The Three Jacks: Music

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Turlough O’Carolan is known to have set words to many of his tunes but while the melodies have survived the words have – pretty much - not.


One of O’Carolan planxties in particular - “Lord Inchiquin” - just seemed to beg for a set of lyrics – so I supplied them. O’Carolan was a bawdy, boozy, bugger and I thought that this variation on the “Trooper and The Lass” theme found in dozens of ballads and broadsides in Turlough’s time – now christened “Ramrods & Bearskins” - might have met with his approbation . . .


Curiously – and gratifyingly - long after I wrote “Ramrods,” I came across a set of O’Carolan lyrics that seemed strangely similar in meter and approach. Compare the opening lines from my “Ramrods”:


One a fine summer morning just past break of day
On the High Road to London a soldier did stray
When in petticoats and flounces and ribbons so gay
He fell in with a young lass a-skippin’ his way


With the opening lines from “Miss Featherston (Carolan’s Devotion)” - apparently the only surviving poem originally written in English rather than in Turlough’s native Gaelic:


On a fair Sunday morning devoted to be
Attentive to a sermon that was ordered for me
I met a fresh rose on the road by decree
And though Mass was my notion, my devotion was she


Hmmmmmmmmmmm . . .


The song segues into a traditional Irish fiddle piece: “The Red-Haired Boy.”