Hi everyone
I’d like to ask you if any of you knows or have information about a tune that I’ve learned and like very much : Road to Lisdoonvarna ?
Do you know the origin of that tune, any particular meaning about it ?
Hope someone will give me some information.
Thanks in advance !
Lisdoonvarna. Do you mean the slide or the reel?
In any case, it’s always worthwhile checking 1) The Fiddler’s Companion, and 2) The Session tune comments page.
http://www.ibiblio.org/fiddlers/ROA_ROB.htm#ROAD_TO_LISDOONVARNA_[1]
http://www.ibiblio.org/fiddlers/ROA_ROB.htm#ROAD_TO_LISDOONVARNA_[2]
http://www.thesession.org/tunes/display/249
http://www.thesession.org/tunes/display/250
The quality of the information may be good or not so good, but at least it’s easily accessible and often a good starting point. 
Man…I was just thinking the same question!!! I was actually in the process of researching the tune myself when I saw your post. Just the title ‘TheRoad To Lisdoonvarna’ is intriguing. Then when I hear the tune and reconsider the title…baffeling…I want more.
MTGuru
I think I’m talking about the slide !
Thanks a lot for the quick reply and the links, I’ll check them out.
Petey Whistle
I agree… the title sounds to me like the begining of a fairytale !
So Let’s hope we’ll get some more information about this tune !
Why baffling? It’s a better name than “The N67 to Lisdoonvarna”.
It’s just the standard tune title formula “The Road to [Place]”. I’m sure it’s a lovely town, and probably a common stop on the tourist loop back from the Cliffs of Moher. According to Wikipedia, the name Lios Dúin Bhearna means “Enclosed fort of the gap”, after the nearby ring fort.
Breathnach gives the following info on the reel setting in CRE 2:
282. An Bealach ar fad go Gaillimh: All the Ways to Galway, from Micko Russell [flute or whistle], Doolin, County Clare, VII, 1966. First printed by Aird, The Galway Girls (Aird, ii, 155). “All the way from Gallaway, early in the morning, is the burden of a popular song descriptive of the march of the Galway militia” (Crofton Croker’s The Popular Songs of Ireland (1839) p242). This is basically the same as Yankee Doodle, or perhaps the latter is derived from it. The same name in Petrie (SP, 849). Slash away the Pressing Gang in O’Neill (WSGM, 80). It seems that he did not notice what tune he had there [also All the Way to Galway, DMI 999]. Also called Sarsfield March, The March of the Tribes to Galway, The Road to Lisdoonvarna. Another version at 116 above.
116. An Bhó Chiarraíoch: The Kerry Cow, from Laurence McDonagh [flute], Ballinafad, County Sligo, VIII, 1972. This is for the polka. Another setting as a single reel at number 282 below. The name is from the song I wish I had a Kerry cow.
Just to be clear … the slide and reel are two setting of the “same” tune. It’s one of the more famous jig/reel pairs, thanks to the Chieftains’ recording (Chieftains 3).
The polka cited by Breathnach is a close cousin. And if you follow the Fiddler’s Companion links, you’ll find the Scottish relatives, too.
According to Wikipedia, Lisdoonvarna (Irish: Lios Dúin Bhearna, meaning “Enclosure at the Fort by the Gap”) is a spa town of 822 people (2002 census) in County Clare in Ireland. Famous for its music and festivals, in September each year one of Europe’s largest matchmaking events is held in the town attracting upward of 40,000 romantic hopefuls, bachelor farmers and accompanying revellers. The month-long event is an important tourist attraction. The current matchmaker is Willie Daly, a fourth-generation matchmaker.
A now-defunct music festival which took place near the town is celebrated in a song of the same name written by the Irish folk singer, Christy Moore. This festival took place until the early 1980s.
The town takes its name from the Irish Lios Dúin Bhearna meaning the “lios dúin”, or enclosured fort, of the gap (“bhearna”). It is believed that the fort referred to in this name is the green earthen fort of Lissateeaun (fort of the fairy hill), which lies 3 km to the north-east of the town, near the remains of a Norman-era castle.
The present town is a comparatively new one by Irish standards, dating mainly from the start of the nineteenth century.
Isn’t there a movie with Janine Garofalo in which she ends up in an Irish village that is home to annual matchmaking festival? 
Yeah. It was “The Matchmaker”:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119632/
That film makes me cringe
I stayed in Lisdoonvarna in my one trip to Ireland. I never would have thought of it had I not known the tune; I wanted to hit a few places relevant to music. It’s nothing exciting (except presumably during the matchmaking festival), but a nice quaint little town, convenient to the Burren.
Thanks everybody for all the information !
The single jig Road to Lisdoonvarna has got to be the tune one hears poorly played more than any other ITM tune.
Possibly because of the influence of those early Chieftans recordings or whatever, all ITM newbies play it, leaving all the work out and thus reducing it to a caricature of ITM.
If someone tells me he plays Irish music and whips out his plastic recorder, that’ll be the tune.
Or Banish Misfortune (likewise reduced to caricature).
I wish all of those people would go back to the Chieftans recordings and learn to play the tunes right.
The reel is cool. I hadn’t thought about its similarity to the jig, maybe because the jig is in E minor and the reel is in D mixolydian.
Interesting, that both tunes were featured on Grey Larsen & Malcolm Dalglish’s first album, Banish Misfortune (1977), which is often credited with popularizing those tunes at least among revivalists on this side of the pond. It’s how I first learned them back then.
Now why do you think those tunes happened to show up on a 1977 album done by American revivalists?
99% sure because they were recorded by the Chieftans a decade earlier.
It’s funny, whenever I hear “Granola Irish” bands they play loads of tunes that appeared on old Chieftans albums and little else.
These guys themselves usually don’t know where their repertoire originated from.
Ooh! “Granola Irish” - I like that expression. Haven’t come across it before. What does that mean, panceltic? Where does it come from?
Andrew Kunitz’s The Fiddlers’ Companion* quotes Phillipe Vartlet’s hypothesis that a ril gan ainm played by the Chieftains before The Road to Lisdoonvarna slide on that record is the origin of the The Road to Lisdoonvarna reel.
Much like, I suppose, that lovely unnamed slow reel that Frankie Kennedy played before Dobbin’s Flowery Vale on Harvest Storm (I think) often gets called D’sFV.
*It’s also my belief that AK doesn’t get nearly enough props for The Fiddlers’ Companion. It’s a fabulous resource for what it is, and a very useful work of scholarship and compilation. The internet made it possible, I suppose, but the net has also made it seem ordinary, and it’s not that at all.
It’s the kind of work a wiki does well, but this one wasn’t. Andrew began it almost a decade before wikipedia, and worked solo.
Thank heavens they have legions of dyed-in-the-wool, pure-drop, pan-celtic pipers to explain it all to them! What a boon to the neophyte.
Rob
I bet that smarts.