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Irish Ballads
The following are often-sung Irish folk ballads and folk songs. The songs are arranged by theme under the categories "Politics and soldiering" and "Non-political" and are not necessarily contemporary to the events to which they relate. Songs may fit into more than one category, but where possible, are grouped uniquely to where is most appropriate. Politics and soldiering Anti-war and anti-recruiting *"Arthur McBride" – an anti-recruiting song from Donegal, probably originating during the 17th century. *"The Recruiting Sergeant" – song (to the tune of "The Peeler and the Goat") from the time of World War 1, popular among the Irish Volunteers of that period, written by Séamus O'Farrell in 1915, recorded by The Pogues. *" Mrs. McGrath" – popular among the Irish Volunteers, 1916 *"The Saxon Shilling" – written by K. T. Buggy, 1840s *"Sergeant William Bailey" – written by Peadar Kearney, recorded by Dominic Behan and Maeve Mulvany Moore *"Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye" †... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ballad
A ballad is a form of verse, often a narrative set to music. Ballads derive from the medieval French ''chanson balladée'' or ''ballade'', which were originally "dance songs". Ballads were particularly characteristic of the popular poetry and song of Britain and Ireland from the Late Middle Ages until the 19th century. They were widely used across Europe, and later in Australia, North Africa, North America and South America. Ballads are often 13 lines with an ABABBCBC form, consisting of couplets (two lines) of rhymed verse, each of 14 syllables. Another common form is ABAB or ABCB repeated, in alternating eight and six syllable lines. Many ballads were written and sold as single sheet broadsides. The form was often used by poets and composers from the 18th century onwards to produce lyrical ballads. In the later 19th century, the term took on the meaning of a slow form of popular love song and is often used for any love song, particularly the sentimental ballad of pop or roc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fiach MacHugh O'Byrne
Fiach Mac Aodha Ó Broin (anglicised as Feagh or Fiach MacHugh O'Byrne) (1534 – 8 May, 1597) was Chief of the Name of Clann Uà Bhroin (Clan O'Byrne) and Lord of Ranelagh during the Elizabethan wars against the Irish clans. Arms Background During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England, the O'Byrnes controlled territory in the Wicklow mountains south of Dublin, covering about . The fastness of the Ranelagh O'Byrnes lay toward the south, at Ballinacor in Glenmalure, where they maintained a fort near to a ford with a bridge and a castle at Drumkitt (now encompassed within Ballinacor House). The territory included the oak wood of Shillelagh and part of Co. Wexford. The Kiltimon, Downs, Cloneroe and Newrath branches of the clan were generally loyal to the Crown, having benefited under English law by primogeniture and the system of 'surrender and regrant'. The Ranelagh O'Byrnes were unsubmissive and were reckoned capable of fielding one hundred expert swordsmen, posing a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Sash
"The Sash" (also known as "The Sash My Father Wore") is a ballad from the Irish province of Ulster commemorating the victory of King William III in the Williamite War in Ireland in 1690–1691. The lyrics mention the 1689 Siege of Derry, the 1689 Battle of Newtownbutler near Enniskillen, the 1691 Battle of Aughrim, and the 1690 Battle of the Boyne. It is popular amongst Ulster loyalists and many other unionists in Northern Ireland, as well as in parts of Scotland. The melody has been traced back to the early 19th century. The tune of "The Sash" was well-known around Europe, and before the lyrics were added, it was a love song that lamented division between people. Instead of "it was old and it was beautiful", the lyrics were "she was young and she was beautiful" and is in Broadside Ballads (1787), titled "Irish Molly O". Another known printing of the tune is from 1876 including the words "The Hat My Father Wore". The song is classified in the Roud Folk Song Index as number 4796 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tommy Makem
Thomas Makem (4 November 1932 – 1 August 2007) was an internationally celebrated Irish folk musician, artist, poet and storyteller. He was best known as a member of the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. He played the long-necked 5-string banjo, tin whistle, low whistle, guitar, bodhrán and bagpipes, and sang in a distinctive baritone. He was sometimes known as "The Bard of Armagh" (taken from a traditional song of the same name) and "The Godfather of Irish Music". Biography Makem was born and raised in Keady, County Armagh (the "Hub of the Universe" as Makem always said), in Northern Ireland. His mother, Sarah Makem, was an important source of traditional Irish music, who was visited and recorded by, among others, Diane Guggenheim Hamilton, Jean Ritchie, Peter Kennedy and Sean O'Boyle. His father, Peter Makem, was a fiddler who also played the bass drum in a local pipe band named "Oliver Plunkett", after a Roman Catholic martyr of the reign of Charles II of England. His bro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Owen Roe O'Neill
Owen Roe O'Neill (Irish: ''Eoghan Ruadh Ó Néill;'' – 1649) was a Gaelic Irish soldier and one of the most famous of the O'Neill dynasty of Ulster. O'Neill left Ireland at a young age and spent most of his life as a mercenary in the Spanish Army serving against the Dutch in Flanders during the Eighty Years' War. After the Irish Rebellion of 1641, O'Neill returned and took command of the Irish Confederate Ulster Army. He is known for his victory at the Battle of Benburb in 1646. O'Neill's later years were marked by infighting amongst the Confederates, and in 1647 he led his army to seize power in the capital of Kilkenny. His troops clashed with rival forces of the Confederacy, leading to O'Neill forming a temporary alliance with Charles Coote's English Parliamentary forces in Ulster. He initially rejected a treaty of alliance between the Confederates and the Irish Royalists, but faced with the Cromwellian invasion he changed his mind. Shortly after agreeing an alliance ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Battle Of Benburb
The Battle of Benburb took place on 5 June 1646 during the Irish Confederate Wars, the Irish theatre of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. It was fought between the Irish Confederation under Owen Roe O'Neill, and a Scottish Covenanter and Anglo-Irish army under Robert Monro. The battle ended in a decisive victory for the Irish Confederates and ended Scottish hopes of conquering Ireland and imposing their own religious settlement there. Background The Scots Covenanters had landed an army in Ulster in 1642, to protect the Scottish settlers there from the massacres that followed the Irish Rebellion of 1641. They landed at Carrickfergus and linked up with Sir Robert Stewart and the Laggan Army of Protestant settlers from County Donegal in northwest Ulster. The Covenanters cleared northeastern Ulster of Irish rebels by 1643 but were unable to advance south of mid-Ulster, which was held by Owen Roe O'Neill, the general of the Irish Confederate Ulster army. In 1646, Monro led a forc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Battle Of Benburb
"The Battle of Benburb" is an Irish song commemorating the 1646 Battle of Benburb. The tune was composed by Tommy Makem, with the lyrics drawn from a nineteenth century poem by Robert Dwyer Joyce.Manganiello p.54 On 5 June 1646 Owen Roe O'Neill, the leader of the Ulster Army of the Irish Confederates, won a major victory over the Scottish Covenanter Army in Ireland at Benburb in County Tyrone. The fighting took place as part of the War of Three Kingdoms, with both sides pledging allegiance to Charles I while advancing distinctively Catholic and Protestants agendas in Ireland. O'Neill's troops defeated the Scots and pursued fugitives for miles, killing many of them and taking very few prisoners. This severely weakened the strength of the Scottish forces in Ulster, but O'Neill was unable to follow up his victory by attacking Carrickfergus as much of his army dispersed with their plunder. In the mid-nineteenth century O'Neill was revived as a hero by Irish Nationalists and it was i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Flight Of The Wild Geese
The Flight of the Wild Geese was the departure of an Irish Jacobite army under the command of Patrick Sarsfield from Ireland to France, as agreed in the Treaty of Limerick on 3 October 1691, following the end of the Williamite War in Ireland. More broadly, the term Wild Geese is used in Irish history to refer to Irish soldiers who left to serve in continental European armies in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. An earlier exodus in 1690, during the same war, had formed the French Irish Brigade, who are sometimes misdescribed as Wild Geese. By country Spanish service The first Irish troops to serve as a unit for a continental power formed an Irish regiment in the Spanish Army of Flanders in the Eighty Years' War in the 1590s. The regiment had been raised by an English Catholic, William Stanley, in Ireland from native Irish soldiers and mercenaries, whom the English authorities wanted out of the country. (See also Tudor conquest of Ireland). Stanley was given a commission b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Patrick Sarsfield
Patrick Sarsfield, 1st Earl of Lucan, ga, Pádraig Sáirseál, circa 1655 to 21 August 1693, was an Irish soldier, and leading figure in the Jacobite army during the 1689 to 1691 Williamite War in Ireland. Born into a wealthy Catholic family, Sarsfield joined a regiment recruited by James Scott, Duke of Monmouth for the 1672 to 1674 Third Anglo-Dutch War, a subsidiary of the Franco-Dutch War. After England made peace, his regiment served in the French Rhineland campaign, and when the war ended in 1678, he returned to England. Following the so-called Popish Plot, Catholics were barred from the English military, and for the next few years Sarsfield led a precarious life on the fringes of London society. When the Catholic James II came to the throne in 1685, Sarsfield served as a volunteer during Monmouth's Rebellion, and was commissioned into the Royal Army. A colonel by the time of the Glorious Revolution in November 1688, he remained loyal to James and followed him into ex ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Michael Scanlon (poet)
Michael Scanlan (10 November 1833 – 6 March 1917) was an Ireland, Irish nationalist, editor, poet and writer. He was known as the "Fenian poet" and is remembered as the author of stirring Irish ballads such as the "Bold Fenian Men" and "The Jackets Green". Life He was born in Mahoonagh, Castlemahon, County Limerick. He emigrated to the United States at fifteen years of age and with his brothers, John and Mortimer, settled in Chicago. They started a sweets (candy) business which became very successful. Scanlan joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood and wrote articles and poems for a number of newspapers.Obituary in Gaelic American, March 1917 He supported the Fenian raids, Fenian invasion of Canada (31 May 1866), following the leadership of William R. Roberts, and was a member of a body known as the Senate. After the failure of that enterprise he was appointed editor of a new newspaper, the ''Irish Republic'' on which he worked with former Irish tenant-right activist and fe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Patrick Galvin
Patrick Galvin (15 August 1927 – 10 May 2011) was an Irish poet, singer, playwright, and prose and screenwriter born in Cork's inner city. Biography Galvin was born in Cork in 1927 at a time of great political transition in Ireland. His mother was a Republican and his father a Free Stater which gave rise to ongoing political tension within the household and later informed his well loved poem "My Father Spoke with Swans" and his autobiographical memoir ''Song For a Poor Boy''. An autodidact, he came to know and love literature through the Russian, French and Irish classics. His early poetry shows the influences of Gaelic poetry whilst his later poetry reflects more international rhythms and themes. He had grown up during the time of the Spanish Civil war under the shawl of his mother's Republican politics and later discovered a great affinity with the Andalusian poet, Federico GarcÃa Lorca; these influences are evident in his epic poem about Michael Collins, 'The White Monume ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
George Sigerson
George Sigerson (11 January 1836 – 17 February 1925) was an Irish physician, scientist, writer, politician and poet. He was a leading light in the Irish Literary Revival of the late 19th century in Ireland. Doctor and scientist Sigerson was born at Holy Hill, near Strabane in County Tyrone, the son of William and Nancy (née Neilson) Sigerson. He had had three brothers James, John and William, and three sisters, Ellen, Jane and Mary Ann. He attended Letterkenny Academy but was sent by his father, William, who developed the spade mill and who played an active role in the development of Artigarvan, to complete his education in France. He studied medicine at the Queen's College, Galway, and Queen's College, Cork, and took his degree in 1859. He then went to Paris where he spent some time studying under Charcot and Duchenne at the Salpêtrière; a fellow-student was Sigmund Freud. Sigerson published successful translations of Charcot's ''Clinical Lectures'' in 1877 and 1881. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
