Is “The Days of the Kerry Dancing” a happy song? Well, no.

I’ve had the privilege of singing most of the pieces I write about on this site with my wonderful choir the Cherry Creek Chorale, and I remember getting the sheet music for “Kerry Dancing” on the first night of rehearsal for our March 2023 Celtic concert. As I glanced through it and read the words I felt a sense of longing and sadness. Why was that?

The first clue is the word “oh.” Not to belabor the point here too much, but have you ever thought about the rich array of meanings in this two letter word? It can mean:

Surprise, delight – “Oh! How nice!”
Anger – “Oh! You idiot!”
Pain – “Oh! That wasp stung me!”
Disappointment – “Oh! You’re not coming after all?”
Longing – “Oh! How I wish he would come!”

The first line of the song expresses that final meaning: “Oh! The days of the Kerry dancing!” The third line starts with “Oh, for” – another expression of longing or desire:

Oh,  for one of those hours of gladness
gone, alas! Like our youth too soon!

You can mentally insert the words “I long” or “I wish” in between the “oh” and the “for.” It’s a lament for the good old days, when young people gathered and danced without a care in the world. The golden light of nostalgia bathes the scene, and the speaker forgets that all was not perfect back then: perhaps so-and-so had started flirting with someone else, or a parent had been injured or fallen sick, or there was a threat of war or eviction hanging in the air. All of those negative details have been edited out.

Certain highlights come clearly to the speaker’s mind. There’s a golden couple, Eily who’s sweet and Thady who’s proud. There’s the caller, telling everyone to take their places, and the piper tuning up. There’s the laughter and delight. And how do those memories affect the speaker? This is where the point of the song becomes very clear: It fills his heart with tears, because the happy years are dead and the merry hearts are fled. Remembering past joys doesn’t make the speaker happy, as it would if he were happy in the present. Have you ever thought about that paradox? It just occurred to me as I was writing this paragraph. A happy old person who’s lived a good life and is surrounded by family and friends will look back on past joys and smile. Life was good back then, and it’s good now. But if the present is lonely, or dreary, or tragic, then happy memories just emphasize the contrast. A quick google search yielded the term “nostalgic depression” for this type of feeling, and that seems a correct term for what’s going on here.

The speaker isn’t asking for a full return to his youth. If he could have just an hour of that time it would be enough. Whenever this sentiment pops up in the lyrics of a song I’m discussing I’m reminded of that scene from Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town when Emily is granted her wish after death to re-visit one day of her life and says upon her return to the grave, “O earth, you’re too wonderful for anyone to realize you.” She asks the Stage Manager, “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?- every, every minute?”  And he replies, “No. _ The saints and poets, maybe-they do some.” (Opinions vary on this play; I tend to oscillate between regarding it as profound or sappy.) It’s another one of those paradoxes of human experience: if we were really conscious of time’s passing every minute, straining to hold onto its fleeting happiness, then we’d have no attention to spare for the happiness itself.

The piece is often categorized as a folk song, but there’s a known author for both the words and the music: James Lynam Molloy, an Irishman who lived from 1837-1909. Note the following from Wikipedia:

From early on, his music included songs relating to Ireland, and although many of them made no use of Irish traditional melodic or rhythmic elements, they gained such a popularity in the early 20th century that some gained a folksong status. These include his still-famous “The Kerry Dance” (1879).

So it’s a tribute to how authentically Irish this song seems that it’s been labeled as folk music, but maybe Mr. Molloy would rather get the credit. Kind of a backhanded compliment, I guess. His songs are now well past any copyright date and in the public domain, so there’s no financial loss to his estate, just a reputational one.

Molloy pictured his dancers capering about in “the glen of a summer night,” so the young people aren’t in some kind of formal ballroom setting but outdoors in a natural clearing in the woods. It all sounds quite spontaneous, as “the boys began to gather” when they hear “the Kerry piper’s tuning.” Two words in that line need explaining: “Kerry” is the westernmost county in Ireland, and the “piper” is indeed playing bagpipes, specifically Irish ones, called “uilleann pipes,” or “elbow pipes.” Scottish bagpipes are powered by the player’s breath, but an Irish piper squeezes a set of bellows under his elbow. I got rather tickled by this information from Wikipedia:

The bellows not only relieve the player from the effort needed to blow into a bag to maintain pressure, they also allow relatively dry air to power the reeds, reducing the adverse effects of moisture on tuning and longevity. Some pipers can converse or sing while playing.

There are many renditions of this song on YouTube but only one choral version that I could find. It has an absolutely killer piano accompaniment:

And while I do like the young Julie Andrews’ performance, this woman is simply marvelous–no video, just a digital track from an album:

https://johnwolohan.bandcamp.com/album/o-the-days-of-the-kerry-dancing

Here are the complete lyrics: