Love At The Endings: A Song History

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"Love at the Endings" is a reel in D composed by Ed Reavy (1898–1988), a fiddler born in County Cavan who spent most of his life in Philadelphia.[1][2] Mike Pinder's Musical Traditions review of Rounder's The Music of Ed Reavy, which includes the reel, names it among Reavy's most often played tunes and says he made hundreds of tunes between the 1930s and the 1960s, many now lost, while earning his living as a plumber.[2] According to the Traditional Tune Archive, Reavy's son Joe connected the title to Sean O'Casey's play Purple Dust, where the phrase turns up in a speech by O'Killigan as he courts Avril.[1]

Watercolor of a chain bridge over a rocky river with trees on the bank

Pavel Petrovich Svinin, The Falls of the Schuylkill and Chain Bridge, watercolor and gouache, about 1811–13. The Schuylkill at Philadelphia, the city where Ed Reavy later lived; it has no connection to the tune.

The reel is No. 12 in The Collected Compositions of Ed Reavy.[1][3] The earliest recording irishtune.info lists is Kevin Burke's on Sweeney's Dream, and later ones include Liz Carroll's in 1976 and De Danann's a few years after; the date of Burke's album differs between sources, with irishtune.info giving 1973 and the Archive listing a 1977 Folkways issue.[1][3] On De Danann's Star Spangled Molly the reel appears as "The Head of Cabbage," and the Archive cites collector and fiddler Philippe Varlet for the account that Frankie Gavin at one time used that name for almost any tune whose title he didn't know.[1][4] On recordings indexed by irishtune.info it has led into reels such as "Boys of Malin" and "Mountain Road."[3]

Aaron O'Rourke sets the reel in DAD tuning in Irish Session Tunes, Volume 2, a Fingers Of Steel mountain dulcimer book that begins by introducing Irish session playing and ornamentation, with downloadable recordings of each tune at two speeds.[5]

Our book that contains the song "Love At The Endings"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation: Love at the Endings".
  2. Musical Traditions: "The Music of Ed Reavy" (review by Mike Pinder).
  3. irishtune.info: "Love at the Endings".
  4. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation: Head of Cabbage (The)".
  5. Fingers Of Steel: "Aaron O'Rourke, Irish Session Tunes, Volume 2".
  6. Image: Pavel Petrovich Svinin, The Falls of the Schuylkill and Chain Bridge, watercolor and gouache, about 1811–13. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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