Annotation:Moving Bogs (1) (The)
X:1 T:Moving Bogs [1], The R:Reel M:4/4 L:1/8 K:G A|BG (3AGF GBAF|D2 CD =FDCE|DG (3AGF GABc|d^cde fd=cA| BG (3AGF GBAF|D2 (3FED ADFE|DG (3AGF GABc|dfe^c d||B=c| dg{a}gf gbag|fd (3ddd fdcA|dg{a}gf gbag|fgaf ~g3 f| defg a2 ag|fd (3ed^c defg|af (3gfe fde^c|dfe^c d3||
MOVING BOGS [1], THE (Na Portaigh Chreathaca). AKA - "The Moving Bogs of Powelsboro." "Flowers of Limerick (3)," "Miss Wallace (1)," "Wallace Twins (The)," "Upper Room (The)," "Upstairs in a Tent (1)." Irish, Reel. G Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). AB (Breathnach, Cranitch, Harker/Rafferty, Moylan): AAB (Mulvihill, O'Neill). The great Sligo fiddler James Morrison recorded the melody in the 1930's. Editor David Taylor (1992) believes "The Flowers of Limerick" (AKA "The Bunch of Keys") to be related to this tune. One wag renamed the tune "The PortaJohn" after the ubiquitous portable rest rooms at festivals. County Sligo fiddler James Morrison and accordion player Peter "P.J." Conlon recorded the reel in New York in 1924, and the pair, along with flute player Tom Morrison, recorded it again in 1929.
Moving bogs could be serious business, however. A notable tragedy occurred in the Sliabh Luachra region of Ireland during Christmas, 1896, when eight members of the Donnelly family were swept away as they slept peacefully in their cottage near Gneeveguilla. A landslide cause a huge portion of bog to float down the valley of the Owenacree river, with some material found to have come to rest fourteen miles away. A 13-year-old female child of the family, Katie, survived because she was staying with relatives several miles away. Later, after marrying, she returned to the site of the family homestead, moved in and raised her family there. She died in 1964 and was buried in Gneeveguilla (Hickey, Stone Mad for Music, 1999).
Fr. John Quinn links "Upstairs in a Tent (1)" with the "Moving Bog (1) (The)" family of tunes; unusually the second strain of each melody is the more closely related, with the first strains being cognate but more distantly so than the second. Fr. Quinn, finding no earlier instance of a member of the tune family with the name "Moving Bogs", suspects that this title was imposed by editor Miles Krassen in the mid-1970's when he published his version of O'Neill's Music of Ireland. Francis O'Neill himself printed the tune as "Miss Wallace (1)" (DMI, 1907), and "Wallace Twins (The)" (WSGM, 1922), while Brendan Breathnach collected it as "Upper Room (The)" (CRÉ I, 1963).
