The Dawning Of The Day: A Song History
"The Dawning of the Day," in Irish "Fáinne Geal an Lae," is a name shared by more than one old Irish air.[1][2] The Traditional Tune Archive keeps separate entries for a harp air, which Edward Bunting's collection of 1840 credits to the seventeenth-century Sligo harper Thomas O'Connellan, and for a different melody printed by P. W. Joyce.[2][1] By the Archive's account, Joyce's melody is the one most often heard today, played as a march as well as a slow air.[1]
Alphonse Legros, Landscape: Sunrise, drypoint, c. 1857–1911. Shown for its title; it has no connection to the tune.
The Irish song that gave that melody its name, set to words from an anonymous eighteenth-century love poem according to the Tune Archive, appeared in Edward Walsh's Irish Popular Songs (Dublin, 1847) beside an English verse translation by Walsh himself.[1][3][4] In his introduction Walsh says he took care to make each translation fit the measure of the tune the Irish original was sung to.[3] The Tune Archive says Walsh published the air as well, but the Internet Archive catalogues his book as without music and its scan of the song shows words only; the melody does appear in notation as No. 8 of Joyce's Ancient Irish Music (Dublin, 1873).[1][3][4] In his note to it, Joyce wrote that the Irish song was "still well known in the southern counties," that copies of Walsh's book had grown hard to find, and that in his own youth a rough English rendering circulated as a street ballad.[4] Alongside the Irish text he set his own near-literal translation, identified Lough Lene, the lake named in the song, with the Killarney lakes, and observed that the tune uses just two four-bar strains, in the order first, second, second, first.[4]
Joyce's melody is also the tune of "On Raglan Road," Patrick Kavanagh's poem from the 1940s; the writer Benedict Kiely remembered Kavanagh, around the time the poem was first published, wanting to know if it would go to "The Dawning of the Day," and Luke Kelly recorded the song with The Dubliners in 1971.[1][5] Judy House includes "The Dawning of the Day" in Jam Across America, a 178-page jam book for mountain dulcimer clubs, with songs chosen from the playlists of clubs around the country and arranged in DAD tuning.[6]
Sources
- The Traditional Tune Archive: "Dawning of the Day (2) (The)" (annotation).
- The Traditional Tune Archive: "Dawning of the Day (1) (The)" (annotation).
- Internet Archive: "Edward Walsh, Irish Popular Songs (1847)".
- Internet Archive: "P. W. Joyce, Ancient Irish Music (1873)".
- IMRO: "On Raglan Road Is Ireland's Favourite Folk Song".
- Judy House: "Jam Across America".
- Image: Alphonse Legros, Landscape: Sunrise, drypoint, c. 1857–1911. The Cleveland Museum of Art.