Erin Grá Mo Chroí: A Song History
"Erin Grá mo Chroí" (Irish for "Ireland, love of my heart") is a traditional emigrant song, number 14056 in the Roud Folk Song Index.[1] Its narrator is an Irishman in New York who thinks back on home, on his mother's sorrow when he left and the turf fire on the hearth.[2] According to the folk song collector Tom Munnelly, singers knew it across almost the whole of Ireland, yet printed versions were scarce.[2]
Charles Magnus & Company, Castle Garden Landing for Emigrants, Barge Office, Battery, wood engraving, hand colored, 1850–1900. Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the song.
Joe Heaney sang it in English for Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger; the Heaney archive dates that recording to 1963 in London, while Mainly Norfolk dates it to 1964 at the couple's home in Beckenham, so sources differ on the year.[2][1] It was later issued on the Heaney anthology The Road from Conamara.[2] The Boys of the Lough recorded it on The Fair Hills of Ireland (1992), and Gay Woods sang it with Steeleye Span on Horkstow Grange (1998), having learned it from her brother, Terry Corcoran.[1] A television programme about Irish women who emigrated to America moved Woods to sing it from a woman's point of view.[1]
A piece under this title appears in Janene Millen and Shawn McCurdy's From Ditties To Dirges, a collection of 31 tunes for mountain dulcimer, most of them from the British Isles, in tablature and standard notation with historical notes and playing tips.[3]
Sources
- Mainly Norfolk: "Erin Grá Mo Chroí".
- Cartlanna Sheosaimh Uí Éanaí (Joe Heaney Archive): "Erin Grá mo Chroí".
- Janene Millen And Shawn McCurdy: "From Ditties To Dirges".
- Image: Charles Magnus & Company, Castle Garden Landing for Emigrants, Barge Office, Battery, wood engraving, hand colored, 1850–1900. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.