Lanigan's Ball: A Song History
"Lanigan's Ball" is a comic Irish song in which Jimmy Lanigan, having spent himself broke, comes into money from his father and throws a party that collapses into a fight engulfing the piper and the dancing girls.[1][2] The Traditional Ballad Index credits the words to D. K. Gavan and, with a question mark, the music to John Candy, while the Traditional Tune Archive, citing a note in J. Diprose's 1865 songster, gives the lyricist as George or D. K. Gavan and the composer as Candy, so the two differ on Gavan's first name and on how firm the Candy credit is.[1][2] The Index's earliest date is 1863, from Dime Song Book No. 10; it also cites several songsters, one of them named after the song, London broadsides printed by H. Such, and Colm Ó Lochlainn's note that he had the air and a fragment of the words from his mother, who learned them in Kilkee around 1880.[1] The melody also carried new words: the Library of Congress holds a Philadelphia song sheet of about 1864, "How Sherman's Veterans Took Atlanta," headed with the air of "Lanigan's Ball," and the Index lists other pieces set to the same tune, among them songs about Admiral Farragut's fleet and Jefferson Davis.[3][1]
David Teniers, Landscape with Peasants Dancing, oil on wood, c. 1645–50. Country people dancing to a piper, shown for the song's party; it has no connection to the song.
As a dance tune it is a double jig, mostly played in E minor or Dorian; the earliest-dated printed source on the Tune Archive's list is Howe's Musician's Omnibus No. 3 (1865), and it later turns up in Ryan's Mammoth Collection (1883) and, with the alternate title "At the Side of the Road," in Francis O'Neill's Dance Music of Ireland (1907).[2] The Archive associates the tune with New England, Maine and southwestern Pennsylvania, and reports that Bayard's Dance to the Fiddle (1981) places it in a varied British tune family that he judged probably very old.[2] Maine fiddler Mellie Dunham, whom the Archive describes as Henry Ford's champion fiddler of the mid-1920s, recorded it in New York on February 3, 1926, in a Victor medley with "Irish Washerwoman" and "Campbells Are Comin'," issued as Victor 20537.[2][4]
On the Galax dulcimer, "Lanigan's Ball" is one of three E minor tunes in Phyllis Gaskins's Pig In A Pen (And Other Fiddle Ditties For Galax Dulcimer), a 98-page Fingers Of Steel book she illustrated herself, which covers the style's history, construction and players and, for these tunes, suggests tuning the drones to E or using a partial capo at the first fret.[5]
Sources
- The Traditional Ballad Index: "Lanigan's Ball (I)".
- Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation: Lannigan's Ball".
- Library of Congress: "How Sherman's veterans took Atlanta. Air- Lanigan's ball".
- Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Victor matrix BVE-34389. Medley of reels / Mellie Dunham Orchestra".
- Fingers Of Steel: "Phyllis Gaskins, Pig In A Pen (And Other Fiddle Ditties For Galax Dulcimer)".
- Image: David Teniers, Landscape with Peasants Dancing, oil on wood, c. 1645–50. The Cleveland Museum of Art.