goes by "Julia Clifford's Slide," "Pádraig O'Keeffe's Slide," "The Gleanntán Slide" and "The Dark Girl in Blue."[1][6] Among the earliest recordings indexed in those sources is one made for RTÉ in 1949 by Murphy with the accordion player Johnny O'Leary and later issued on Music from Sliabh Luachra.[1][6] Later recordings include Tony MacMahon's 1972 album and The Chieftains 3 (1973), and the tune is printed in collections of music for set dancing such as Taylor's Music for the Sets and An Pota Stóir, a book of West Kerry set-dance music.[1][6] Murphy and Clifford's 1969 Claddagh album The Star Above the Garter, which University College Cork calls a classic, preserves the pair's playing, though this particular slide does not appear in the irishtune.info track listing for that album.[5][7]

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Sources

  1. Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Denis Murphy's Slide (1)".
  2. Irish Traditional Music Archive: "Pádraig O'Keeffe".
  3. Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann: "Pádraig Ó Caoimh (O'Keeffe)".
  4. Irish Traditional Music Archive: "Denis Murphy".
  5. University College Cork: "From Lisheen to The Bronx: The Fiddle Music of Denis Murphy (1910–74)".
  6. irishtune.info: "Denis Murphy's".
  7. irishtune.info: "The Star above the Garter".