Template:Pagina principale/Vetrina
Played by: Michael Coleman
Source: Soundcloud
Image: Michael Coleman - (Jan 31, 1891 - Jan , 1945)
Charlie Piggott, in his book Blooming Meadows (1998, written with Fintan Vallely), relates the story regarding a remark by Coleman, who was at the time living in New York.
Coleman was performing when a female admirer asked her companion to find out from the fiddler whether or not he was married. “Tell Her I Am,” he replied, in an inside joke. Piggott also relates that Galway accordion player Joe Cooley (who also lived for some time in America) also fancied the jig, which he learned in the 1940’s in Dublin from the playing of Kilkenny fiddler John Kelly.
A bemused Cooley often, tongue in cheek, asked his flatmate for the name of the tune, anticipating the reply. Invariable it came in a tortured, garbled, improperly understood variation, “Tell Her Who Am I.” Paul de Grae suggests "the slightly cryptic title may be a garbling of "A Tailor I am"; there is an unrelated jig of that title"[1].
Coleman’s setting is certainly the standard setting nowadays for the tune, although not the earliest one. O’Neill printed the tune in 1903, in a different setting then the one employed by Coleman (who was a boy of 12 in County Sligo at the time).
William Bradbury Ryan's Ryan’s Mammoth Collection (1883) includes the tune in a setting more akin to Coleman’s, and which is also similar to a setting collected by Church of Ireland cleric and uilleann piper James_Goodman_ (1828-1896) in Munster in the 1860s, under the title “Humors of Ballymore (2) (The).”
...more at: Tell her I am - full Score(s) and Annotations
X:0 T:Tell Her I Am [1] M:6/8 L:1/8 B:O'Neill's Music of Ireland. 1850 Melodies, 1903, p. 140, no. 749 Z:François-Emmanuel de Wasseige K:G V:1 clef=treble name="0." [V:1] d|edB GAB|DED GAB|DED cBA|BGE E2d| edB GAB|DED GAB|AGE cBA|BGG G2:| |:d|B/c/dB def|gfe dBG|ABA AGA|BGE E2d| Bcd def|{a}gfe dBG|AGE cBA|BGG G2:|]