Hello! Ask me (almost) anything about traditional music.
Annotation:Tell Her I Am (1)
X:0 T:Tell Her I Am [1] M:6/8 L:1/8 B:O'Neill's Music of Ireland. 1850 Melodies, 1903, p. 140, no. 749 Z:François-Emmanuel de Wasseige K:G V:1 clef=treble name="0." [V:1] d|edB GAB|DED GAB|DED cBA|BGE E2d| edB GAB|DED GAB|AGE cBA|BGG G2:| |:d|B/c/dB def|gfe dBG|ABA AGA|BGE E2d| Bcd def|{a}gfe dBG|AGE cBA|BGG G2:|]
TELL HER I AM [1] ("Inneos/Innis Di Go B-Fuilim," or "Abair Lei go bhFuil Me"). AKA and see “Boys of the Town (4) (The),” "Humors of Ballymore (2) (The)," "Jackson's Daisy," "Jackson's Duishig," "Jackson's Dooshay." Irish, Double Jig (6/8 time). G Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). AABB (Cole, Laufman, O'Neill/1850 & 1001): AABBCC’ (Harker/Rafferty), AA'BBC (Breathnach): AA'BBCC' (Cranitch, O'Neill/Krassen). "Tell Her I Am [1]" was recorded in New York by influential County Sligo fiddler wikipedia:Michael Coleman (1891-1945) in 1927, paired (as the second tune) with “Trip to Sligo.” 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).
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 wikipedia:James_Goodman_(musicologist) (1828-1896) in Munster in the 1860s, under the title “Humors of Ballymore (2) (The).”
Breathnach finds the alternate title “Jackson’s Dasey” (sic) in a manuscript from Castleisland, County Kerry.
Early 20th century uilleann pipers Patsy Touhey and Bernard Delaney both recorded versions of "Tell Her I Am," Touhey on wax cylinder.
There is an internet report that the tune, differently interpreted, is popular with Orange marching bands. Paul de Grae writes: “The only time I’ve heard O’Neill’s setting played is by the anonymous céilí band on a Peter Sellers comedy recording from 1960. It’s one of ‘Three Folk Songs, Collected in Hi-Fi’, introduced by Sellers impersonating a German ethnomusicologist: the band, allegedly ‘Pat O’Shaughnessy and His Men of Shamrock’, breaks up in disorder when one member (Sellers again, of course) accuses another of playing a bum note. It can be found on the internet.”
