Eugene Dunphy explores the history of a Famine lament
In August 1913, John McCormack took a well-earned holiday on the outskirts of Dublin. Renting a large red-brick house on the Trimleston estate in Booterstown, the property of Colonel Arthur Henry Courtenay, the world-famous tenor from Athlone collected from the gatekeeper six verses of an Irish ballad.
On returning to America, he sent the lyrics of this ballad, ‘Skibbereen’, to the New York Advocate, asking readers if they could provide him with the name of the lyricist, adding that he was going to sing it on the 22nd of November 1913, at an afternoon concert in Carnegie Hall.
According to the old gatekeeper, said McCormack, ‘Skibbereen’ may have been composed by Frances Isabelle Parnell, sister of Charles Stewart Parnell, or by Denis Florence McCarthy.
With no definitive evidence to suggest that either poet penned the words, the ballad, alas, must be consigned to that unfortunate category of ‘Anonymous’. We can say for certain that it was written about the horrors of famine which gripped the West Cork town of Skibbereen between 1845 and 1852, and that parts of the melody were the same as that which accompanied a much older song, ‘Irish Molly-O’, the words of which were published in 1842, in the Dublin University Magazine, the melody appearing five years later in Elias Howe’s New Violin Without a Master (published in Boston). Here’s the chorus:
She’s modest and she’s beautiful,
the fairest I have known,
The primrose of Ireland, all
blooming here alone;
For wheresoever I go, the only one
entices me, is Irish Molly-O.
A few bars of the ‘Irish Molly-O’ melody were also incorporated into ‘Patrick Sheehan’, a song Charles Kickham, who used the pseudonym ‘Darby Ryan, Junior’, the song being first published on the 7th of October 1857, in the Kilkenny Journal.
As for ‘Skibbereen’, it would later be attributed to at least another two writers. The verses were included in ‘Wearing of the Green’, a songbook published in 1869, in Boston, Massachusetts, the accompanying note stating that the author’s name was ‘Patrick Carpenter’, and that it was sung to the martial-sounding air, ‘The Wearing of the Green’.
Little is known of Patrick Carpenter, save to say that as the years rolled on, some speculated that he may have been a poet from West Cork; then again, others began to wonder if the verses were composed by Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa.
When it comes to ballads, attribution of authorship can be a spurious pastime, in that it can lead readers to definitively connect a song to a particular name, what psychologists sometimes call ‘association of ideas.’
Continue reading in this week’s Ireland’s Own
Lyrics
Father dear, I oft times hear you talk
of Erin’s Isle,
Of her lofty hills and valleys green,
her mountains rude and wild;
They say it is a pretty place wherein
a prince might dwell,
Then why did you abandon it, the
reason, pray, me tell?
My boy, I loved our native land, with
energy and pride,
But oh, a blight came on my land,
my sheep and cattle died;
The rents and taxes were to pay, I
could not them redeem,
And that’s the cruel reason why I left
old Skibbereen.
Oh, it’s well do I remember that
bleak December day,
The landlord and the sheriff came to
drive us all away;
They set the roof on fire with their
demon low-down spleen,
And that’s another reason why I left
old Skibbereen.
Your mother too, God rest her soul,
lay on the snowy ground,
She fainted o’er in anguish, seeing
the desolation round;
She never rose, but passed away
from life to immortal dream,
And found a quiet grave, my boy, in
dear old Skibbereen.
It’s well I do remember the year of
forty-eight,
When I arose with Erin’s boys to
battle ’gainst the fate;
I was hunted through the mountain
like a traitor to the Queen,
And that’s another reason why I left
old Skibbereen.
Oh, father dear, the day will come
when vengeance’s hand will call,
And we will rise with Erin’s boys to
rally one and all,
I’ll be the man to lead the van,
beneath our flag of green,
And loud and high we’ll raise the
cry, ‘Revenge for Skibbereen!’
