Strung Out Episode 142. THE HISTORY, MYSTERY AND TRAGEDY OF DANNY BOY

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The song Danny Boy is considered an Irish Song.  Like a lot of Irish songs and the Irish themselves, it is complicated.  The melody being an ancient bardic tune, it was collected by well-meaning publishers of Irish Airs back in the 17th and 18th Century.  
However the words came from Fred Weatherly, a lawyer who lived in Bath, England in the county of Somerset.  Those words were written prior to WWI and they contain what seems to allude to a person going off to war.  Or does it?  The fact that Weatherly's son, Danny, does go off to war and never comes home in WWI seems to give the lyrics a chilling sense of prophecy.  Yet, the lyrics weren't married to the melody until Weatherly's sister-in-law, Margaret sent him the melody in her own hand from the Neosho mining operation near the Ouray, Colorado in the San Juan Mountains.  That the origin of the song itself has such an emotional background to its creation is one thing.  The song resonating with the diaspora of Irish in North America was another.   It is a song that is both revered and reviled.  Mainly because the challenge of the song itself makes a beautiful delivery something than can go off mark in a crowded boisterous pub.    We hear on this podcast, courtesy of the Library of Congress, the original first recorded version of the song, sung by Ernestine Schuman-Heink in 1915.  The second version was recorded by Jim Sundberg of Martin McCormack singing Danny Boy at the Historic Elk Rapids Town Hall almost a century later.   

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