Rakes Of Kildare: A Song History

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"The Rakes of Kildare" is an Irish double jig in 6/8 time, usually played in two repeated parts and most often given in A Dorian, though some sources set it in a G mode instead.[1] Its title borrows a word that, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, described "unruly and spirited young gentlemen."[1] Players also know it under other names, among them "The Galbally Farmer," "The Barn Door Jig" and "The Fair of Drumlish."[2] One tune catalog keeps a major-key setting under the same title as a separate entry and compares it with the Dorian one.[3]

Oval portrait of a young man with powdered hair in a green coat and white ruffled shirt

Gilbert Stuart, Man in a Green Coat, oil on canvas, ca. 1779–85. A fashionable young gentleman of the 1780s, shown for the "rakes" of the title; it has no connection to the tune.

Francis O'Neill took the view in 1913 that the jig grew out of an old march, "Get Up Early," which Edward Bunting had obtained from R. Stanton at Westport, County Mayo, in 1802.[1] Under its present name, it turns up in the 1844 manuscript collection of the County Longford musician Thomas "Blind" Kernan.[1] O'Sullivan (1983) traced its earliest printing in this form to the opening volume of R.M. Levey's Dance Music of Ireland in 1858, where it is labelled simply as a jig; Haverty's One Hundred Irish Airs printed it the following year, and O'Neill included it in both his 1903 and 1907 collections.[1]

The accordionist John J. Kimmel recorded it for Columbia in 1920,[1][2] and the Flanagan Brothers followed with a recording in 1923.[2] Versions have also been collected in New England and Michigan, and English dancers sometimes use it for morris.[1] Mark Gilston includes a tune of this name on page 32 of Irish Tunes For Dulcimer, Volume 1, a collection of Irish melodies published by Gilston himself that comes as a single PDF along with a separate file for every piece; the listing does not say which of the settings above he uses.[4]

Our book that contains the song "Rakes Of Kildare"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation: Rakes of Kildare".
  2. irishtune.info: "Rakes of Kildare" (A Dorian, tune 1638).
  3. irishtune.info: "Rakes of Kildare" (G Major, tune 4273).
  4. Mark Gilston: "Irish Tunes For Dulcimer, Volume 1".
  5. Image: Gilbert Stuart, Man in a Green Coat, oil on canvas, ca. 1779–85. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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