Danny Boy

The melody is the Londonderry Air, and it first reached print in 1855, in The Ancient Music of Ireland, edited by George Petrie. He listed it as an anonymous air and thanked Miss J. Ross of New Town, Limavady, in County Londonderry, who had sent it to him from her own collection of the county's unpublished tunes. Where she heard it is not known. The descendants of a blind fiddler named Jimmy McCurry say it was from him, and nothing on paper settles it either way.

For half a century it was an instrumental air with a string of different lyrics tried on it. The words that stuck are not Irish at all. Frederic Weatherly, an English lawyer and lyricist, wrote Danny Boy in Bath in 1910 to a different tune. The story usually told is that his sister-in-law sent him a copy of the Londonderry Air, he fitted the words to it, and the song was published in 1913. Weatherly's words are in the public domain now, and so is the air.

Everyone sings the same melody, and the settings in the tunebooks agree with each other note for note. It is four lines of four bars. The second line answers the first and comes home. The third jumps up an octave to the top of the tune and the fourth goes higher still before coming down the way the second line did, and that one high note in the thirteenth bar is the moment a room waits for.

On a mandolin in D the air runs from the fourth fret of the G course up to the second fret of the E course and sits in first position throughout. The whole art of it is the long notes. Each line starts with three quick notes climbing into a long one, and the long one wants a soft tremolo that swells a little and does not stop until the next three notes arrive. Take the slowest speed until the tremolo on the high f sharp stays even from start to finish.