Road To Lisdoonvarna: A Song History
"The Road to Lisdoonvarna" is an Irish slide, also classed as a single jig, in 12/8 time and the E Dorian mode.[1] Its title points to Lisdoonvarna in County Clare, a one-time spa town where Victorian visitors came for the mineral waters, set in the stony Burren country north of the Cliffs of Moher and known today for its annual matchmaking festival.[1][2] It should not be confused with a reel of the same name.[2][3] The Traditional Tune Archive hears a strong likeness between the tune's second part and the start of the Scottish strathspey "Ciorsdan Mhór."[1]
Cornelius Varley, Irish cars (Study of two carts in a landscape), pen and ink, wash and graphite, 1800–73. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Two Irish carts; it has no connection to the tune.
The earliest dated printing in the Tune Archive's list is an untitled single jig in Bulmer and Sharpley's Music from Ireland, volume 4 (1976); Deloughery's Sliabh Luachra on Parade (1980) gives it from the playing of Terry Teahan.[1] In the sources consulted here nothing documents the tune before the 1970s. The Chieftains recorded the slide on The Chieftains 3 (1973), placing it beside the reel that shares its name, and the whistle player Micho Russell is among the many others who have recorded it.[4][1][2]
The tune's American career has a hammered-dulcimer connection: the Tune Archive credits Grey Larsen and Malcolm Dalglish with popularizing it in the United States, pairing it with "O'Keeffe's Slide."[1] Their 1977 June Appal album Banish Misfortune, with Dalglish on hammered dulcimer and Larsen on Irish flute, opens a medley with it that also includes "Denis Murphy's Slide."[5] The tune has since appeared in American collections such as Brody's Fiddler's Fakebook (1983).[1]
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