Annotation:Star of the County Down
X:1 T:Star of the County Down M:4/4 L:1/8 R:Air Q:"Moderato" B:Herbert Hughes - Irish Country Songs vol. 4 (p. 8) Z:AK/Fiddler's Companion K:F#min (C/E/)|FF FE/F/ AA B(A/B/)|c(B/A/) F(E/C/) E3 C/E/|FF FE/F/ AA BA/B/| cB/A/ FF F2 zc|ec cB/A/ BB BA/B/|cB/A/ FE/C/ E2 zC/E/| FF F/>F/ E/>F/ AA/A/ BA/B/|cB/A/ FF F2 ||"Chorus"zc|ec cB/A/ BB BA/B/| cB/A/ FE/C/ E3 (C/E/)|FF FE/F/ AA BA/B/|cB/A/ FF F3z||
STAR OF THE COUNTY DOWN. AKA and see "Banbridge Town," "I Love Nell,” “Mary from Blackwater Side,” "My Love Nell," “Paddy's Return (2),” "Sliabh na m Ban," "When a Man's in Love," “When first I left old Ireland.” Irish; March (4/4 time), Air or Waltz (3/4 time). A Minor (most versions): E Minor (Silberberg). Standard tuning (fiddle). AB (Barnes, Matthiesen, Silberberg): AAB (Brody, Johnson, Phillips). A 'star', in Irish vernacular, is a beautiful woman. John Loesberg (1980) says the air originally was set to the sheet ballad "My Love Nell," and that it first appears under the "Star of the County Down" title in Hughes' Irish Country Songs (vol. 4, 1936, p. 8), with words written by Cathal Mac Garvey (1866-1927) that begin:
Near Banbridge town in the County Down one morning in last July,
Down a boreen green came a sweet cailín and smiled as she passed me by.
She looked so neat from her two bare feet to the crown of her nut brown hair,
Such a winsome elf, I was ashamed of myself for to see I was really there.
Chorus:
From Bantry Bay up to Derry quay and from Galway to Dublin town,
No maid I’ve seen like the brown cailín that I met in the County Down.
However, this popular air seems to have been attached to numerous songs over the years. For example, P.W. Joyce (1909) prints a version of the air under the title “Mary from Blackwater Side” (No. 187), while George Petrie (Stanford/Petrie, 1905) collected it several times: as an untitled air from favorite source sculptor Patrick MacDowell (No. 196), “When first I left old Ireland” (No. 863), and “Paddy's Return” (No. 867). Hughes (1936), writing from Cahirciveen, County Kerry, remarked:
"The Star of the County Down" is another [air] that has had a travelling career. It too, is obviously of the North [of Ireland], but it is known in the States, and has been familiar [in County Kerry] for generations. The late Mrs. Milligan Fox published many years ago a ballad with the refrain--
My love Nell is an Irish girl,
From the County Down she came...
And there is a version here of which the corresponding lines are:
My love Nell is an Irish girl,
From the Cove or Cork she came...
The air is identified by Cazden (et al, 1982) as belonging to the protean and huge 'Lazarus' family of tunes, which includes, among numerous others in the Gaelic/British tradition, the Scottish "Gilderoy," Cazden's own Catskill Mountain collected "Banks of the Sweet Dundee," and Chappell's English "We Be Poor, Frozen Out Gardeners" as well as literally hundreds of other airs. Jerome Colburn points out that an American shape-note variant of the “Star” family appears in the tenor of the hymn “Help Me to Sing” (attributed to B.F. White) from The Sacred Harp (1859). The tune is also used for two poaching ballads (one from Scotland, one from Ireland, “Van Dieman’s Land”), remembers Sean Laffey, and the forebitter/capstan shanty "Banks of Newfoundland.” Rock singer Van Morrison performed a march-time version of the song with the Chieftains on a 1994 recording.
County Down takes its name from Downpatrick, where St. Patrick is said to have been buried (Down is a variation of the Celtic word Dun, meaning a fortified place).
