Lady On The Island: A Song History

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"Lady on the Island" is an Irish reel in D major, known also as "Lady of the Island" and, in Irish, "An Bhean Uasal ar an Oileán."[1][2] The Traditional Tune Archive finds it, as "Lady of the Island," in the manuscript collection of Philip Carolan (c. 1839–1910), a farmer and fiddler in County Mayo, which it dates to about 1863–73.[1][3] The tune also traveled to America: the Philadelphia uilleann piper and pipe maker William Taylor wrote it down for his friend Henry Mercer, who recorded that Taylor had learned it in Ireland before emigrating around 1870.[1] Ciaran Carson, in Last Night's Fun (1996), called it "a kind of floating tune" that turns up joined to all manner of other tunes, and he heard in it a variant of "Rolling on the Ryegrass."[1]

Square blue-glazed ceramic tile with an antelope in dense foliage, in low relief

Moravian Pottery and Tile Works, Tile – Antelope in Foliage, glazed ceramic, before 1921. A tile from the Pennsylvania pottery of Henry Mercer, for whom William Taylor wrote the reel down; the tile has no connection to the tune.

The earliest printing in the Archive's list is Francis O'Neill's O'Neill's Irish Music (1915), and the reel was later taken into Breandán Breathnach's Ceol Rince na hÉireann, Volume 1 (1963), Miller and Perron's Irish Traditional Fiddle Music (1977), David Brody's Fiddler's Fakebook (1983) and Martin Mulvihill's First Collection of Traditional Irish Music (1986).[1][2] According to the Archive, the fiddler Michael Coleman was the first to record it commercially, in New York in 1936, in a medley with "The Wind That Shakes the Barley."[1] Both sites also list an older recording, made about 1932 by fiddler Dick Brennan and flute player Tommy Hunt and issued in 2003 by the Coleman Archive, which irishtune.info gives as the tune's oldest source.[1][2] Later versions came from Julia Clifford and Denis Murphy on The Star above the Garter (1969), the Chieftains on Chieftains 3, the Kilfenora Céilí Band, Mary Bergin on tin whistle and Planxty on After the Break.[1][2] In sets, irishtune.info lists it following tunes such as "The Dairy Maid" and "The Wind That Shakes the Barley."[2]

For mountain dulcimer it appears in Aaron O'Rourke's Irish Session Tunes, Volume 1 from Fingers Of Steel, where each of the 36 session pieces is written out in DAD tuning, supplied as its own PDF and paired with an MP3 demonstration track.[4]

Our book that contains the song "Lady On The Island"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Lady on the Island".
  2. irishtune.info: "Lady on the Island".
  3. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Lady of the Island".
  4. Fingers Of Steel: "Aaron O'Rourke, Irish Session Tunes, Volume 1".
  5. Image: Moravian Pottery and Tile Works, Tile – Antelope in Foliage, glazed ceramic, before 1921. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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