Song Of The Water Kelpie, Arran Ghelbee: A Song History
Arrane Ghelbee, also spelled Arrane Ghelby, is a traditional melody from the Isle of Man whose Manx title Sophia Morrison glossed as "A Dalby Song."[1][2] Morrison wrote that she had the tune from Tommy Quane, a Dalby fisherman who knew no words for it and would sometimes fit it to a hymn from the Manx Wesleyan hymn book.[1] Stephen Miller, writing in Manx Notes, identifies him with a Thomas Quane recorded in the 1901 census as a Manx speaker aged 43.[1] Morrison found that the air's unusual metre matched verses in A. W. Moore's Manx Ballads, and a boys' chorus sang it with those words at a Fastyr-Giensal she organised on 4 January 1907, where a newspaper reviewer counted it among two old folk songs heard in public for the first time.[1]
Eugène Delacroix, The Wild Horse, or Frightened Horse Leaving the Water, lithograph, 1828. A horse plunging out of the water, shown for the water horse of the English title; the lithograph has no connection to the tune.
Morrison printed the melody in the first number of the journal Mannin in 1913, together with a story told by Quane.[3][2] In that tale, an old man with long white hair rowed a strangely shaped boat toward Dalby on summer evenings, paused off Niarbyl Point to sing the air, and then rowed off to the south-west, never to be identified, though the people of Dalby kept his song and passed it down.[3] The same note observes that the melody climbs and falls through the minor scale.[3] The tune was gathered without words, and both English and Manx lyrics have since been written for it; it also circulates under the English name "Song of the Water Kelpie."[4] The Traditional Tune Archive renders the Manx title itself as "Song of the Kelpie," so sources differ on what the name means.[5]
Colin Jerry later included the air in his 1979 collection of Manx songs and dances, Kiaull yn Theay, and it also appears in Matthiesen's Waltz Book II (1995), with the Tune Archive classing it as a slow air or waltz in 3/4 time in B minor.[5] The band Solas recorded it on Sunny Spells and Scattered Showers (1997).[5] Culture Vannin, which counts it among the loveliest of Manx tunes, in 2017 shared a video of the young Manx harper Mera Royle playing it.[2] National Dulcimer Champion Linda Brockinton includes it, credited as traditional Manx, in Simply Dulcimer, her own 37-page collection of fingerstyle dulcimer arrangements drawn mostly from Scottish and Irish music.[6]
Sources
- Manx Notes (Stephen Miller): "'For the first time in public' (1907). 'Tar dys Mannin' & 'Bahie Veg'".
- Culture Vannin: "Arrane Ghelby performed by Mera Royle".
- A Manx Notebook: "Arrane Ghelbee" (from Mannin no. 1, 1913).
- Manx Music and Dance: "Arrane Ghelby".
- Traditional Tune Archive: "Arrane Ghelby".
- Linda Brockinton: "Simply Dulcimer".
- Image: Eugène Delacroix, The Wild Horse, or Frightened Horse Leaving the Water, lithograph, 1828. The Cleveland Museum of Art.