For Ireland I Would Not Tell Her Name: A Song History

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"For Ireland I Would Not Tell Her Name" is one English title of the Irish-language song "Ar Éirinn ní Neosfainn Cé Hí," whose melody is also played by instrumentalists as a slow air.[1] Edward Walsh printed the Irish words with his own English verse translation in Irish Popular Songs (Dublin, 1847); he did not know who wrote it, but judged the poet likely a Kerryman, since in that part of Munster no song was more popular.[2] Walsh also recorded a tradition that it was made by a young man who had fallen for the bride promised to his own brother.[2] The Boys of the Lough, in notes reported by the Traditional Tune Archive, give a related story in which a suitor too poor to propose goes abroad, comes back wealthy, and finds his sweetheart married to his brother.[3] The Traditional Ballad Index reports, citing Munnelly and Deasy-Lenihan, that the Clare scholar Eugene O'Curry said the song was first written about 1810.[4]

Painting of a young woman in a long white gown holding a rose beside a stone pedestal, with a peacock behind her

Thomas Lawrence, Portrait of Catherine Grey, Lady Manners, oil on canvas, 1794. A portrait of an Irish poet, shown as an image of a young lady of the period; it has no connection to the song.

The melody was printed in John O'Daly's The Poets and Poetry of Munster (1849), and it also survives in the mid-nineteenth-century music manuscripts of James Goodman of County Cork.[3] O'Daly's third edition uses the air for "The River Lee," a song by Eoghan Mac Carthy, and points readers to Walsh's book for the original Irish words.[5] Francis O'Neill included it in his Music of Ireland (1903), and players have recorded it often since the 1970s, among them Willie Clancy, Boys of the Lough, De Dannan and Dervish.[1][3]

Linda Brockinton includes it, arranged as a duet, in Simply Dulcimer, her book of fingerstyle dulcimer arrangements of mostly Scottish and Irish classics.[6]

Our book that contains the song "For Ireland I Would Not Tell Her Name"

Sources

  1. irishtune.info: "Ar Éirinn ní Neosfainn Cé Hí".
  2. Internet Archive: "Irish Popular Songs" by Edward Walsh (1847).
  3. The Traditional Tune Archive: "For Ireland I Won't Say Her Name (1)".
  4. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Ar Eirinn Ni Neosfainn Ce hi (For Ireland I Will Not Tell Whom She Is)".
  5. Internet Archive: "The Poets and Poetry of Munster" by John O'Daly, third edition.
  6. Linda Brockinton: "Simply Dulcimer".
  7. Image: Thomas Lawrence, Portrait of Catherine Grey, Lady Manners, oil on canvas, 1794. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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