Miss Monaghan: A Song History

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"Miss Monaghan" is an Irish reel in D major, normally played in two repeated parts, and it belongs to a large family of related reels that share its melodic shape.[1][2] It also goes by a long list of other names, among them "The Connacht Lasses," "The Dandy Girl," "The Four Courts of Dublin," "Stormy Weather," "The White-Haired Piper" and Irish-language forms such as "Iníon Uí Mhuimhneacháin."[1][2]

Red poppies, blue cornflowers and white daisies on a bank under a pale sky

Andrew Nicholl, Bank of wildflowers, watercolor and gouache, 1830s. Wildflowers by the Irish painter Andrew Nicholl, shown for an Irish reel; it has no connection to the tune.

The earliest source under this title noted by the Traditional Tune Archive is the mid-nineteenth-century manuscript collection of the collector James Goodman (1828–1896), which has it more than once, including a fragment headed "Miss Manahan's Reel" among the pipe tunes; Stephen Grier also entered it in his manuscript collection of about 1883.[1] Francis O'Neill printed it in The Music of Ireland (1903) and The Dance Music of Ireland (1907), and it appears in the Roche Collection (1912).[1][2] Its first known sound recording was made by O'Neill himself, who captured the piper Patsy Touhey playing it on home cylinders between 1902 and 1904.[1][2] The fiddler Michael Coleman recorded it in 1922, and Leo Rowsome's pipers' band cut it for HMV in 1937.[1][2]

The piper Séamus Ennis was especially fond of the reel and recorded it several times, from 1940 to Forty Years of Irish Piping (1977).[1][2] Joe Cooley, Noel Hill and Tony Linnane, Matt Molloy and many later players have recorded it, and on the recordings indexed by irishtune.info it most often follows "The Pigeon on the Gate."[2] Aaron O'Rourke's Irish Session Tunes, Volume 2, published by Fingers Of Steel, sets it in DAD tuning among a second batch of session tunes for mountain dulcimer, with downloadable recordings of each tune at slow and full speed.[3]

Our book that contains the song "Miss Monaghan"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Miss Monaghan's Reel".
  2. irishtune.info: "Miss Monaghan".
  3. Fingers Of Steel: "Aaron O'Rourke, Irish Session Tunes, Volume 2".
  4. Image: Andrew Nicholl, Bank of wildflowers, watercolor and gouache, 1830s. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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