Port Lairge: A Song History
"Port Láirge," the Irish name for the city of Waterford, is one of the many titles of a two-part air and polka in 2/4 time and D major.[1] The tune index irishtune.info files it under "The Rose Tree" and gathers more than a dozen other names for it, from "Little Mary Cullinan" and "Maureen from Gibberland" to "Moore's Favorite" and "The Gimlet."[2]
After Pierre-Joseph Redouté, The Roses: China or Bengal Rose, color stipple engraving with watercolor added by hand, 1817–24. A rose, shown for the tune's best-known English title, "The Rose Tree"; it has no connection to the tune.
The English title comes from "A Rose Tree in Full Bearing," a song with words by John O'Keeffe in William Shield's opera The Poor Soldier of the early 1780s, but the Traditional Tune Archive says Shield reworked an older melody, perhaps an Irish one, rather than writing it himself.[3] The same archive notes that James Aird had printed the melody as "The Dainty Besom Maker" in the first volume of his collection of airs, dated to about 1778, and that Niel Gow published it as "Old Lee Rigg--or Rose Tree."[3] The air is also tied to a Thomas Moore song that appeared in 1813 in the fifth number of A Selection of Irish Melodies, and on the dance floor it was in use in Scotland as a reel or country-dance tune by about 1788, while morris versions come from Bampton and Brackley.[3]
In Irish tradition it appears as No. 277 in Francis O'Neill's Music of Ireland, and the earliest recordings irishtune.info lists date from 1922, when the piper Tom Ennis and the fiddler John Gerrity played it in a set of polkas, and from 1924, by McConnell's Four Leaf Shamrocks.[2] The fiddler Michael Coleman recorded it in 1926 with the flute player Tom Morrison.[3] Later recordings range from set-dance albums to Harry Bradley's fife and Bobby Gardiner's melodeon.[2] On the mountain dulcimer, Aaron O'Rourke includes it as "Port Lairge" in Irish Session Tunes, Volume 1, a Fingers Of Steel book of 36 session jigs, reels and polkas whose download comes with a separate PDF and a demonstration MP3 for every tune.[4]
Sources
- The Traditional Tune Archive: "Port Láirge".
- irishtune.info: "Rose Tree".
- The Traditional Tune Archive: "Rose Tree (The)".
- Fingers Of Steel: "Aaron O'Rourke, Irish Session Tunes, Volume 1".
- Image: After Pierre-Joseph Redouté, The Roses: China or Bengal Rose, color stipple engraving with watercolor added by hand, 1817–24. The Cleveland Museum of Art.