Oh, Danny Boy, the world loves you so. This mournful paean to love and loss has moved more people to tears than probably any other song ever written. It has become so identified with Ireland, its culture, and the Irish people that it might as well be the country's national anthem.
However, there may not be a speck of anything Irish in Danny Boy whatsoever. Its lyrics were written by an Englishman — thinking of Scotland and its glens and bagpipes — who never set foot on the Emerald Isle. The tune itself — Londonderry Air — was long assumed to be an ancient Irish folk melody but now many music historians suspect it may have altogether different origins.
The words
Oh Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling
From glen to glen, and down the mountain side
The summer's gone, and all the roses falling
It's you, it's you must go and I must bide.
But come ye back when summer's in the meadow
Or when the valley's hushed and white with snow
It's I'll be here in sunshine or in shadow
Oh Danny boy, oh Danny boy, I love you so.
But when ye come, and all the flow'rs are dying
If I am dead, as dead I well may be
You'll come and find the place where I am lying
And kneel and say an Avé there for me.
And I shall hear, though soft you tread above me
And all my grave will warmer, sweeter be
For you will bend and tell me that you love me
And I shall sleep in peace until you come to me.
Those are the haunting and now immortal words penned by Frederic Edward Weatherly — who lived his whole life in England — in 1910. Weatherly was a practicing lawyer but his true calling was as a prolific lyricist. During his lifetime, he is believed to have created literally thousands of songs by writing words to put to the music of existing tunes. By best estimates, he wrote more than 3,000 songs, an amazing show of creativity.
Even more amazing is how wildly successful his avocation was. At least 1,500 of his songs were published as sheet music and the public was enchanted by many of his creations. His second most famous ballad, Roses of Picardy, sold 50,000 copies in just one month during World War I. Weatherly became one of the most famous people in England, with a music-hungry public eagerly awaiting his next piece.
When Weatherly created the verses of what would become his legendary masterpiece — Danny Boy — he set it to a very different tune than that which we know today. It attracted little notice and failed to stir the public as he hoped. Had things ended there, Ireland would have had to look elsewhere to find its signature song.
A couple of years after writing the lyrics and creating the nearly ignored first version of Danny Boy, Weatherly's sister-in-law in America sent him a piece of music: the Londonderry Air. He realized its meter would be a superb fit for Danny Boy's lyrics. He quickly tweaked his lyrics a tad to perfectly match the music's cadence and thus one of the world's favorite songs came to be published in 1913.
Many people have speculated about the meaning of the song. Who was Danny? Who was his sweetheart, left behind with a foreshadowing of Death? Why did they need to be parted?
The truth is that nobody knows. Weatherly did have a son, Daniel, who died in battle while serving as a soldier, and some have believed that the song was a tribute to him. If so, it would be truly precognitive: Daniel was still a child in 1910 and died during World War I, years after Danny Boy was written.
The sadness and longing of Danny Boy certainly spoke to people during the years of the Great War, shortly after it was published. Soldiers deployed for unknown perils and the worried wives, mothers, and girlfriends they left behind found both tears and solace in the song.
Others have believed that the words speak of an Irish couple, forced to regretful parting due to the Irish famine; Danny left for America in pursuit of work so that he could send money home to support his sweetheart but would someday come back to her. Another interpretation is much the same, but Danny is leaving behind his mum, who knows she may die before he ever returns.
Another theory is that Weatherly hoped his moving song would touch people's hearts, on both sides of the conflict, and calm "the Troubles" in northern Ireland. However, although resentments and some violence afflicted northern Ireland for decades, 1910 was not a particularly notable year for such; that would come later with the formation of the paramilitary groups and culminate in the Easter Rebellion of 1916.
There's no evidence for any of these theories and Weatherly had no known interest in or attachment to Ireland. Indeed, the lyrics evoke Scotland more than Ireland, with references to the Scottish glens and bagpipes. Weatherly himself never visited Ireland but was familiar with and fond of Scotland's natural beauty, imagery that is found in the verses of Danny Boy as well as some of his other works.
The music
When his sister-in-law sent him the music, it didn't yet have a formal name. It was known simply as "an air from Londonderry." It had been discovered by a woman — Jane Ross — living in that area around 1850-51. The story goes that she heard a blind musician performing across the street and gave him a coin to play it again for her, while she noted a musical transcription of the captivating melody. It was subsequently published in an 1855 compendium of traditional Irish music, with a brief description of how and where Ms. Ross encountered it.
From there, it wended its way into the lore of traditional Irish folk music. Claims have been made that its source was a fabled harpist of the 16th century or that traveling Irish fiddlers, flautists, and harpists stirred the souls of their countrymen with it for centuries before that.
There are problems with attributing it to Irish tradition.
The 19th century was a time of intense pursuit of knowledge. Darwin traveled the world to vastly expand understanding of biology; Mendel discovered the principles of genetic inheritance through experiments in agriculture; steamships and railways opened the world to the masses; and amateur scientists and historians compiled vast amounts of facts and information about both nature and humankind.
Folklore and cultural traditions were part of the push to learn more about the past and present. Musicologists and historians collected Irish musical works, many of which had never before been annotated into musical form. Reviewing those collections show the same tunes, with slight variations, appearing again and again but Londonderry Air — one of the most striking and memorable melodies ever composed — was absent from all of them.
Modern musicologists have analyzed the piece and found something else odd: its meter and structure are unrelated to any other work of traditional Irish music. It stands out as an oddball, unlikely to have stemmed from any common source of Irish folk music, although some find similarities with a 17th century song, Aislean an Oigfear (The Young Man's Dream).
Londonderry — now known as Derry — is a city in northern Ireland, where the English held sway for centuries. With a large population of Englishmen and Scots, mixed with native Irish, its cultural influences were a hodge-podge of three nations. If the Air was composed by someone in or near Derry, it's impossible to know whether that person was drawing on the musical traditions of Ireland, England, or Scotland.
Given that Londonderry Air seemed to pop up out of nowhere, some people have speculated that Ross might have composed it herself. Whether out of shyness and desire to avoid fame, or self-doubt about her talent, or concern that a female composer wouldn't be taken seriously, it's possible that she passed off her own work as a lost piece of ancient Irish folk music.
Irish or not, the melody became hugely popular, the base for at least a hundred different songs that used lyrics from many other songwriters. Those are now largely forgotten, forever in the shadow of Weatherly's heartrending verses.
We may never know just how Irish Danny Boy really is or is not (unless you can force a leprechaun to tell you). The origin of its melody remains an enigma wrapped within the mystery of the meaning of its lyrics.
The song is sung
Danny Boy is one of the most recorded songs of all time. Just about every singer who can so much as carry a tune in a rusty bucket has attempted it at one time or another, with great success or a sad swing-and-a-miss.
The song can be quite challenging for singers. Although they usually get the lower ranges to sound wistful and dulcet, as they reach for the high notes the voice can become shrill and strident, jarring the poignancy of the moment.
To spare you that, I present the perfect rendition of Danny Boy. It is sung a cappella (voices only, no musical instruments) with an effortless journey between its lowest tones and its soaring highs. The artists are the incredibly talented Irish lasses of Celtic Woman.
If that doesn't bring a tear to your eye, you don't have even a wee drop o' Irish in you, ye Sasanachs!
Music for new ages to come
Danny Boy — in the form of its beloved tune, Londonderry Air — continues to grow and evolve, inspiring new music for new generations. The smash hit You Raise Me Up, popularized by Josh Groban, is derived from the Air, as can be heard in its introductory violin solo. The song starts out with the plaintiveness of Danny Boy but ultimately is transformed into joy and exuberant confidence through new uplifting lyrics and a bright adaptation of the musical base of the original melody.
Just as with Danny Boy, there's also mystery and speculation about You Raise Me Up. It seems that the controversies about the original Danny Boy have carried over to its derivatives; history may not be repeating itself but it is rhyming, as the saying goes.
A musician from Iceland, Jóhann Helgason, has asserted that You Raise Me Up was plagiarized from his original song Söknuður. Norwegian composer Rolf Løvland spent a lot of time in Iceland, where Helgason's song is very popular, and quite likely he heard it performed there prior to writing You Raise Me Up.
No matter your mysterious origins and meaning, or any swirling controversies of the present day, Danny Boy, we will always love you so.
Bonus trivia
In the You Raise Me Up video there's a moment near the end when Lisa Kelly thanks the audience. Whoa, she sounds Irish when she speaks!
Have you ever wondered why singers of English-language songs sound the same no matter where they are from? Think about it: when you listen to them, you don't spot an accent and say to yourself "Oh, she's from Australia" or "He sounds Scottish." Even foreign-language speakers, when singing in English, are usually indistinguishable from native English singers.
But when those singers open their mouths to speak, their native accents will come through loud and clear. Who is teaching all those singers to "sing American"?
There's no worldwide conspiracy to secretly train all singers to erase their native accents so that they sound "American." The truth is much simpler than that and really has little to do with choice or training.
By and large, regional and national accents are conveyed to us through vowel pronunciation and consonantal emphasis or absence. For example, a dropped "r" in car makes us think of Boston; shifting "I" to sound like "Ah" makes us think Southern, as in "Ah declare!"; prolonging an "a" until it elides into an "eee" sound is a characteristic of "Austraaylian". In other words, people add something or remove something from the generic or "neutral" sounds of the language and that produces an accent.
The mechanics of singing eliminate or flatten most of those regional patterns. Instead of letting a word mark its own time — with a short syllable here or a lengthened syllable there — the pronunciation must follow the musical beat. Opening the throat and voicebox to get out a sound makes a singer naturally move to purer vowel sounds, as those are the easiest to produce.
The result? Most singers, based on their singing voice, sound like what is called the General American accent. With small variations, it covers the majority of the country west of the Mississippi and north of Oklahoma/Texas, a region of countless mass migrations and mixings in which native accents became suppressed into an undifferentiated pattern of speech with few noticeable distinctions. That quality — the removal of distinctive enhancements to English sounds — is the natural and instinctive way a singer sings.
Certainly singers can purposely invoke an accent during their performance. Country music stars may have a twang and comedic singers may throw in "ze accent of Paree" for effect. Even so, if you listen closely, you'll often find that the accent isn't maintained 100%; the performer slips at times and reverts to neutral American, because that's what the voice and the music want him or her to do naturally.
So, sing it loud and sing it proud, and your singing accent will probably sound like everyone else's, even if you've never taken a voice lesson in your life.
Oh, Danny Boy – the 'old', 'Irish' song that isn't so green (or ancient) at Independent.ie
History of Danny Boy and the Londonderry Air at Irish Music Daily
Londonderry Air - The True Origin of Danny Boy by Wilfried Voss
Danny Boy—the mystery solved! by Michael Robinson
Frederic Weatherly at Wikipedia
The case of the stolen Josh Groban song at Oh No They Didn't
Why British Singers Lose Their Accents When Singing at Today I Found Out