Moorlough Shore: A Song History
"The Moorlough Shore" is a song of love turned down, found in Ireland: a young man pleads with his sweetheart to love him rather than let him go overseas, she replies that she will keep faith with a sailor, and he sadly makes ready to emigrate.[1] The Traditional Ballad Index files it as Roud 2946 under "The Maid of Mourne Shore," with "The Moorlough Shore" and "The Banks of Moorlough Shore" among its other titles, and takes its earliest date, 1924, from Sam Henry's collection.[1] The Traditional Tune Archive, by contrast, says the song was first printed on an 1886 broadside now in the Bodleian Library.[2] Where the shore lies is debated, with Antrim and the Strabane side of Tyrone both proposed and, in the Archive's view, nothing settled.[2] Album notes gathered on Mainly Norfolk show the same split: Reg Hall and A. L. Lloyd place Moorlough in upland country near Strabane that turns up often in street and fairground ballads, while Jim Carroll and Rod Stradling point out that the title calls Murlough Bay in north Antrim to mind, though the variant "Maid of Mourne Shore" points instead to the Mourne Mountains and Kilkeel in south Down.[3]
Robert Charles Dudley, Foilhummerum Bay, Valentia, Looking Seawards, watercolor over graphite with gouache, 1865–66. A rocky shore on Valentia in Kerry, shown for the shore of the title; it is not the song's Ulster setting.
Notes by John Moulden say the song is sung mostly in north Antrim and Derry, and as "The Maid of Mourne Shore" in south and east Down, the form Sam Henry printed in his Songs of the People; Andy Irvine called it well known across most of Ulster.[3] Moulden traces Kevin Mitchell's version to a 78 rpm record by John McGettigan, a Donegal singer who had settled in America, and observes that such records sometimes shaped the tradition the way printed ballad sheets did; Mainly Norfolk dates McGettigan's recording to 1937, in Philadelphia.[3] Peter Kennedy and Seán O'Boyle recorded Jim O'Neill of Markethill, County Armagh, singing it in July 1952, and Peta Webb and Kevin Mitchell both put it on Topic albums in the 1970s.[3] Irvine's version with Patrick Street came mainly from Eddie Butcher and his family at Magilligan, County Derry.[3] The air, a one-part melody in A Dorian, is placed by Cowdery's 1990 study in the "Boyne Water" family of tunes.[2] Hall and Lloyd note that the tune is best known through the political song "The Foggy Dew," which they date to 1916, and Moulden hears it, in plainer form, in Yeats's "Down by the Sally Gardens."[3]
Mark Gilston, who publishes his own books, arranges it for solo mountain dulcimer in DAD tuning in Irish Tunes For Dulcimer, Volume 2, the second book of his two-volume set of Irish melodies.[4]
Sources
- Traditional Ballad Index: "The Maid of Mourne Shore (I)".
- Traditional Tune Archive: "Moorlough Shore (The)".
- Mainly Norfolk: "The Maid of Mourne Shore / The Moorlough Shore".
- Mark Gilston: "Irish Tunes For Dulcimer, Volume 2".
- Image: Robert Charles Dudley, Foilhummerum Bay, Valentia, Looking Seawards, watercolor over graphite with gouache, 1865–66. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.