Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye: A Song History
"Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye" tells of a woman who meets Johnny, a soldier back from the wars, so badly maimed that she can barely recognize him.[1] An older view, set out in Halliday Sparling's Irish Minstrelsy (1887), classed it as a street ballad from the start of the nineteenth century, when Irish regiments were being raised for East India service.[2] More recent research by the folklorist Jonathan Lighter, summarized by Terry Moylan in a letter to History Ireland, assigns the words instead to the English music-hall performer Joseph Geoghegan and dates them to early 1867.[3] The Folk Song and Music Hall research site, which describes Geoghegan as the long-serving master of ceremonies at a Bolton music hall, cites the British Library catalogue for a London sheet-music edition of 1867 but reports a newspaper notice of the song on stage as early as December 1866.[4] The entertainer Harry Liston made it famous and advertised it widely as part of his act through the late 1860s and the 1870s.[3][4]
Alexander Gardner, Grand Army Review, Washington, D.C., albumen print, May 1865. Union troops parading home at the end of the Civil War, the years of Gilmore's related song; it has no connection to this song.
The song is now sung to the air that Patrick S. Gilmore had used for his 1863 hit, "When Johnny Comes Marching Home."[3] Gilmore published that song in Boston under the pen name Louis Lambert, and its first edition credits Gilmore's Band with introducing it.[5] Which song came first is disputed: the Traditional Ballad Index notes that scholars still argue the point, while observing that Gilmore's song is firmly dated to the Civil War years and this one turns up slightly later.[1] The older view, still reflected in the Traditional Tune Archive, holds that Gilmore, a Dublin native, arranged an Irish air he had probably learned in his youth.[2] Lighter's findings, as Moylan presents them, run the other way: Gilmore is said to have heard the melody whistled, with no record of where or by whom, no evidence ties it to Irish tradition, and Liston's habit of singing the two songs together probably joined Gilmore's tune to Geoghegan's words.[3] The Folk Song and Music Hall site likewise judges it more probable that Geoghegan's song is a parody of the American one.[4]
It was first offered as grotesque comedy rather than protest, but from the early twentieth century it came to be heard as a condemnation of war, and by the 1960s singers such as Tommy Makem, Joan Baez and Frank Harte were presenting it as an anti-war song.[3] The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem recorded it.[1] Its title was borrowed for Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, a memoir by John F. Kennedy's aides David F. Powers and Kenneth P. O'Donnell, written with the journalist Joe McCarthy.[6] Bing Futch includes it in DAD tuning in Mountain Dulcimer In The Band (Book 6 - Celtic), a book of sixteen Celtic songs from his repertoire published by J.O.B. Entertainment, with one set of recordings of Bing playing over an accompaniment track and another of the accompaniment alone.[7]
Sources
- The Traditional Ballad Index: "Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye".
- The Traditional Tune Archive: "Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye".
- History Ireland: "'Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye'" (letter from Terry Moylan).
- Folk Song and Music Hall: "Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye".
- The Morgan Library & Museum: "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" (Boston: Henry Tolman, c1863).
- John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum: "'Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye' (Irish Folk Song)".
- Bing Futch: "Mountain Dulcimer In The Band (Book 6 - Celtic)".
- Image: Alexander Gardner, Grand Army Review, Washington, D.C., albumen print, May 1865. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.