King Of The Fairies: A Song History
"King of the Fairies" is classed as an Irish set dance in E minor or E Dorian, with a 48-bar structure.[1][2] Its Irish name is given as Rí na Sideog.[1] The Traditional Tune Archive suggests the melody grew out of a Jacobite tune, "Bonny Charlie," which circulated in eighteenth-century Scottish and northern English collections such as Aird's of 1783.[1] The archive also passes on a story that playing it three times at a gathering summons the fairy king, while cautioning that this may be modern invention with no basis in folklore.[1]
Richard Doyle, The Enchanted Tree, watercolor and gouache, 1868. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for its fairy subject; it has no connection to the tune.
In Ireland the tune was noted around 1840 by John Edward Pigot under a different title, and that version was later printed by P. W. Joyce in 1909; George Petrie also kept an untitled setting.[1] Francis and James O'Neill included it as No. 979 in The Dance Music of Ireland: 1001 Gems, and the oldest source on record at irishtune.info dates from 1907.[2] The tune also traveled: Cape Breton fiddlers play it as a march, a Shetland reel setting is known as "Scollay's Reel," and "King William of Orange" is a British title for the melody.[1]
Recorded settings include a 1938 fiddle performance by Frank O'Higgins, fiddle recordings by Michael Gorman and John Vesey from about 1957, and Kevin Burke's 1973 album Sweeney's Dream.[2] The Irish rock band Horslips recorded an arrangement of it on their 1974 album Dancehall Sweethearts.[3][4] It also appears in modern collections such as The Fiddler's Fakebook and 100 Enduring Irish Session Tunes.[2]
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