strangely enough, I was only playing this CD yesterday!

Donal Maguire
The Star of Sunday's Well, 1979, remastered 2003 by Rossendale Records

note to track 12 - The Star of Sunday's Well

This song adequately thumbs it's nose at the purveyors of all those stories which portray the Irish as a race of semi-literate inarticulate numbskulls. Undoubtedly written with tongue-in-cheek by W.B. Guiney, it appeared in the Cork Examiner in 1871.It is a masterpiece of rhetoric and abounds with flowery language, a legacy of the post-Penal Law 'Hedge School' classics teaching which often accompanied the ubiquitous 'three R's' I first heard it sung by singer John Gregson a specialist in comic songs, in a Warrington folk club. The action takes place in Cork city, and this must surely be the most eloquent put-down of amorous intent one is likely to hear!

sandra