Annotation:Jackson's Bouner Bougher

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JACKSON'S BOUNER BOUGHER. AKA and see "Bouner Bouger," "Cordal Jig," "Darby Gallagher's," "Five Hundred a Year," "Idle Road (The)," "If I Had in the Clear," "Land of Potatoes," "Morgan Rattler." Irish, Jig. D Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). AABB. A composition of the famous 18th century gentleman musician Walker 'Piper' Jackson, of the townland of Lisduan, in the parish of Ballingarry, Limerick. The tune was first published by Samuel Lee in Dublin c. 1774 in Jackson's Celebrated Irish Tunes, a volume reprinted in 1790. Smollet Holden included it in his Collection of Old Established Irish Slow & Quick Tunes (Dublin, 1805) as "Bouner Bouger." O'Neill (1913) states that it is the original of "Morgan Rattler," before being embellished with variations, and Breathnach (1996) identifies "Darby Gallagher" as another title appearing in County Fermanagh musician Patrick Gunn's manuscript. The song "Oh had I in the clear but Five Hundred a year," published by B. Cooke, Dublin, c. 1795, was written to the melody, from which the alternate titles "Five Hundred a Year," "If I Had in the Clear" and "Land of Potatoes (The)" comes from. Breathnach suggests the title might be a corruption of the Irish Bonn ar bóthar.

Source for notated version:

Printed sources: Aird (Selection of Scotch, English, Irish and Foreign Airs, vol. 3), 1788; No. 546, p. 208. Holden (Collection of Old Established Irish Slow & Quick Tunes), 1805; p. 11. Mulhollan (Selection of Irish and Scots Tunes), 1804; p. 47.

Recorded sources:

See also listing at:
Alan Ng's Irishtune.info [1]

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