Annotation:Prime's Hornpipe

Back to Prime's Hornpipe

---

PRIME'S HORNPIPE. AKA and see "Waterford Hornpipe," "O'Dwyer's Hornpipe (1)," "Muddy Water (1)," "Durrock's Hornpipe," "Dwyer's Hornpipe (2)," "Gasúr Mor (An)." Irish, Hornpipe. G Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). AABBCC. Francis O'Neill, the Chicago police chief and collector, knew the tune as "O'Dwyer's" from his boyhood days in the latter 1800's Co. Cork and printed a four-part version in his Music of Ireland (1903). The Rev. Luke Donnellan collected a similar version in County Louth in 1909 under the similar title "Dwyer's Hornpipe (2)." O'Neill remarked in Irish Folk Music: A Fascinating Hobby (19, pp. 117-118):

When quite young I heard an indifferent fiddler named Crowley, at Drimoleauge, in West Cork, play a tune which he called "O'Dwyer's Hornpipe," the tones and triplets of which haunted me more or less distinctly through life. The third strain seems to have come to me by intuition, for it is not one of the three which Crowley played. This hornpipe is and old traditional tune in Munster, but wellnigh forgotten in this generation. Somewhere, years ago, a poor and limited version of it was seen in a piano pamphlet, disguised as "De Wier's Hornpipe."

Patrick Weston Joyce [1] (1827-1914) was himself from Limerick, raised in the 1830's and '40's; his three-part version is nearly identical to "Waterford Hornpipe" printed in the first decade of the 19th century in London by uilleann piper O'Farrell. Donegal fiddler John Doherty recorded the tune as "Gasúr Mor (An)" (The Big Young Boy).

Source for notated version:

Printed sources: Joyce (Old Irish Folk Music and Songs), 1909; No. 63, p. 34.

Recorded sources:

---