The Galway Shawl: A Song History
"The Galway Shawl" is an Irish courtship song with no known author; the sources consulted here treat it as traditional.[1] Its story is a brief romance: a chance meeting with a girl in a Galway shawl, an evening of music at her family's home, and a parting the young man cannot put out of his mind.[2] The encounter takes place at Oranmore, in County Galway.[1] Its earliest known version was noted by the collector Sam Henry in 1936 from Bridget Kealey of Dungiven, County Derry, and appears as number H652 in Sam Henry's Songs of the People.[1]
George Bellows, Irish Town, lithograph, 1923. Women in long shawls on an Irish town street, shown for the song's title; the lithograph does not show Oranmore and has no connection to the song.
In notes to a Fred Jordan album, Mike Yates reports that he could trace no writer for the words, and that the melody also circulates under other names, among them "Eochaill."[1] The song crossed the Atlantic, too: the Traditional Ballad Index lists a Newfoundland version sung by Lou O'Driscoll in the MacEdward Leach collection.[2] The singer Margaret Barry was recorded performing it by Alan Lomax in 1953 and by Ewan MacColl in 1956, and later recordings range from The Dubliners to Dervish.[1] It has become popular both as a song and as a waltz.[3]
Bing Futch sets it in DAD tuning in Mountain Dulcimer In The Band (Book 6 - Celtic), a sixteen-song Celtic collection for mountain dulcimer from J.O.B. Entertainment that includes play-along accompaniment tracks.[4]
Sources
- Mainly Norfolk: "The Galway Shawl".
- Traditional Ballad Index: "Galway Shawl, The".
- Clare County Library: "The Galway Shawl" (Micho Murrihy, Carroll Mackenzie Collection).
- J.O.B. Entertainment: "Bing Futch, Mountain Dulcimer In The Band (Book 6 - Celtic)".
- Image: George Bellows, Irish Town, lithograph, 1923. The Cleveland Museum of Art.