Peter T.: I believe you're right on the mark! There are a lot of conflicting stories out there about all these songs. I'm finding what sounds like solid data by correlating data from various sites on the net. See the following data re: Danny Boy:

from: http://www.dannyboy.ie/history.htm

Composed by Rory Dall O'Cahan in the 1600's as a lament for his ancient Irish clan. Performed over 200 years later at Limavady market by Jimmy McCurry, a blind street fiddler. Heard and noted down by miss Jane Ross, a private music teacher in Limavady. Published in 1855 in honour of Jane and her native county as "The Londonderry Air" by Dublin music publisher George Petrie. Lyrics added in 1912 penned by Fred Weatherley, an eminent English Lawyer.

from: http://www.sirius.com/~ststones/dannyboy.htm

To begin with, Danny Boy is one of over 100 songs composed to the same tune. The author was an English lawyer, Frederic Edward Weatherly (1848-1929), who was also a songwriter and radio entertainer. In 1910 he wrote the words and music for an unsuccessful song he called Danny Boy. In 1912 his sister-in-law in America sent him a tune called the Londonderry Air, which he had never heard before. He immediately noticed that the melody was perfectly fitted to his Danny Boy lyrics, and published a revised version of the song in 1913. As far as is known, Weatherly never set foot in Ireland.

The Danny Boy lyrics proved particularly popular in the United States, where they were recorded by a number of popular singers including Bing Crosby. In England, however, the tune is often still known as the Londonderry Air. This title has a certain political bias, since the name "Londonderry" is used to emphasize the ties between Northern Ireland and Britain (referring to the colonization of the area by English settlers in the early 17th century). Irish nationalists usually prefer to use "Derry", the original name of the Northern city and county.

The first appearance of the tune in print occurred in 1855, in Ancient Music of Ireland, published by the early collector George Petrie (1789-1866). The untitled melody, described as "very old", was supplied to Petrie by Miss Jane Ross of Limavady, County Londonderry, who claimed to have taken it down from the playing of an itinerant piper. This is the origin of the Londonderry Air name.

A great collector of the 1930s, Sam Henry, speculated that Miss Ross had collected the tune from a fiddler, Blind Jimmy McCurry, who was known to have been active in Limavady at the time. But there seems to be no hard evidence supporting this theory, although Jimmy's descendants have embraced it enthusiastically.

As the tune grew in popularity, and at the same time traditional Irish music came to be more thoroughly researched, considerable doubt emerged about Miss Ross's story. No additional versions of the melody were encountered by other collectors. The structure of the tune is unlike any other traditional Irish tune, and it is not suited for words in any of the known Irish song meters. Miss Ross was unable to provide any supporting evidence (the name of the piper, for example), and the suspicion grew that she had composed it herself and was attempting to pass it off as a genuine Irish tune (although by doing so she would be missing out on considerable royalty payments!). She continued to maintain the truth of her original account.

The next piece of the puzzle appeared in 1934, when Anne Gilchrist published an article entitled "A New Light Upon the Londonderry Air" in the Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. She theorized that the tune was taken from a performance in which the performer was using extreme rubato, and this "so disguised the natural rhythm that the tune was wrongly noted down in common instead of triple time". If the prolonged notes occurring on the first beat of the bar are shortened "the tune falls at once and easily into a rhythm which instead of being unique in Irish folk-music is paralleled in scores of other Irish folk- tunes".

Finally, in 1979, an article "New Dates for Old Songs 1766-1803", by Hugh Shields, appeared in Long Room (the journal of the library of Trinity College Dublin). Shields identified a tune in Edward Bunting's 1796 publication A General Collection of the Ancient Irish Music, entitled Aislean an Oigfear (in modern Irish Aisling an Ógfhir, "the young man's dream"), as being very close to the Gilchrist version of the Londonderry Air, except in the fourth phrase which "makes the Londonderry Air almost unsingable in traditional style while endearing it to virtuosos eager for effects of vocal expression". (This phrase does not, however, exceed the range of the pipes, so there is nothing to show it was not present in the original performance.)

Edward Bunting (1773-1843) was the pioneer collector of harp music whose career began in 1792 when he was hired to write down the tunes performed at the Belfast Harp Festival. It is to him that we owe the preservation of much of the traditional Irish harp repertoire. Bunting noted Aislean an Oigfear from Denis Hempson (1697-1807), the very last traditional performer on the Irish wire-strung harp (who luckily lived to the age of 110, allowing Bunting to collect many of his tunes before his death), in Magilligan, County Derry—very near to Miss Jane Ross's home in Limavady.

In his 1840 work, A Collection of the Ancient Music of Ireland, Bunting discusses the characteristics of typical Irish melodies, stating "The Young Man's Dream, and the air of The Green Woods of Truigha, might be suggested as answering more nearly to the Editor's conception of such a standard than any others with which he is acquainted".

So after more than a century, Miss Ross has been vindicated, although her skill as a transcriber is perhaps called into question. (Of course, we cannot be sure that the anonymous piper's performance was of the best standard, either.)

this is getting interesting!!

Pete