Drimindown DESCRIPTION: "Bad luck to ye Drimon and why did you die?" I'd sooner have lost my son and hut. When I found her "I rolled and I bawled and my neighbors I called." "I thought my poor Drimindoon never would fail." AUTHOR: unknown EARLIEST DATE: 1956 (Creighton-Maritime) KEYWORDS: death lament nonballad animal FOUND IN: Canada(Mar) REFERENCES (1 citation): Creighton-Maritime, p. 176, "Drimindown" (3 texts, 1 tune) Roud #2712 RECORDINGS: Ernest Sellick, "Drimindown" (on MRHCreighton) Notes: The description is based on Creighton-Maritime with help from the notes for Creighton/MacLeod 88(3) in Gaelic Songs in Nova Scotia. Creighton/MacLeod has three versions in English (two with chorus in Irish Gaelic). Is this an allegory or really about a country-man's lament for the death of his cow? There are Jacobite songs in which a cow is named Drimin and denotes Ireland allegorically. H Halliday Sparling, in Irish Minstrelsy (1888), gives three examples of this in other songs: "O Say, My Brown Drimin" by James Joseph Callanan, p. 309. "Drimin Dubh"--from Druim-fionn dubh dilis "dear black white-backed (cow)" by Samuel Ferguson, p. 148. "Drimin Donn Dilis" by John Walsh, p. 203. ibiblio site The Fiddler's Companion: DEAR BLACK COW [1] (Druimin Dubh). AKA and see "The Black Cow." Irish, Air (3/4 time). G Dorian. Standard. AAB. The words lament the loss of a cow, comparing it to the celebrated mythological Irish cow which could never be fully milked. In Bunting's 1840 collection he gives a few verses of a political song in which "the black cow" serves as a "very whimsical metaphor, the cause of the exiled monarch." [I must admit, in reading Creighton's first version, I thought of Bonnie Prince Charlie. The more so as many residents of Nova Scotia fled there after the Jacobite rebellions. - RBW] Other writers, notably George Petrie, Patrick Walsh, Margaret Hannegan, Seamus Clandillon and Redfern Mason, believe "Drimin/Druimin Dubh" (or "Dhriman Dhoun Deelish" "Drimin donn Dilis" etc.) also note the title's symbolizm (sic.) with Ireland. Cazden (et al, 1982) finds that, "with sufficiently imaginative adjustment," the melody resembles the "Drimindown" tune family, which includes O'Neill's "The Sorrowful Maiden" and Cazden's own Catskill Mountain (New York) collected ballad "The Maid on the Shore." For an exhaustive discussion of text and tune history see "Drumion Dubh(Drimindown,Irish)" on Bruce Olsen's web site. The earliest complete text he finds "is from The Universal Songster, III, p. 45, London: Jones and Co., 1828." - BS File: CrMa176