Annotation:Paddy O Blarney (1)

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PADDY O' BLARNEY [1]. English, Scottish; Air (6/8 time). D Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). One Part (O'Flannagan): AABB (Aird). There are a few (English) songs that feature the stereotypical comic character Paddy O'Blarney. One was by written and composed by English composer, singer and song-writer Charles Dibdin [1] (1745-1814), performed by him in his entertainment Will of the Wisp (1795), and much anthologized in songsters such as Edinburgh music-seller Archibald MacGoun's Songster's Favourite Companion (1802). It begins:

Is't my country, you'd know? I'm an Irishman born,
And they christen'd my Paddy O'Blarney;
In haymaking time I stepp'd over one morn,
All the way from the Lakes of Killaryney.
Turn'd my hand to just whatever came in my way,
To be sure, while the sun shin'd, I did not make hay;
Spoken: [Well, then, you know the wives and daughters;
of the farmers won't--well, they won't--]
Have plenty of cause to remember the day]
When they first saw Paddy O'Blarney.

Another comic song featuring the character (from The Encyclopædia of Comic Songs, 1820, p. 447) commences:

Sure never a lad loved like Paddy O'Blarney,
Whose heart was pierced through by Sally Dalarney;
Och, she was a lass of the first kind of breeding,
And ne'er spake a word all the time she was feeding.
Something odd too, it is, and perhaps you may think,
She had just the same way when she happen'd to drink;
Och, the devil may bless the bright eyes of Delarney,
For piercing the heart of poor Paddy O'Blarney.

Source for notated version:

Printed sources: Aird (Aird’s 6th and Last Volume of Scotch, English, Irish and Foreign Airs), c. 1803; No. 151, p. 56. Crosby (Crosby’s Irish Musical Repository), 1808. O'Flannagan (The Hibernia Collection), 1860; p. 34 ('Patrick O'Flannagan' was a pen-name for Boston publisher Elias Howe).

Recorded sources:

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