The Fairies: A Song History

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"The Fairies" is among the alternate names given for the Fairies' Hornpipe, an Irish hornpipe in G major built from two repeated strains, known in Irish as Cornphíopa na Sióg.[1] The earliest printings found in the sources consulted here are in Francis O'Neill's collections The Music of Ireland (1903) and The Dance Music of Ireland (1907); it was later taken up in tin whistle tutors and session books.[1][2]

Watercolor of a fairy queen in a blue gown and a fairy king in red facing each other in a windblown meadow, small elves crouching in the grass.

Arthur Rackham, And Now They Never Meet in Grove or Green, pen and black ink and watercolor, 1908. Fairies gathered in a windswept meadow, shown for the tune's title; Rackham drew it for Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and it has no connection to the tune.

The piper Séamus Ennis liked to introduce it with a legend: a young man who had strayed from his road after a dance fell asleep in a field and woke to fairies dancing to the tune, and his neighbours believed him only when no one, however old, had heard what he played.[2] The Traditional Tune Archive proposes a more earthly parent, suggesting the hornpipe grew from "Mór Chluana" ("More of Cloyne"), a slow air that P. W. Joyce took down from Lewis O'Brien of Coolfree, County Limerick, in 1852.[2][3] O'Brien described Mór as the guardian fairy of Cloyne in County Cork.[3] Joyce printed the air in his Ancient Irish Music, first published in Dublin in 1873.[4]

Ennis recorded the hornpipe around 1961, and later recordings include Chieftains 8, a recording by Mick Moloney with Eugene O'Donnell and others, and the Tulla Céilí Band; the Cape Breton fiddler Brenda Stubbert's setting appeared in print in 1994.[1][2] On the mountain dulcimer, "Fairies, The" is among the forty titles listed for Mark Gilston's Irish Tunes For Dulcimer, Volume 2, apart from "King Of The Fairies"; the listing gives the title only, so it does not confirm that this is the same hornpipe, but like every piece in the book it is set for solo dulcimer in DAD tuning, with a separate PDF for each tune.[5]

Our book that contains the song "The Fairies"

Sources

  1. Irishtune.info: "Fairies' Hornpipe".
  2. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Fairies' Hornpipe (The)".
  3. The Traditional Tune Archive: "More of Cloyne".
  4. Irish Traditional Music Archive: "Ancient Irish Music, ed. P. W. Joyce (1873)".
  5. Mark Gilston: "Irish Tunes For Dulcimer, Volume 2".
  6. Image: Arthur Rackham, And Now They Never Meet in Grove or Green, pen and black ink and watercolor, 1908. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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