Trip To Durrow: A Song History
The Trip to Durrow is an Irish reel in D major, called An Turas go Darmhagh in Irish.[1] Both the Traditional Tune Archive and Alan Ng's irishtune.info credit it to a named composer, Dan Cleary (1918–2004) of Ballinamere, County Offaly.[1][2] Cleary was a fiddler who also played uilleann pipes, piano and tin whistle, and the Tune Archive suggests the reel may go back to his youth in the Colmcille Céilí Band of Durrow, which played regularly at the Forresters Hall in Tullamore.[1] He went on to the Ballinamere Céilí Band, All-Ireland winners in the mid-1950s.[1]
Open-Ring Brooch, Irish, copper alloy with red enamel, 7th century. An Irish brooch of the seventh century, shown for the tune's Irish roots; the brooch has no connection to the tune.
Breandán Breathnach printed the tune in the first volume of Ceol Rince na hÉireann (1963), from the playing of the piper Seán Potts, and gave it three parts.[1] Sources differ on its shape: some collections set it out in two parts and others in three, and the versions indexed run the parts AABCBC, AABBCC, AABC or simply ABC.[1][2] The oldest recording indexed by irishtune.info is fiddler Seán Ryan's from 1960, with Paddy Moloney's track on the 1971 LP The Drones and the Chanters following some years later.[2] Since then it has been recorded by fiddlers such as Seán Keane and Tommy Peoples, by concertina player Noel Hill, and on several albums made for set dancing.[2] For dulcimer players, Mark Gilston sets it for solo mountain dulcimer in DAD tuning in Irish Tunes For Dulcimer, Volume 2, the second volume of a two-volume set of Irish tunes that he publishes himself.[3]
Sources
- Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation: Trip to Durrow (The)".
- irishtune.info (Alan Ng): "Trip to Durrow".
- Mark Gilston: "Irish Tunes For Dulcimer, Volume 2".
- Image: Open-Ring Brooch, Irish, copper alloy with red enamel, 7th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.