Rakes Of Mallow: A Song History
The tune is named for Mallow, County Cork, a spa town nicknamed the "Irish Bath" whose spa was famous by the 1740s, with an assembly room, laid-out walks and grottos that drew crowds every year.[1][2] Croker, as cited by the Traditional Tune Archive, says the town's young men were proverbially known as "the rakes of Mallow."[1] John J. Marshall credits a song written about their exploits with making the name known everywhere.[2] Verses lampooning the doings at the spa were published in 1740.[1]
Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, A Dance in the Country, oil on canvas, ca. 1755. Couples dancing in the 1750s, when the tune was spreading through country-dance books; it has no connection to the tune.
The Traditional Tune Archive gives the tune's earliest known printing as John Walsh's Caledonian Country Dances, published in London in 1733, followed in the 1740s by Burk Thumoth's airs and by English country dance books that spell it "Rakes of Mellow."[1] It travelled widely: a Danish manuscript of dulcimer (hakkebraet) tablature has it in 1753 as "Rakes of London," it turns up in 1777 in the fife book of Giles Gibbs Jr., and a Quebec version appears in 1933 as "Le Râteau Vieux."[1] Francis O'Neill printed it as No. 1814 in Music of Ireland (1903), and irishtune.info now classes it as a polka in G major, listing it in session collections such as Dave Mallinson's 100 Vital Irish Session Tunes.[1][3]
Leroy Anderson made it the fourth of the original movements of his Irish Suite, which Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops first played at Symphony Hall on June 6, 1947, and in it the music, as he put it, "grows faster and faster and noisier and noisier."[4] Five years later John Ford gave the tune a prominent place in his film The Quiet Man (1952).[1] Steve Eulberg arranges it twice, once in DAA and once in DAD tuning, in Another Jig Will Do: Songs And Tunes Of The Angles And The Celts, a combined songbook for mountain and hammered dulcimer whose download includes Eulberg's own recordings of the arrangements.[5]
Sources
- The Traditional Tune Archive: "Rakes of Mallow (The)".
- Library Ireland: "The Rakes of Mallow" (from John J. Marshall, Popular Rhymes and Sayings of Ireland, 1924).
- irishtune.info: "Rakes of Mallow, The".
- PBS: "Leroy Anderson: The Irish Suite".
- Fingers Of Steel: "Steve Eulberg, Another Jig Will Do: Songs And Tunes Of The Angles And The Celts".
- Image: Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, A Dance in the Country, oil on canvas, ca. 1755. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.