Lilliburlero: A Song History

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The tune first surfaces in print in Robert Carr’s The Delightful Companion of 1686, a book of lessons for recorder.[1] Its link with Henry Purcell is real but hard to pin down: a keyboard setting titled “A New Irish Tune” appeared in Musick’s Hand-maid in 1689, and Playford credited Purcell, though other musicologists find scant evidence that he wrote it and suspect a folk origin.[2] Purcell later worked the melody into his music for the play The Gordian Knot Unty’d (1691).[3] One scholar has even argued that the tune goes back to a Low Countries psalm book printed in Antwerp in 1540.[4]

Blue-and-white Delftware charger with crowned portraits of William III and Mary II

Charger with double portrait of William III and Mary II, tin-glazed earthenware (Delftware), ca. 1690. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for the Williamite monarchs whose cause the song served; it has no connection to the song itself.

The song’s fame came with satirical verses of 1687 aimed at Richard Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnell, whom James II had placed over Ireland, and the words ridiculed the Irish.[1][3] Britannica names Thomas Wharton, later Marquess of Wharton, as the author and dates the words to 1687, with a single-sheet printing in 1688.[1] Other sources are more cautious, noting that the attribution to Wharton is customary but has never been proven.[5] The bishop and historian Gilbert Burnet recalled the ballad being sung across the army and the country, and it has been said that the song helped sing James out of his kingdoms in the revolution of 1688.[3][5]

The melody was played by Williamite forces during the war in Ireland of 1689–1691, and from at least the nineteenth century it has carried the words of “The Protestant Boys,” a staple of Orange flute bands in the north of Ireland.[2] That sectarian association sits beside a very different modern life: the BBC adopted the tune for a wartime programme, Into Battle, and it went on to become the signature tune of the BBC World Service.[6] A fragment of it was heard on that service shortly before the top of each hour.[5]

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Sources

  1. Encyclopaedia Britannica: "Lilli burlero".
  2. Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation: Lillibulero".
  3. Encyclopedia.com (Oxford reference entries): "Lilliburlero".
  4. Queen's University Belfast, Irish Song Project: "A New Song [Tune: Lilliburlero]".
  5. Traditional Ballad Index (folklorist.org): "Lilliburlero".
  6. Wise Music Classical: "Lilliburlero Variations" (Richard Rodney Bennett).