https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0EjFQfWhJI
Tune no. 2 is listed as ‘Kerry’s Polka’ but all the Kerry Polkas I find online are aka ‘Egans polka’ - so is there another name for this tune or are there two Kerry’s?
All unidentified polkas from the Kingdom are ‘Kerry polkas’. Maybe read the title as a Kerry polka rather than the Kerry polka.
On that note, and as a subdivision, unidentified polkas from Ballydesmond are Ballydesmond polkas and I believe this is one of them.
LOL! I’ll have to remember that.
Thanks for the lead to Ballydesmond 
It’s “Ballydesmond #2” (going by the Ballydesmonds on Star Above the Garter) AKA “Maurice Manley’s”, no?
The slide has Maurice Manley’s applied to the title, not the polka.
I’ve heard that Julia Clifford said that Padraig O’Keefe turned it into a slide, on the other hand Johnny O’Leary (as transcribed in the book) said that Padraig O’Keefe had it as a polka (and Johnny got it from Bill the Weaver, Julia’s dad).
Maybe this should be another post but it’s along the same lines. The Online Academy of Irish Music has a whistle lesson which teaches ‘Johnny O’Leary’s Polka’ yet it as absolutely nothing like anything you can find online; session.com or anywhere. It goes like this:
M: 2/4
k: Ador
|:eA BA|eA BA| G>A Bd| GA Bd|
|:eA BA|eA BA| G>A Bd| BA A2|
|:a2 ge| aa ge| dB gB| de/f/ g2|
| a2 ge| aa ge| dB gB| BA A2:|
So is this actually ‘a’ Johnny O’learys (not ‘the’ Johnny O’Leary’s Polka) or is it something else altogether?
From my limited exposure to the polkas and slides from the Sliabh Luacra region, for every tune there are at least 3–4 tune names…
Best wishes.
Steve
When I go through the backs of the CRE books, or the tunes on The Session, I find this to be pretty common for ITM tunes in general.
The odd thing is how I’ll learn a tune off an album called a particular thing, and find the tune in a book or two using the same name, and hear it played at a session called the same thing, but when I post a YouTube video of me playing it people will chime in saying “that’s the wrong title! where did you ever get that title from? nobody calls it that!” etc.
In other words the same tune will be known by various titles, but there are people who play the tune who seem to think that the title they know is the one-and-only correct original title, and bristle at anyone calling the tune anything else.
A lot of the confusion around tune titles is often quite easy to explain.
First there are the tunes that were heard from a specific player but without a name. For identification purposes they get named after the player. One such example is the reel often referred to a ‘Martin Rochford’s’ or ‘Rochford’s’. Which is in fact a Larry Redican composition’ Forget me not’. Martin Rochford identified the tune for me when I got it off him and interesting enough he played it differently from the version usually named for him. Aa lot nicer too I think.
Tunes get associated not with a player but a location and get named after that. The tune they play over there : Kerry polkas, Ballydesmond ones or the Lisheen slide and all of those.
There are printed sources : O’Neill named a lot of tunes for places where he grew up, people he learned the tunes from and in some cases he lifted tunes from other collections and renamed them eg The Rakes of Westmeath instead of the Rakes from its original Scottish location. Brendán Breathnach named many tunes for his collection, for locations or people eg Ard an Bóthar.
There are titles learned recordings, including mistakenly named ones. I admit being guilty of one of those, we recorded a jig we learned at weekly sessions with Jackie Daly. Jackie called the tune ‘Mist on the Meadow’ so we used that name. Only after the CD was out I realised the tune was taken from a 78rpm by fluteplayer John McKenna : The Castlebar Races/Mist on the Meadow but the name Jackie used belonged to the other tune in the set so the tune was in fact The Castlebar Races. An easy mistake and one that happens quite a bit (see the album with I am Waiting for you and The Sailor’s Cravat reversed and the subsequent recordings with the same mistake repeated again and again.
Ofcourse there are loads of tunes that have loads of different names, Breandán Breathnach had sixty or so alternative titles for The Merry Blacksmith. It was Séamus Ennis however who remarked Colonel Fraser was one tune never found under a different title in his experience.
OK, should have been “at least 30–40 tune names”—but everybody knows that zeros mean nothing…
Best wishes.
Steve
https://www.irishtune.info/tune/106/
https://thesession.org/tunes/238
Multiple printed sources, etc.
Unless you want to claim there is some sort of official overriding Kerry tune naming authority which has been incredibly specific in this (and only this!) case, “Maurice Manley’s” is definitely a name applied to the polka I prefer to call “Ballydesmond #2”.
My mistake - I have been spending a lot of time with the JOL book, and thought I had seen it in there as the Ballydesmond.
Now the question is, who was Maurice Manley?
Regarding tunes from Kerry, I think the habit of losing the name of the tune (if it ever had one at all) and giving the name of whoever you got it from is more common than elsewhere, and is actually a good way to trace the way it was passed. For instance if the Chieftains called it Denis Murphy, but Denis Murphy called it Padraig O’Keefe’s, but Padraig O’Keefe called it Cal Callaghan’s, then you have a nice transmission path outline… Fun stuff!
The Sliabh Luachra Culture & Heritage Centre gives you some profiles of local musicianers. Not Manley though.
Paul de Grae has done great work tracing origins of tunes, both Sliabh Luachra ones and the sources of O’Neill’s music (and in extension Sliacbh Luachra music that went into O’Neill’s).
Yes old album track listings are notorious.
Thing is, many ITM players just don’t care all that much about the names, and might have no names for some of the tunes they play, or mis-heard or mis-remembered names.
Each session might have not only its peculiar versions of tunes, but also its peculiar titles. I don’t know how many times I’ve asked for the name of a tune, and had multiple people at a particular session tell me the name, only to go internet searching and find the tune consistently being called something else.
About learning a different version of a tune from the actual composer, there’s a Canadian piper name John Walsh who wrote a lovely jig called (as best I can recall) McKenna’s Ceili. The tune has been published, but also the composer has responded to requests for the tune by hand-writing it out. I’ve been told that these handwritten manuscripts vary somewhat, from each other and from the published version.
mis-heard or mis-remembered names.
And then they end up on the internet and spread like wildfire. Another Larry Redican composition, The Culfadda, named for the townland he was born in, ended up on the interwebs as ‘The Cruel Father’. Another one is the one Bobby Casey named for John Joe Tuttle: 'Tuttle’s (The Windy Gap elsewhere), which pops up as ‘The Turtle’ in some on-line collections.
Or “Tone Rowe’s”, a corruption of the name of the composer, the late, lamented Brendan Tonra.
Best wishes.
Steve
It’s often a matter of knowing the context and familiarity with the terrain as it were. There’s a set of two Folkways/Smithsoinan recordings from the sixties, that are full of tremendous mishearings in the tracklisting, from William Clancy playing the Shakescone to Denis Murphy’s The Queen of O’Donnell.
And I have an lp that features, if I remember correctly, the Nine Points of Robbery and The Waltz of Liz Carroll in one set.
Most of them are quite understandable mistakes but would really have been avoided by a simple check or even a small bit of knowledge/experience.
But if enough time passes, doesn’t the wrong name eventually become the right name? “Well, they used to call it the Castlebar Races, but everyone calls it the Mist on the Meadow now…”
I wonder what the better option is–the almost nameless tune landscape of Brittany or the Irish jungle of tune names?
Breton session: “OK, everyone, how about we play Reel next?”
“Which one?”
Irish session:“OK, everyone, let’s play Castlebar Races.”
“Do you mean Castlebar Races or the Mist on the Meadow?”
“Right, the one we used to call Mist on the Meadow but now call Castlebar Races.”
People talk about tune names before they play them?
Quite right. People talk about tune names after they play them. To (roughly) quote Ciaran Carson in Last Night’s Fun:
“What was that one called?”
“Ask my father.”
My favorite tune typo has to be The Grease in the Bog on some double-CD compilation of Irish 78 recordings.