Mark Taylor Posted March 21, 2009 Share Posted March 21, 2009 Good evening, Can anyone tell me the name the English use for 'Minstrel Boy'? Regards, Mark Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
michael sam wild Posted March 22, 2009 Share Posted March 22, 2009 When I was kid in the 40s we were taught it was a Welsh song translated. 'The Minstrel boy to the wars is gone with his wild harp slung before him....'Land of song sang the warrior bard etc etc... I always imagined a cowboy on a white horse like Roy Rogers! Great tune sounds like a harp piece. My primary school music teacher in Longsight, Manchester , Miss Hedgewick instilled a love of folk music in us that survived the sadism of secondary school theory teachers etc! God bless her! She had a tin of 'Cherry Lips' sweeties and you got one if you did well, very important in wartime! They were about the size of a finger nail and I can still taste them in my mind, like Proust's buns. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
newgrange Posted March 22, 2009 Share Posted March 22, 2009 Do you mean 'The Minstrel Boy' by Thomas Moore? Minstrel Boy - Wikipedia Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spindizzy Posted March 22, 2009 Share Posted March 22, 2009 When I was kid in the 40s we were taught it was a Welsh song translated. 'The Minstrel boy to the wars is gone with his wild harp slung before him....'Land of song sang the warrior bard etc etc... I always imagined a cowboy on a white horse like Roy Rogers!Great tune sounds like a harp piece. It was still taught in the 50s as a Welsh song (in North London) - looking at the Wikipedia piece, it looks like the Irish and Americans have claimed it with not a single mention of Welsh! Same tune when I listened to the midi there. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JimLucas Posted March 23, 2009 Share Posted March 23, 2009 When I was kid in the 40s we were taught it was a Welsh song translated. 'The Minstrel boy to the wars is gone with his wild harp slung before him....'Land of song sang the warrior bard etc etc... I always imagined a cowboy on a white horse like Roy Rogers!Great tune sounds like a harp piece. It was still taught in the 50s as a Welsh song (in North London) - looking at the Wikipedia piece, it looks like the Irish and Americans have claimed it with not a single mention of Welsh!Same tune when I listened to the midi there. Well, this thread is the first I've heard of any Welsh connection. As noted in Wikipedia, the words as commonly known in English were published by Thomas Moore as his own work in Moore's Irish Melodies, set to an older Irish air, The Moreen. My copies of Moore's Irish Melodies don't have a publication date, but the Preface is dated February 25, 1859, and handwritten in the front of one of my copies is, "Mary Lepper, from her affectionate cousin A.J.H. Lepper, March 15th 1859." Can anybody here provide documentation of Welsh lyrics, or of the melody being considered Welsh at a time before 1859? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
michael sam wild Posted March 23, 2009 Share Posted March 23, 2009 If played as a jaunty march it feels 'cognate' with The Leaving of Liverpool! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hereward Posted March 23, 2009 Share Posted March 23, 2009 (edited) It was still taught in the 50s as a Welsh song (in North London) - looking at the Wikipedia piece, it looks like the Irish and Americans have claimed it with not a single mention of Welsh!Same tune when I listened to the midi there. Are we heading for a face-off between P-Celts and Q-Celts? Ian Edited March 23, 2009 by Hereward Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
michael sam wild Posted March 25, 2009 Share Posted March 25, 2009 (edited) Before we get into all that bollix can someone say definitively who wrote it or its first publication. Maybe in English schools in the 1940s, when we were all 'one nation' having fought together against the Nazis, we were being fed the acceptable line , so Welsh would be OK . Whereas , given the move for Irish independence and militancy and even support for Germany (neutrality) ( woooohh, scarey). Maybe the Welsh were regarded as subdued and incorporated, and hence acceptable romantic relics like the Jacobite Scots and all that tartan and White Heather Club stuff on TV at that time. When people appear to be lying down and are no threat they can be adsorbed as 'quaint' and their culture can be appropriated. ( see Sting and Reggae) The dominant people then claim ancestry and all the attendant stuff. Over here we have Burns' Nights, St Pat's , Chicken tikka, etc etc. Anything but St George's day! How things change when people regain some pride, economic and social clout and strength. Where are we going next, now things are tough? Edited March 25, 2009 by michael sam wild Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JimLucas Posted March 26, 2009 Share Posted March 26, 2009 Are we heading for a face-off between P-Celts and Q-Celts? I doubt it. So far, it seems that the only "source" quoted here for a Welsh origin is a few English (not Welsh) schoolteachers (not musical historians), nearly a century after Thomas Moore published his poems, set to then-traditional "Irish" melodies. I personally couldn't care less about Irish-vs.-Welsh-vs.-English, but I do object to unsupported rumors (or rumours) being promoted as "truth" over historically verifiable facts. As I suggested above, if someone can trace a "Welsh" origin for the song -- and especially for Thomas Moore's 1859 English lyrics being a translation from an even earlier Welsh version -- further back than a few WWII-or-later teachers in the English school system, I'd be very interested. In fact, I'm somewhat curious as to the true origin of that story. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mark Evans Posted March 26, 2009 Share Posted March 26, 2009 Good to have you posting again Jim. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
michael sam wild Posted March 26, 2009 Share Posted March 26, 2009 I think I will defer to Tom Moore. Miss Hedgewick misled us I fear, but it was a nice story. I suppose the harp was seen as Welsh at the time, all those old ladies with tall hats, big harps and things from a little place near Menai Bridge Llanfairpwllgwyglldrumglodwyiliovairgogogoch! or summat like that ( I think it means 'The little tourist shop by the petrol station near the rushing cataract of St Marywhere you can buy postcards and stamps and tip the little old lady in a tall hat and petticoat who doesn't speak Welsh but talks incomprehensibley so you feel a warm glow of ancestry....kerchinggg!) Despite the Irish harp on the Guinness bottle. It may have been in the News Chronicle Song Book as a song for British kids around the piano on a Sunday evening after a family tea of tinned Sockeye salmon sandwiches, tinned cling peaches and Carnation evaporated milk, white bread and butter and a nice cuppa tea, I'll do some searching. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
michael sam wild Posted March 26, 2009 Share Posted March 26, 2009 This seems to do it for me! ' He is best remembered for his lyrics 'The Minstrel Boy' and 'The Last Rose of Summer' Moore ( B, Dublin 1779 d.1852) seems to Ireland like Burns is to Scotland, what a composer! Here http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Thomas_Moore Mike Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Anglo-Irishman Posted March 26, 2009 Share Posted March 26, 2009 Are we heading for a face-off between P-Celts and Q-Celts? I doubt it. I doubt it, too. Moore's songs, including The Minstrel Boy, are Anglo-Irish. Nothing Celtic about them! Although, reading this topic, I realise that my most-eschewed musical term, "Celtic music", may have some redeeming virtue. It seems - incomprehensibly - difficult for English and Americans to distinguish Scottish, Irish and Welsh songs, and if they get it wrong, as in this case, the compatriots of the actual composer or tradition become indignant. Call it "Celtic", and you get a fool's pardon! Mike, I'm surprised at your Irish family connections not enlightening you about your teacher's error ... Cheers, John Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JimLucas Posted March 26, 2009 Share Posted March 26, 2009 Moore ( B, Dublin 1779 d.1852) seems to Ireland like Burns is to Scotland, what a composer! Poet. He composed neither the tunes nor the arrangements, though I believe he did select the tunes and choose the person to do the arrangements. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Anglo-Irishman Posted March 27, 2009 Share Posted March 27, 2009 Moore ( B, Dublin 1779 d.1852) seems to Ireland like Burns is to Scotland, what a composer! Poet. He composed neither the tunes nor the arrangements, though I believe he did select the tunes and choose the person to do the arrangements. Yes, another parallel to Burns. Some poems of both are superficially national, and I believe that Burns was also interested in the traditional music of his time, and saved some good old Scottish tunes from extinction by setting words to them. But both of them are more than just national icons. Burns, living at the time of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, was one of the great poets of the Rights of Man ("A man's a man for a' that" wonderfully sums up the ideals of Liberty, Equality and Freternity, and has been translated into many languages.) And of course the love songs to the country girls he knew so well are unrivalled in bourgeois or aristocratic poems! I would sum up Moore as the poet of Friendship, with the recurring theme of life being filled with a deep melancholy when all you have known and loved are dead and gone ("Oft in the stilly night" or "The last rose of summer", which is also internationally known). Or, as in "The meeting of the Waters", the theme of Nature unfolding all her beauty only when "reflected in looks that we love." Moore and Burns had to be born somewhere, but as poets they have super-national status. Cheers, John Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
michael sam wild Posted March 27, 2009 Share Posted March 27, 2009 Are we heading for a face-off between P-Celts and Q-Celts? I doubt it. I doubt it, too. Moore's songs, including The Minstrel Boy, are Anglo-Irish. Nothing Celtic about them! Although, reading this topic, I realise that my most-eschewed musical term, "Celtic music", may have some redeeming virtue. It seems - incomprehensibly - difficult for English and Americans to distinguish Scottish, Irish and Welsh songs, and if they get it wrong, as in this case, the compatriots of the actual composer or tradition become indignant. Call it "Celtic", and you get a fool's pardon! Mike, I'm surprised at your Irish family connections not enlightening you about your teacher's error ... Cheers, John Hi John I don't think it arose I just liked singing it and playing it on the mouth organ My dad thought Moore was overated and sentimental (whereas Burns spoke for the common man) and felt that there were more important social and political songs to sing. Although he could qieten a pub with Danny Boy! He was a bit inconsistent when it came to music, if it appealed it was OK but the politics came first! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Anglo-Irishman Posted March 27, 2009 Share Posted March 27, 2009 Hi John I don't think it arose I just liked singing it and playing it on the mouth organ My dad thought Moore was overated and sentimental (whereas Burns spoke for the common man) and felt that there were more important social and political songs to sing. Although he could qieten a pub with Danny Boy! He was a bit inconsistent when it came to music, if it appealed it was OK but the politics came first! Mike, You Dad was right about Burns, anyway. He's not that well known in (West) Germany, where I live, but I've met Russians who were familiar with him from school in the Soviet era. No wonder really, because he is (I think) the only poet of international repute and classic stature who actually was a "peasant or worker". He only attended school every other day, alternating with his brother, because his father, a farm labourer, couldn't afford to send both sons to school full-time. He was accounted a very good ploughman. Yet, as a poet, he had his finger on the pulse of the times. And bilingually, too - his English is as eloquent as his Scots! And yes, I regard Moore as a more bourgeois figure. But then, he was Irish, and revolutionary ideas in Ireland were the province of the middle class (as earlier in the American colonies), not of the proletariate. The reasons for the nationalistic struggle of the Irish against the British Crown were of an economic nature, as in America, and their success would have benefitted the mercantile class first and foremost. Burns had nothing of the separatist about him - he was a British poet who sang of social equality within the United Kingdom, of which his native Scotland was a part. The German democrats associated with Marx and Engels believed that the great proletarian revolution would be sparked off in Ireland, where the masses really were oppressed, and where there was a long history of armed rebellion. But they were wrong. The Irish proletariate turned against English government, not against their own bourgeoisie. History books are theoretical - the practical instruction comes through the old songs of all colourings. Cheers, John Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
michael sam wild Posted March 28, 2009 Share Posted March 28, 2009 (edited) Didn't Burns write 'Scots wha hae wi Wallace bled?' As tough as Dick Gaughan and the anthem of the SNP! Cheers Mike Edited March 28, 2009 by michael sam wild Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Create an account or sign in to comment
You need to be a member in order to leave a comment
Create an account
Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!
Register a new accountSign in
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In Now