Annotation:Lad O'Beirne's Hornpipe
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LAD O'BEIRNE'S (HORNPIPE). AKA - "Reavy's Hornpipe." Irish, Hornpipe. G Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). AABB (Cranford/Holland): AA'BB' (Reavy). Composed by prolific tune composer and fiddler Ed Reavy (1898-1988) originally from County Cavan, Ireland, who lived in Corktown, near Philadelphia, Pa., for many years. It was dedicated to the great New York fiddler Lad O'Beirne
as O'Beirne loved the tune, although it was originally written for Reavy's son, Ed Reavy Jr., a lover of hornpipes. The younger Reavy especially liked "Harvest Home" and his father promised to write him a hornpipe in the same vein. Reavy Jr. was somewhat skeptical, as he considered "Harvest Home" a masterpiece, but a few weeks later the elder returned home from a dance and played the hornpipe for his son, and "when I heard that tune, that's when I realized that he was a genius." Ed Reavy Jr. thinks it is different from the sort of hornpipes his father usually wrote. The piece was recorded by the great County Sligo/New York fiddler Michael Coleman in 1944, and later, in the 1960's by Sean Ryan (although it appeared under the title "Flowing Tide (The)," a title that usually goes with another hornpipe).
Source for notated version: Ed Reavy's son, fiddler Joseph Reavy [Fiddler Magazine].
Printed sources: Cranford (Jerry Holland: The Second Collection), 2000; No. 205, p. 76. Fiddler Magazine, vol. 3, No. 2, Summer 1996; p. 35. Reavy (The Collected Compositions of Ed Reavy), No. 96, pp. 108-109.
Recorded sources: Ossian OSS 49, Mick Moloney - "The Music of Ed Reavy." Outlet PTI CD 1014, Sean McGuire & Joe Burke - "Two Champions" (1971. appears as "The Flowing Tide"). Rounder RO 7023, Natalie MacMaster - "No Boundaries" (1996. Setting learned from Cheticamp, Cape Breton, fiddler Arthur Muise. The hornpipe was a favorite of Cape Breton fiddler Angus Chisholm who learned it from a 1962 recording of Sean Maguire). 'Ón tSean-Am Anall' {Danny O'Donnell} (appears as second of "Reavy's Hornpipe's").
See also listings at:
Alan Snyder's Cape Breton Fiddle Recording Index [1]
Jane Keefer's Folk Music Index: An Index to Recorded Sources [2]
Alan Ng's Irishtune.info [3]
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