Annotation:Stoneybatter (1)
STONEYBATTER [1] (Bóthar na gCloch). AKA - "Stony Batter." AKA and see “Fill the Bumper Fair,” “Hey for Stoney Batter,” “Love and Whiskey.” Irish, Slig Jig (9/8 time). G Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). AABB. Breathnach (1963) identifies this tune as a variant of “Bob and Joan,” “Boban John,” or (in older collections) “Bobbing Joan,” a tune commonly found in 18th century collections. He prints this verse:
Hi for Bob and Joan, Hi for Stoneybatter,
Leave your wife at home, or surely I’ll be at her.
Stoneybatter is a Dublin street, as explained in William Palmer’s Recollections of a Visit to Great Britain and Ireland in the Summer of 1862 (Quebec, 1863, pp. 52-53):
I could not think of leaving Dublin without having a ramble in a well-known street, called Stoneybatter, a multum in parvo mere Hibernico business locality, celebrated for its humourous, ready-witted, active residents—“some of the rale ould shtock” of the Emerald Isle—famed in days of yore for tatterdemalions, fiddling, dancing, singing, whisky-drinking, ventilating drapery, gymnastics, shillelaghs, and battles royal; and where a motley, ill-regulated police, or guardians of the night, ‘yclept “Charleys,” were not only despised for their unwelcome intrusion, but often obliged to take to their heels and beat a helter-skelter retreat, while defiance was being hurled after them in the shape of brickbats, potatoes, turf, and other familiar missiles. While some were hunted like bag foxes, others having been cornered up like badgers, were allow to sneak off, with “fainting steps and slow,” carrying with them indelible impressions of knuckles—as hard as the knockers of Newgate—of the leathering heroes of Stoneybatter, whose ideas of civilization and the golden rule had become visionary by the too frequent apllication of Paddy’s Eye Water, which screwed up all the faculties of the minds of both sexes to such an uproarious point of action, that the inhabitants of Pandemonium might be said to be Quakers in comparison to the boozers of Stoneybatter. Here is a jollification chorus:
Whilliloo, hubbaboo, whack, burra!
Tear away, fight away, Erin-go-bragh!
Stoneybatter for ever, and whisky agra—
Whoo! Who dare cough?
See also the related “Butterfly (3) (The).”
