Annotation:Gramachree

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GRAMACHREE. AKA and see "Will you go to Flanders?," "Harp that once through Tara's halls (The)," "Molly Asthore," "Little Molly O!," "Graidh Mo Chroidhe," "Gramachree Molly," "Maid in Bedlam." Irish, Air (4/4 time). G Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). AB (O'Farrell): AABBCC (Colclough). A tune dating from the time of the Confederation of Kilkenny (1642-1648) as it is alluded to in a pamphlet in Dublin in 1737, and "purloined," asserts Grattan Flood (1906), by James Oswald in 1742. However, provenance is debated, and their are Scottish claims to the melody as well (see the excellent discussion in James Hogg, ‎Peter Garside and ‎Peter Horsfall's The Forest Minstrel, 2006, p. 250 [1]).

The song "Gramachree" is by the Rt. Hon. George Ogle (1742-1814), who represented the City of Dublin in Grattan's Parliament and voted against the Union with Britain. 'Gramachree' is an Englished version of the Irish Grá Mo Croi (Graidh mo chroidhe), or 'love of my heart.' The song appears in Songs of the Gael, 1st series (1922), and begins:

As down by Banna's banks I strayed
One evening in May,
The little birds, in blithest notes
Made vocal every spray.
They sang their little notes of love,
They sung them o'er and o'er.
Ah! Gra Machree ma Cholleen Oge,
'Shee Molly veg Mashtore!

A note to the song indicates the editor of Songs of the Gael was given his version of the air by a priest who had taken the tune down some fifty years before from "the singing of an old woman in County Carlow, who was then nearly a hundred years old. She had learned the version from her grandmother."

Source for notated version:

Printed sources: Colclough (Tutor for the Irish Union Pipes), c. 1830; p. 18. O'Farrell (National Irish Music for the Union Pipes), 1804; p. 46.

Recorded sources:

See also listings at:
Jane Keefer's Folk Music Index: An Index to Recorded Sources [2]
Alan Ng's Irishtune.info [3]

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