Tobin's Favourite: A Song History

← Back to Browse By Song

"Tobin's Favourite," also spelled "Tobin's Favorite," is an Irish double jig in D major, built from two repeated strains.[1] Its name honors Adam Tobin, a self-taught flute player, fiddler and piper from Mooncoin, County Kilkenny (O'Neill, by this account, put the parish in Tipperary), who emigrated in the 1880s, made his home in Chicago, and died there in 1920.[2] Tobin was one of the Chicago musicians who advised Francis O'Neill and passed tunes to him, and O'Neill printed the jig under Tobin's name in Music of Ireland (1903).[2] The Traditional Tune Archive adds that the melody reached O'Neill by way of the Chicago fiddler James Kennedy, and that O'Neill included it again in Dance Music of Ireland (1907).[1]

Etching of the Chicago stockyards seen from above, with long rows of pens, walkways and factory buildings.

Joseph Pennell, Stockyards, Chicago, etching, 1910. Chicago in 1910, the city where Adam Tobin, for whom the jig is named, lived until his death in 1920; the etching has no connection to the tune.

The tune has gone by several other names, among them "Tobin's Fancy," "Tobin's Jig" and "Follow Me around the Garden."[1] The fiddler Michael Coleman recorded it for Victor on June 27, 1927, as "Tobin's Fancy," a violin solo with piano.[3] In the same year a Columbia 78 by Patrick Doran, Joseph Sullivan and Joe Owens carried it as "Follow Me around the Garden."[1] Recordings since then run from John Vesey's album Sligo Fiddler (about 1957) to Chulrua in 1998 and John Carty and Brian Rooney around 2011.[4]

The jig is widely played at sessions: among the double jigs that irishtune.info members report playing, it ranks seventeenth.[5] Mark Gilston arranges "Tobin's Favourite" for solo mountain dulcimer in DAD tuning in Irish Tunes For Dulcimer, Volume 2, the second book of his two-volume collection, delivered as a 52-page PDF with every tune also in a file of its own.[6]

Our book that contains the song "Tobin's Favourite"

Sources

  1. Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation: Tobin's Favorite".
  2. Lives of the Pipers: "Adam Tobin".
  3. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Victor 20916".
  4. irishtune.info: "Tobin's Favorite".
  5. irishtune.info: "Top Session Double Jigs".
  6. Mark Gilston: "Irish Tunes For Dulcimer, Volume 2".
  7. Image: Joseph Pennell, Stockyards, Chicago, etching, 1910. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

← Back to Browse By Song