Rocky Road To Dublin: A Song History

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"The Rocky Road to Dublin" is an Irish slip jig in 9/8 time, most often set in A Dorian, according to the Traditional Tune Archive.[1] The Archive gives its first known printing as a dance tune in the Dublin Magazine of April 1841, although Francis O'Neill, writing in 1913, credited a different Dublin publication, The Citizen, of that same year.[1] Canon James Goodman noted the tune in his mid-nineteenth-century Cork manuscripts, P. M. Haverty and Levey both printed it in 1858, and O'Neill took it into his Music of Ireland of 1903.[1] One early writer quoted by the Archive says it served widely as a nursery song in the south of Munster, while the idea that the name comes from a road near Clonmel is reported there only as hearsay.[1]

Early photograph of the columned front of St. George's Hall in Liverpool

Thomas Sutton, St. George's Hall, Liverpool, salted paper print from a paper negative, 1854. Liverpool in 1854, a city named on the comic song's emigrant's ill-fated journey; the photograph has no connection to the tune.

The title also belongs to a comic song, Roud 3012, in which an emigrant from Tuam sets out for England and meets misfortune after misfortune between Mullingar and Liverpool.[2] The music hall performer Harry Clifton, who appeared often in Ireland between 1855 and 1861, sang it; a newspaper notice of 1859 is the earliest found linking him to the song, and the earliest mention of sheet music found dates from 1864.[3] The Ballad Index finds it in an 1865 song collection and on a broadside held by the Bodleian Library that predates 1867.[2] Sources differ on the author: an 1859 notice points to Harry Sydney, later references from 1863 on give the words to D. K. Gavan, "The Galway Poet," a figure still not clearly identified, and the Ballad Index, following Richard Anthony Baker's 2014 history of the music hall, names Clifton himself.[3][2] The original melody is unsettled too: Folk Song and Music Hall suggests the song may first have been sung to the old jig "Cam Ye Ower Frae France," and the Ballad Index, while granting that both are minor-key jigs, would not call that tune and the song's the same.[3][2]

Among recordings of the dance tune, the Archive lists Seamus Ennis on The Pure Drop (1973) and Dave Swarbrick on Swarbrick 2.[1] The name also turns up on an old-time breakdown that the north Georgia fiddler Allen Sisson recorded for Edison in 1925, and on "Along the Rocky Road to Dublin," a 1916 pop song by Joe Young and Bert Grant that the Ballad Index distinguishes from the comic song.[4][2] Steve Eulberg includes a piece titled "Rocky Road To Dublin I," in DAD tuning, in Another Jig Will Do: Songs And Tunes Of The Angles And The Celts, a combination book for mountain and hammered dulcimer that offers alternate tunings and unusual tunes; its listing does not say which of the tunes by this name it is.[5]

Our book that contains the song "Rocky Road To Dublin"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Rocky Road to Dublin (1)".
  2. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Rocky Road to Dublin, The".
  3. Folk Song and Music Hall: "The Rocky Road to Dublin".
  4. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Rocky Road to Dublin (8)".
  5. Fingers Of Steel: "Steve Eulberg, Another Jig Will Do: Songs And Tunes Of The Angles And The Celts".
  6. Image: Thomas Sutton, St. George's Hall, Liverpool, salted paper print from a paper negative, 1854. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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