Old Hag You've Killed Me: A Song History

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"Old Hag You Have Killed Me" is an Irish double jig in D Mixolydian, played in the usual AABB form; it also goes by the Irish title "A Chailleach, do Mharaís Mé" and "Stop, Old Hag, or You'll Kill Me."[1] The Traditional Tune Archive points to "Will You Come Home with Me?" as a related tune and adds that George Petrie's similarly named "Hag you've killed me" is a different melody, though the two share some rhythmic figures and motifs.[2] The oldest source in Alan Ng's irishtune.info index is Francis O'Neill's Music of Ireland of 1903, where it is tune No. 831; it reappears in O'Neill's Dance Music of Ireland, in Breandán Breathnach's Ceol Rince na hÉireann 2, and in Pat Mitchell's The Dance Music of Willie Clancy.[1]

Bellows-blown bagpipe with a tartan bag, wooden bellows and ivory-tipped drones

Lowland Pipe, various materials. A bellows-blown bagpipe, shown for the pipers who have recorded the jig; it has no connection to the tune.

Uilleann pipers have recorded it often; irishtune.info lists two 1973 recordings by the piper Willie Clancy, and Brian Vallely played it on pipes with the Armagh Pipers Club.[1] The Bothy Band recorded it in July 1976 for their Mulligan LP, which took the tune's name as its title, opening a set that continues with "Dinny Delaney's."[1][3] The Chieftains used it on their album Bonaparte's Retreat around the same time, and later recordings range from Laurence Nugent's flute to David Power's pipes.[1] It belongs to the set-dancing repertoire as well: the Archive's printed setting, from Taylor's Music for the Sets: Blue Book (1995), was taken from set-dance music recorded at Na Píobairí Uilleann in the late 1980s.[2]

Mountain dulcimer players can learn "Old Hag You've Killed Me" in DAD tuning from Aaron O'Rourke's Irish Session Tunes, Volume 2, a Fingers Of Steel book that pairs its session jigs, reels and polkas with a short primer on Irish ornamentation and audio of the tunes at slow and fast tempos.[4]

Our book that contains the song "Old Hag You've Killed Me"

Sources

  1. irishtune.info: "Old Hag You Have Killed Me".
  2. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Old Hag You Have Killed Me".
  3. irishtune.info: "Old Hag You Have Killed Me by The Bothy Band".
  4. Fingers Of Steel: "Aaron O'Rourke, Irish Session Tunes, Volume 2".
  5. Image: Lowland Pipe, various materials. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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