O'Rourke's: A Song History

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"O'Rourke's" is an Irish reel that sits somewhere between A Mixolydian and D major, and pipers in the uilleann tradition play it in D.[1] Alan Ng's irishtune.info gives its mode as A Mixolydian, notes that it also turns up in D, and lists a string of other names for it, among them "The Sligo Chorus," "The Pride of Ballymote" and "O'Rourke's Wild Irishman."[2] The oldest source in that index dates from 1903, and the books it lists include two of the O'Neill collections.[2]

A dark wooden flute with silver keys, taken apart into its sections in a fitted wooden case

Rudall & Rose, Flute, cocuswood and silver, 1843. A wooden flute of the 1840s, shown for Irish dance music; it has no connection to the reel.

According to the Traditional Tune Archive, the title itself is a misnomer that seems to stem from a labelling slip.[1] When the County Sligo fiddler Michael Coleman recorded the reel for Decca in 1936, the 78 was issued as "O'Rourke's/Wild Irishman," and the Archive explains that the label had the two tunes of his set the wrong way round.[1][3] Musicians today still call this reel "O'Rourke's" all the same, the Archive notes, while the other half of the record is largely the reel now called "The Daisy Field," which the Archive also lists as "Coleman's Wild Irishman."[1][3] The Archive treats "O'Rourke's" as more or less related to "The Sligo Chorus," "The Westport Chorus" and "Push About the Jorum."[1]

The earliest recording in irishtune.info's index is a 1926 performance by Frank Quinn and P. Crowley, and the reel has been recorded regularly since, by the Chieftains in 1969 and later by Paddy Keenan, Séamus Connolly and Liz Carroll with John Doyle, among others.[2] For mountain dulcimer, an "O'Rourke's" arranged in DAD tuning is one of the 36 jigs, reels and polkas in Aaron O'Rourke's Irish Session Tunes, Volume 1, a Fingers Of Steel book that also introduces session playing and Irish ornamentation; despite the shared surname, nothing in the sources consulted here links the reel's title to him.[4]

Our book that contains the song "O'Rourke's"

Sources

  1. Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation: O'Rourke's".
  2. irishtune.info: "O'Rourke's" (tune 2052).
  3. Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation: Daisy Field (The)".
  4. Fingers Of Steel: "Aaron O'Rourke, Irish Session Tunes, Volume 1".
  5. Image: Rudall & Rose, Flute, cocuswood and silver, 1843. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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