On Raglan Road: A Song History

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"On Raglan Road" began as a poem by Patrick Kavanagh, who was born in the parish of Inniskeen, County Monaghan, in 1904, settled in Dublin in 1939 and died there in 1967.[1] In 1944 Kavanagh was living on Raglan Road, and he became infatuated with Hilda Moriarty, a medical student who saw him more as a friend; she married Donogh O'Malley, later a Fianna Fáil Minister for Education, in 1947.[2] The poem, written around 1946, first went out under the title "Dark-haired Miriam Ran Away," with the name Miriam standing in to disguise Hilda.[2] Its first printing was in The Irish Press that year, and it was first gathered into a book of Kavanagh's in his Collected Poems of 1964.[3][1]

Watercolor of a dim landscape at dawn with a winding stream, bare trees and a small hunter with a dog

Henri Joseph Harpignies, Dawn—Hunter with Dog, watercolor, 1882. A French landscape at dawn, shown for the title of the air, "The Dawning of the Day"; it has no connection to the song.

The melody is the old Irish air "The Dawning of the Day," in Irish "Fáinne Geal an Lae," which Edward Bunting's 1840 collection credits to the seventeenth-century Sligo harper Thomas O'Connellan; a rival attribution to Turlough O'Carolan, found in some sources, is treated as doubtful.[4] The Traditional Tune Archive cites an early printing in James Aird's Glasgow collection of 1788 and notes that the aged harper Denis O'Hampsey played it at the Belfast Harp Festival in 1792; Edward Walsh published an Irish-language song of that name in 1847, and P. W. Joyce an English one in 1873.[4] By the later account of the writer Benedict Kiely, Kavanagh asked him around the time of that first printing whether the poem could be sung to this air.[3]

Kavanagh offered the song to the singer Luke Kelly at the Bailey pub in Dublin in 1964, but Kelly did not record it with The Dubliners until 1971, after the poet's death, and it came out on their live album Hometown in 1972.[3] Kelly's singing made it one of Ireland's most familiar songs, and in a 2019 public vote for an RTÉ series it was named Ireland's favourite folk song.[1][3] Larry Conger has made a three-page arrangement of it for solo mountain dulcimer in tablature, sold as a single-song PDF published by Dulcimerican Music.[5]

Our book that contains the song "On Raglan Road"

Sources

  1. Royal Irish Academy: "Modern Ireland in 100 Artworks: Patrick Kavanagh".
  2. National Library of Ireland: "Yours fondly, Patrick".
  3. IMRO: "On Raglan Road Is Ireland's Favourite Folk Song".
  4. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Dawning of the Day (1) (The)" (annotation).
  5. Larry Conger: "On Raglan Road".
  6. Image: Henri Joseph Harpignies, Dawn—Hunter with Dog, watercolor, 1882. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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