Red Haired Boy: A Song History

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"Red Haired Boy" is an English rendering of the Gaelic title "Giolla Rua," and the name is usually taken to refer to a real outlaw.[1] Under that Gaelic name, and as "The Little Beggarman," it was widespread throughout Britain and Ireland, and it is a rare example of a melody shared by fiddlers in both Scotland and Ireland.[1] As "The Little Beggarman" it is also a song, whose narrator is an old Irish beggar known as Johnny Dhu; Sarah Makem and Tommy Makem sang it on The Lark in the Morning, a 1956 Tradition anthology.[2] Irish tradition also has a legend about the tune: the piper Donnchadh Ó Sé is said to have learned "An Giolla Rua" from otherworldly music he heard near a cliff.[1] The Traditional Tune Archive classifies it as A mixolydian.[1]

Samuel Lovett Waldo portrait of an old beggar called Old Pat, about 1819

Samuel Lovett Waldo, Old Pat, the Independent Beggar, oil on wood, about 1819. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). A beggar portrait of the period, recalling the title “The Little Beggarman”; the painting is not connected to the tune.

Francis O'Neill included it in his 1903 collection Music of Ireland, and the Flanagan Brothers recorded it for Columbia in 1923.[1] The tune crossed the Atlantic with little alteration, taking root in both Northern and Southern American fiddling, and bluegrass fiddlers have embraced it in recent times.[1] In America the English title won out: one album note says the tune is "usually called The Red-Haired Boy" there.[2] Among mountain dulcimer players, it is one of the tunes in Stephen Seifert's Join the Jam, a book of popular jam tunes for the instrument.[3]

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Sources

  1. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation: Red Haired Boy".
  2. Mainly Norfolk: "The Little Beggarman / Johnny Dhu / The Oul' Rigadoo".
  3. Stephen Seifert: "Join the Jam DAD Tuning".