O’Carolan’s Receipt: A Song History

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Turlough O'Carolan (1670–1738), the Irish harper who lost his sight to smallpox at eighteen and spent his career travelling widely through Ireland, left about 220 pieces that survive today.[1] This one is tied to his friend John Stafford, who lived near Elphin in County Roscommon: Donal O'Sullivan gave it number 161 in Carolan: The Life, Times and Music of an Irish Harper (1958), where he printed a composite setting, often reproduced since, drawn from three eighteenth-century sources.[2] The tune also goes by "Carolan's Receipt for Drinking," "Planxty Stafford" and "Dr. John Stafford."[2][3] "Receipt" here is the older word for a recipe, a sense that early on was applied to medicinal preparations.[4]

Gilded early nineteenth-century Irish harp by John Egan with painted decoration

John Egan, Portable Harp, 1819. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for the harp, Carolan’s instrument; it was made long after his time and has no connection to the tune.

The story behind the title is an anecdote, and it has never been told only one way. The oldest version found here appears in Joseph Cooper Walker's Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards (1786), from a correspondent: warned by his doctors to give up spirits, a gloomy Carolan held out for six weeks in Boyle, then asked a grocer's assistant for a glass of whiskey he promised only to smell, drank it after all, began the song that evening and performed it the next morning in Stafford's parlour at Elphin. Walker himself remarks that the tale is told in different ways, and he describes Stafford as a respected apothecary.[5] A later retelling, which the Traditional Tune Archive credits to a 1976 tunebook, makes Stafford the one who prescribed the whiskey, with the two friends sitting up until dawn while the tune took shape.[2] The Archive also notes that Stafford helped carry Carolan's coffin and died later the same year, 1738.[2]

The tune was in print early. The Archive lists it in John Lee's Dublin collection of Carolan's music (1780), in two keys; in Walker's Memoirs; and in the Thompsons' Hibernian Muse in London (dated 1786 or 1787 in different parts of its entry). Scottish publishers such as Aird and the Gows printed it as "Carlionne," and O'Farrell's pipe collection of 1804 titled it "Carolan's Receipt for Drinking Whiskey."[2] On record, The Chieftains included it on Chieftains 7 in the late 1970s, Derek Bell named an album after it, and accordionist Josephine Marsh recorded it in the mid-1990s.[2][3]

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Sources

  1. Encyclopaedia Britannica: "Turlough O'Carolan".
  2. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Carolan's Receipt".
  3. Irish Traditional Music Tune Index (Alan Ng): "O'Carolan's Receipt for Drinking".
  4. Merriam-Webster: "Receipt".
  5. Internet Archive: Joseph Cooper Walker, "Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards" (Dublin, 1786).