I was curious to know about John McCormack singing three verses of James Clarence Mangan's (longer) version of Roisin Dubh, "My Dark Rosaleen." I did not picture McCormack, with all due respect, as the singer of a traditional Gaelic melody, so I asked: who wrote the music? And if someone has posted it at mudcat, I can't find it. So here is what I found:

An Anglo-Irish native of County Meath, she was born Alicia Adelaide Montgomery; she would marry young, right after studying composition on London. After this she was professionally known as Alicia Adelaide Needham, her married name. Some references to her musical compositions call her Alicia Adelaide Needham-Morgan, and I have no idea where the Morgan comes from; often as not it is just Alicia Adelaide Needham.

Hers is the setting you can hear in John McCormack's recording, arranged for the sort of orchestra that accompanied Enrico Caruso in HIS recordings. That's to say, you hear brasses and woodwinds, and it is hard to hear strings....maybe the strings are absent? That was sometimes the case with those primitive recording sessions. And the style of music? Well, "My Dark Rosaleen" is unmistakeably in the minor key, and the recording sounds like classical music to me, right enough -- it is what form of composition would have been taught where the composer was educated. If her setting of this song has any musical hints of a traditional/folk melody anywhere, then they went in one ear and out the other for me -- I missed them.

Before looking this up, I had never heard this composer's name. It seems that she beat out the competition, in 1902, for the coronation of Edward VII, for a prize song for the occasion. I forget what her husband did for a living, but he kept her in style; then he suddenly died. That, along with the outbreak of world war, to say nothing of the irreversible changes in Ireland, so drastically changed the widow's life that she died in near poverty. Her son, however, was a prominent scientist who lived and worked in China. Her family, right through to her son, has a kind of colonialism in its history. Anyway, her version was recorded by John McCormick, and -- I have not heard this version -- by Bing Crosby.