The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #171224   Message #4140774
Posted By: GUEST,cnd
01-May-22 - 03:48 AM
Thread Name: Origins: Henry Joy
Subject: RE: Origins: Henry Joy
Date: 22 Mar 22 - 06:05 PM

Perhaps a library near you has a copy? http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/48962333

Date: 22 Mar 22 - 06:08 PM

Note that HENRY JOY and HENRY JOY McCRACKEN aren't the same song. Irish Music Review gives a good summary of it, which I'll quote below:

The song which particularly interested me however was Henry Joy McCracken, a different composition to the Henry Joy discussed above. Like the Joyce creation, this is a literary song which found its way into folk tradition. In this case, however, a measure of confusion exists over the authorship. Frank gives P J MacCall as the writer and this is a fairly common ascription[2].   However, I have elsewhere seen the song attributed to William Drennan, one of the Ulster leaders of ‘98, and I would have thought Drennan the more likely candidate. First of all, MacCall was a Wexford man. He is not likely to have identified himself as closely with the Ulster uprising, as with happenings in his own part of the world. Secondly, to my ears at any rate, it does not sound like a MacCall composition. I may be doing him an injustice, but MacCall was famed for spirited, rousing compositions; songs like Boolavogue and Kelly, the Boy from Killann which, for all their patriotic declamation, never quite lost the starch of the drawing room. Henry Joy McCracken is a tender love song. It takes for its subject the intimate sorrow of two human beings, caught in the inexorability of an event which is greater and more significant than either of them; and it is written in an altogether less starchy manner.