Planxty Burke: A Song History
“Planxty Burke” is an Irish air in 6/8 credited to the harper Turlough O’Carolan, and the Traditional Tune Archive gives “Plangsty Bourk” and “Honorable Thomas Bourk” as other names for it.[1] Drawing on Donal O’Sullivan’s research, the archive names the likely subject as Thomas Burke of Castlebar, County Mayo, who, O’Sullivan found, sat for that borough in King James’s Irish Parliament of 1689.[2] The archive gives this identification only as probable, and it adds that Carolan wrote a second tune for the same man.[2] The air is number 14 in O’Sullivan’s 1958 Carolan catalogue.[2]
John Egan, Portable Harp, wood and various materials, Dublin, 1819. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). An Irish harp made long after Carolan's time, shown for its subject.
The meaning of the word “planxty” is still debated.[3] O’Sullivan linked it to words for striking, while other writers have proposed an Irish term for praise pieces or a twist on sláinte, “health”.[3] O’Sullivan also observed that Carolan himself rarely used the term, which later publishers applied to his pieces.[3]
The tune appears in John Lee’s Dublin collection of 1780 and in the Thompsons’ London Hibernian Muse in the 1780s.[1] Edward Bunting later noted it down from the harper Charles Byrne in 1802, and Francis O’Neill printed it in his Music of Ireland in 1903.[2] It should not be confused with “Thomas Burk,” a separate air attributed to Carolan that Burk Thumoth printed in London in the 1740s; O’Sullivan regarded that air as a different tune from Lee’s.[4]
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