Coleman’s version of the tune (the one played today) is in three parts and is most similar to Francis O’Neill's two-part version in the first strain; it is more similar to the two-part setting collected by James Goodman (with the addition of a third part).Tell her I am
Charlie Piggott, in his book Blooming Meadows (1998, written with Fintan Vallely), relates the story regarding a remark by Coleman, who was at the time living in New York.
Coleman was performing when a female admirer asked her companion to find out from the fiddler whether or not he was married. “Tell Her I Am,” he replied, in an inside joke. Piggott also relates that Galway accordion player Joe Cooley (who also lived for some time in America) also fancied the jig, which he learned in the 1940’s in Dublin from the playing of Kilkenny fiddler John Kelly.
A bemused Cooley often, tongue in cheek, asked his flatmate for the name of the tune, anticipating the reply. Invariable it came in a tortured, garbled, improperly understood variation, “Tell Her Who Am I.” Paul de Grae suggests "the slightly cryptic title may be a garbling of "A Tailor I am"; there is an unrelated jig of that title"[1].
Coleman’s setting is certainly the standard setting nowadays for the tune, although not the earliest one. O’Neill printed the tune in 1903, in a different setting then the one employed by Coleman (who was a boy of 12 in County Sligo at the time).
William Bradbury Ryan's Ryan’s Mammoth Collection (1883) includes the tune in a setting more akin to Coleman’s, and which is also similar to a setting collected by Church of Ireland cleric and uilleann piper James_Goodman_ (1828-1896) in Munster in the 1860s, under the title “Humors of Ballymore (2) (The).”
Although we are not trained musicologists and make no pretense to the profession, we have tried to apply such professional rigors to this Semantic Abc Web as we have internalized through our own formal and informal education.
This demands the gathering of as much information as possible about folk pieces to attempt to trace tune families, determine origins, influences and patterns of aural/oral transmittal, and to study individual and regional styles of performance.
Many musicians, like ourselves, are simply curious about titles, origins, sources and anecdotes regarding the music they play. Who, for example, can resist the urge to know where the title Blowzabella came from or what it means, or speculating on the motivations for naming a perfectly respectable tune Bloody Oul' Hag, is it Tay Ye Want?
Knowing the history of the melody we play, or at least to have a sense of its historical and social context, makes the tune 'present' in the here and now, and enhances our rendering of it.
Andrew Kuntz & Valerio Pelliccioni
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↑Paul de Grae, “Notes on Sources of Tunes in the O’Neill Collections”, 2017 [1].
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