Star of the County Down

The words are Irish and recent enough to have an author. Cathal MacGarvey, born in Ramelton, County Donegal in 1866 and dead in 1927, wrote the ballad, and it was first collected in Herbert Hughes's Irish Country Songs. It is set near Banbridge in County Down, though the places the verses name are scattered across the whole island, which is one reason people sometimes mix it up with the older Flower of the County Down.

The tune is much older and much traveled. It belongs to the family English collectors filed as Dives and Lazarus, and Ralph Vaughan Williams took a member of that family into the hymnals as KINGSFOLD, which is why a session player and a church organist can both know this melody and think it belongs to them. It also turns up as Gilderoy. Nobody composed it in any useful sense of the word.

In the twentieth century the song got a second life through records: Van Morrison and the Chieftains on Irish Heartbeat in 1988, the Pogues, Loreena McKennitt. Those arrangements are under copyright and none of them is the source here. The page carries the plain melody underneath them, which is public domain and which is what gets sung in a room.

It is a sixteen bar song built out of one four bar phrase. The verse says that phrase four times with small changes at the ends, and the chorus opens on a high d, drops through the same shape and then finishes with the verse's own last four bars. So there is far less to learn than the length suggests. What to listen for is the D that falls out of the third bar: it is the flattened seventh, and it is the note that keeps the tune from sounding like a minor key sad song.

On a mandolin the whole thing lives under one hand. The lowest note is the B at the fourth fret of the G course, which is the pickup, and the highest is the d at the fifth fret of the A course in the chorus. Nearly every bar opens on a note held two beats or more, so this is a tremolo song before it is anything else: give the long E, G and D an even tremolo and pick the pairs of eighth notes that answer them cleanly. The one bar worth drilling on its own is the third, B, A, G down to a held E and then D, B, because the hand has to cross to the G course for that last note and come straight back.