Foggy Dew: A Song History

← Back to Browse By Song

At least three different songs travel under the title "The Foggy Dew," and they are easy to confuse. The best known today is the Irish song of the 1916 Easter Rising (Roud 973), which the Traditional Ballad Index credits to Canon Charles O'Neill and dates to 1919[1]. Writing in History Ireland, Eugene Dunphy explains that O'Neill (1887–1963), a priest from Portglenone, Co. Antrim, then serving at St Peter's in Belfast, was moved to write it after attending the first meeting of Dáil Éireann in January 1919, setting his tribute to the Rising's dead to the melody of an existing love song of the same name[2]. Whelan & Co. of Dublin published it that year under O'Neill's pen-name "Iascaire," and a later edition named the music as an old Irish air with piano accompaniment by the blind musician Carl Hardebeck, organist at St Peter's[2]. By 1920 it was being sung across Antrim and Down, and Jim Dwyer recorded it in New York in 1938[2]; later recordings include Patrick Galvin (1956), the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, and the Wolfe Tones, whose 1965 album took its name[1][3].

Félix Bracquemond etching of pheasants in heather and grass on a misty morning, with slender trees fading into the fog

Félix Bracquemond, Brumes du matin (Morning Mists), etching, 1882. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for its mist; it has no connection to any of the songs.

The older Irish love song that lent its tune was a three-verse piece printed in Songs of the Irish Harpers, its melody noted from a "Mr McGarvay of Dublin"[2]. John McCormack recorded it for Victor in 1913, and the Discography of American Historical Recordings lists the lyricist as L. F. Milligan[4] (Dunphy gives the lyricist's initials differently[2]). The Traditional Tune Archive lists the air in E minor, notes that the ballad "The Moorlough Shore" uses a nearly identical tune, and records a West Cork version that Francis O'Neill printed in his Music of Ireland (1903); it repeats Grattan Flood's claim that the air goes back to 1595 while warning that Flood is often unreliable[5]. In the sources consulted here, no account says which of these songs dulcimer arrangements generally follow.

The English "Foggy Dew" (Roud 558) is a different song altogether: a frank courtship-and-seduction ballad that the Ballad Index suggests calling "The Foggy, Foggy Dew" to keep it apart from the Irish lyric[6]. Its ancestry runs back to a London broadside of 1689, "The Fright'ned York-shire Damosel," and it was later collected widely in England, Scotland, North America and Australia[6][7]. According to Roy Palmer, the BBC kept Peter Pears's recording of Benjamin Britten's arrangement of a Suffolk version off the air in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and Peter Kennedy observed that East Anglian traditional singers most often used the tune Burns had set to "Ye Banks and Braes of Bonny Doon"[7].

Find books with Foggy Dew for sale →

Sources

  1. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Foggy Dew (III), The".
  2. History Ireland (Eugene Dunphy): "A hundred years in The Foggy Dew".
  3. Mainly Norfolk: "The Foggy Dew (Easter Rising)".
  4. Discography of American Historical Recordings (UCSB): "Victor 64326 (Red Seal 10-in. single-faced)".
  5. Traditional Tune Archive: "Foggy Dew (1) (The)".
  6. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Foggy Dew (I), The (The Bugaboo) [Laws O3]".
  7. Mainly Norfolk: "The Foggy Dew" (Roud 558).