I Buried My Wife And Danced On Her Grave: A Song History

← Back to Browse By Song

"I Buried My Wife and Danced on Her Grave" is an Irish tune in 6/8 time in D, which the Traditional Tune Archive classes as an air; irishtune.info files it as a double jig under the title "I Buried My Wife and Danced on Top of Her."[1][2] Its title is taken from a song that was sung to the melody.[1] Other names attached to it include "The Frieze Breeches" (or "Frieze Britches"), and the Traditional Tune Archive links it with a wider family of related tunes such as "O'Gallagher's Frolics" and "Cunla."[2][1]

Etching of townspeople dancing in a village square while a musician plays

Abraham Bosse, Dance on the Village Square, etching, ca. 1633. A French village dance, shown for its subject; it has no connection to the tune.

The collector Francis O'Neill judged in Irish Folk Music (1910) that the tune was very similar to two others in his collections, "Frieze Breeches" and "O'Gallagher's Frolics."[1] Commenting on "Frieze Breeches," which he had printed in Music of Ireland (1903), O'Neill dismissed the song formerly sung to the air as "a ridiculous, although typical folk song," and reported that versions of the jig were familiar across Munster.[3] The historian Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin associates the tune with Garret Barry (1847–1899), a piper of Inagh in west Clare.[1]

Players who have recorded it include the piper Willie Clancy, Paddy Glackin, Martin Hayes, and the band Dervish, and irishtune.info indexes eighteen recordings made between 1973 and 2013.[1][2] Transcriptions appear in the Roche Collection, Pat Mitchell's The Dance Music of Willie Clancy, and Lesl Harker's 300 Tunes from Mike Rafferty.[2] Harker's book appeared in 2005, and Rafferty was a New Jersey flute player born in County Galway in 1926.[1] Mark Gilston includes it in Irish Tunes For Dulcimer, Volume 2, a book of Irish melodies arranged for solo mountain dulcimer in DAD tuning.[4]

Our book that contains the song "I Buried My Wife And Danced On Her Grave"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Tune Archive: "I Buried My Wife and Danced on Her Grave".
  2. irishtune.info: "I Buried My Wife and Danced on Top of Her".
  3. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Frieze Breeches (1)".
  4. Mark Gilston: "Irish Tunes For Dulcimer, Volume 2".
  5. Image: Abraham Bosse, Dance on the Village Square, etching, ca. 1633. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

← Back to Browse By Song