Top Of Cork Road: A Song History
"Top Of Cork Road" is a double jig in D major, built of two eight-bar parts that are each played twice, and it is also widely known as "Father O'Flynn."[1][2] That second name comes from a song by Alfred Perceval Graves, set to this melody and first printed in 1874, and song and tune alike caught on widely.[1] A Boosey & Co. score of the song in the National Library of Ireland credits the words to Graves and the piano arrangement of the "old Irish melody" to Charles Villiers Stanford.[3] The Traditional Tune Archive names the model for the song's priest as Father Michael Walsh, a Buttevant man who served as parish priest of Sneem, County Kerry, until he died in 1866, and whom Graves remembered as a piper "who played delightfully."[1] By 1907 the song had become so familiar that Frank Kidson, writing about barrel-organ music, grumbled that it was ground out on every street corner.[1]
Ignaz Bruder, Barrel Organ, wood and various materials, 1839. A barrel organ of 1839, the kind of street instrument on which, Frank Kidson complained in 1907, the tune was ground out on every corner; the organ has no connection to the tune.
The tune itself is older than the song, and its homeland is not settled.[1] In Dance to the Fiddle (1981), Samuel Bayard suspected it was English rather than Irish, pointing out that English printings, from 1778, come before an Irish one of 1798; under the name "Yorkshire Lasses" it turns up in English country dance collections.[1] Bayard's collection also gives Pennsylvania versions, from the Hoge manuscript and from Hiram Horner, a fifer from Westmoreland and Fayette Counties, noted in 1960.[1] Other names attached to it include "The Rollicking Irishman," "Trample Our Enemies," "To Drink with the Devil" and plain "Cork Road."[1][2]
It was the very first tune the Clare piper Willie Clancy learned, taught to him at five by his father, Gilbert, a flute player.[1] The irishtune.info discography lists fifteen recordings made between 1923 and 2017, among them fiddler Patrick J. Gaffney in 1923, Leo Rowsome, Boys of the Lough, and Paddy Glackin with Robbie Hannan.[2] Dulcimer players will find "Top Of Cork Road" in Irish Tunes For Dulcimer, Volume 1, the opening book of Mark Gilston's two-volume gathering of great Irish melodies, which he publishes himself as sheet music that can be printed or read on a tablet or computer.[4]
Sources
- The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Father O'Flynn".
- irishtune.info: "Father O'Flynn".
- National Library of Ireland: "Father O'Flynn: old Irish melody".
- Mark Gilston: "Irish Tunes For Dulcimer, Volume 1".
- Image: Ignaz Bruder, Barrel Organ, wood and various materials, 1839. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.