Matt Hyland: A Song History

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"Matt Hyland" is a love ballad, number 2880 in the Roud index, about a lord's daughter and a servant named Matt: her parents threaten to drive him away, she urges him to escape before he can be transported, and in the end her father gives way and she calls Matt home to marry her.[1] It seems to have begun on the broadside presses; sheets titled "Mat Hyland" and "Young Mat Hyland" survive, one of them dated to about 1825.[1][2] Henry Hudson noted the air and title in 1841 from Paddy Conneely, a blind Galway piper and singer, and a text appears in John Hume's manuscript songbook of about 1845, now in the National Library of Ireland.[3][2]

A large pale three-storey country house set among wooded hills

Anonymous, British, Country house, watercolor, 19th century. A country house, shown for the lord's estate in the ballad; it has no connection to the song.

In Ireland the song was traditionally sung in south-west Ulster, and it became popular across the country in the late 1960s after Tommy McDermott of County Fermanagh sang it in a ballad competition in the year he became All-Ireland champion.[2] It also crossed the Atlantic, turning up in Horace Beck's Folklore of Maine (1957) and in the singer Carrie Grover's privately published collection of family songs, and singers recorded in Newfoundland gave it as "Matt Ireland."[2][1] Robin Morton included it in his 1970 collection Folk Songs Sung in Ulster.[2]

The folk revival took it up quickly: Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick recorded it in 1968, Frank Harte, Jean Redpath and Al O'Donnell followed in the early 1970s, and later versions came from Andy M. Stewart and Kate Rusby.[3] Joe Heaney was recorded singing it in 1978 while he was artist in residence at the University of Washington, though it was not part of his public repertoire.[4] Janene Millen and Shawn McCurdy set it in DAD tuning in From Ditties To Dirges, a book of 31 tunes, most of them centuries-old melodies from the British Isles, arranged mainly for solo mountain dulcimer in tab, standard notation and chord names.[5]

Our book that contains the song "Matt Hyland"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Matt Hyland".
  2. Clare County Library: "Matt Hyland" (Peg McMahon, Carroll Mackenzie Collection).
  3. Mainly Norfolk: "Matt Hyland".
  4. Joe Heaney Archive: "Matt Hyland".
  5. Janene Millen And Shawn McCurdy: "From Ditties To Dirges".
  6. Image: Anonymous, British, Country house, watercolor, 19th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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