The Pirate O'Reilly: A Song History

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Bing Futch's "The Pirate O'Reilly" is the one piece of his own in Mountain Dulcimer In The Band (Book 3), a book otherwise made up of his arrangements of well-known tunes, and the listing credits it to Futch as composer, says it comes from his album 21, and gives a copyright date of 1987.[1] It also appears in All Over The Map, whose listing repeats the composer and album credits and gives the tuning as DAC.[2] Futch's own store calls All Over The Map his first mountain dulcimer book and lists the tune among the works of his own collected there.[3]

Painting of a large sailing warship firing a cannon salute amid smoke, with smaller boats on calm water

English Warship Firing a Salute, oil on canvas, 1690. A navy ship rather than a pirate's, shown for its subject; it has no connection to the piece.

Futch's DulcimerDownloads biography places him in the post-punk act Crazed Bunnyz in 1986 and has him co-founding Mohave, in which he played mountain dulcimer, in 1999.[4] Beyond naming the album 21, the sources consulted here do not say how the piece was first played or recorded, and they do not say who O'Reilly is or whether he was a real person.[1][2][3][4]

Our books that contain the song "The Pirate O'Reilly"

Sources

  1. Bing Futch: "Mountain Dulcimer In The Band (Book 3)".
  2. Bing Futch: "All Over The Map".
  3. BingFutch.com: "Bing Futch - All Over The Map".
  4. DulcimerDownloads: "Bing Futch".
  5. Image: English Warship Firing a Salute, oil on canvas, 1690. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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