Annotation:Kilkenny Girl (The)
X: 1 T: KILKENNY GIRLS O: Irish Melody %R: jig B: Elias Howe "The Musician's Companion" Part 3 1844 p.71 #2 S: http://imslp.org/wiki/The_Musician's_Companion_(Howe,_Elias) Z: 2015 John Chambers <jc:trillian.mit.edu> M: 6/8 L: 1/8 F:http://www.john-chambers.us/~jc/music/book/EliasHowe/MusiciansCompanionP3/MusiciansCompanionP3-1844-V2.abc K: G % - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - B |\ d2B d2B | G2G GAB | c2A c2A | FGA D3 | d2B g2d | e2c g2e | dec BcA | G2G G2 :| |: D |\ DFA cAF | GBd dBG | DFA cAF | GBd dBG | ece ege | dBd dgd | edc BcA | G2G G2 :| % - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
KILKENNY GIRL, THE (An Cailin Ua Cill-Cainnig). AKA - "Kilkenny Girls." AKA and see "Vento's Farewell," "Woman's Dance," "Women's dance in the Ombres Chinoises." Irish, Jig (6/8 time). G Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). AABB. The tune was first printed in Boston music publisher Elias Howe's Third Part of the Musician's Companion (1844), whose title for the jig was "Kilkenny Girls." O'Neill, no stranger to the Howe collections (including The Hibernia Collection by Patrick O'Flannagan, a Howe psyeudonym) for source material, reprinted it in his Music of Ireland (1903) with a slightly altered title. However, despite the Irish connections with O'Flannagan and O'Neill's publications, the jig was first published as an English country dance in London in the latter 18th century by Charles and Samuel Thompson, and associated with Italian composer and harpsichordist Mattio Vento (see note for "annotation:Vento's Farewell" for more). The jig was entered into the large 1840 music manuscript collection of Waverton (near Wigton), Cumbria, multi-instrumentalist John Rook as "Woman's Dance."
Paul de Grae finds that "Kilkenny Girl" is that name of a song that could be sung to this tune. The chorus goes:
She's the darling holds my heart,
And never gave it cause to smart;
Tho' she's not worth a penny o,
I'll marry her in Kilkenny, o!
Kilkenny takes its name from Saint Kenneth, a companion of St. Columba.
