Planxty Irwin

Turlough O'Carolan wrote this one for Colonel John Irwin of Tanrego House, on Ballysodare Bay in County Sligo. Irwin lived from 1680 to 1752 and came from a family of English settlers who had been given Irish land after the Cromwellian wars. Donal O'Sullivan, in his 1958 book on Carolan's life and music, dated the tune to around 1713, after Irwin came home from fighting abroad, because the words Carolan put to it mention his service in Flanders. The Traditional Tune Archive counts it among Carolan's most popular compositions today, and it has been recorded many times over.

It was in print early. John Lee's Dublin collection of Carolan's tunes carried it in 1780, Edward Bunting printed it in 1809, and Thomas Moore took Bunting's version, without saying where it came from, for his song Oh! Banquet Not. Francis O'Neill included it in his Music of Ireland in 1903. The Tune Archive files the old Irish settings as a spirited planxty in 6/8. Sessions and the New England waltz books play it in 3/4, and that is the tune on this page.

The tune is two strains of sixteen bars, and they share their second halves. The first strain opens by stepping down from the high g through a chain of held notes and dotted figures, and the second climbs higher, to a held b, before dropping back into the same eight bars that close the first. Learn one ending and you have both.

On a mandolin it is a close relation of Sí Bheag, Sí Mhór, the other Carolan air on this shelf, and a good one to learn second. The b at the seventh fret of the E course is the only stretch. Most bars are a long note and a short one, so the left hand has an easy time and the right hand has the real work: pick the long notes cleanly and let them ring, or fill them with tremolo once the tune is in your fingers. Take it a little brighter than Sí Bheag and it starts to dance.