Irish music Archives - Behind the Music

“An Irish Peasant Family Discovering the Blight of Their Store” by Daniel MacDonald, 1847, public domain.

I just sat down and went through the entire Letters from Ireland book with its arrangements of Irish folk songs by Mark Brymer interspersed with texts, mostly taken from letters written in the relevant historical period. Some are what you’d call “rollicking;” others are very somber, with perhaps “Skibbereen” being the most tragic. So what’s going on here? I’m going to give some general ideas here, and if you find them interesting I’d encourage you to head on over to the page of this website where you can purchase my book that includes a chapter on each of the selections in this fabulous work.

To begin with, let me give you a couple of astoundingly obvious observations:

Léon Bazille Perrault [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

A song about singing is a great choice for a choral concert! So what’s the deal with the lyrics for this song? Well, first let me take a look at the poet himself:

Thomas Moore was an Irishman who lived from 1779-1852. He had a long and varied career, as they say, which could have ended much sooner if the duel he was supposed to fight in 1806 had not been stopped by the authorities; he forever afterward had to deal with rumors that his opponent (the editor of a critical review) had been given an unloaded pistol.

Eventually Moore was persuaded to write lyrics to some already-established Irish airs. These songs included the more-famous “The Last Rose of Summer” and “Believe Me, If All These Endearing Young Charms.”