Annotation:Paddy Heagerty's Leather Breeches

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PADDY HEAGERTY'S LEATHER BREECHES. AKA "Old Leather Breeches." Irish, Song Air (6/8 time). G Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). AB. A 19th century comic Irish street ballad (Roud no. 923), printed on songsheets and songsters such as P.J. Kennedy’s The Universal Irish Song Book (New York, 1884). The first stanza goes:

It was at the sign of the Bell, on the road to Clonmel,
Paddy Hegarty kept a neat shebeen;
He sold pig's meat and bread, kept a good lodgin' bed,
And so well liked round the country had been;
Himself and his wife both struggled thro' life.
In the week days Pat mended the ditches,
But on Sunday he dressed in a coat of the best.
But his pride was his old leather breeches.

Source for notated version: The mid-19th century music manuscript collection of uilleann piper and Church of Ireland cleric James Goodman [Shields].

Printed sources: Shields (Tunes of the Munster Pipers), 1998; No. 181, p. 75.

Recorded sources:

See also listing at:
Hear a field recording of the song from the pub singing of John Cranny at ITMA [1]
Hear Andrew Moar's sung rendition [2]

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