The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #17535   Message #664743
Posted By: McGrath of Harlow
07-Mar-02 - 09:13 PM
Thread Name: Nell Flaherty's Drake; alternate verses
Subject: RE: Nell Flaherty's Drake; alternate verses
James Healy's Second Book of Irish Ballads has a different version, which he describes as his favourite ballad, in which it's Ned not Nell, and as living near Cork City. And Colm O Lochlann has her from Coote Hill (essentially, apart from that, his "Frank O'Connor version" is the one in the DT.)

But the curses are essentially the same in both cases, though the exact words and the order of the curses may vary a bit, as you'd expect, since there's no particular logical order for them.

James Healy writes "This was an old ballad at the turn of the century, and probably dates in its original form from min-nineteenth century days, when a great number of ballads of this type were being written. I first picked it up on West Cork duringthe thirties, whne I used to spend holidays there, and I gradually pieced the words together and got the correct tune from a very old dance music copy: but the ballad originally may have come from the Midlands or the North, where it is sometimes known as Nell Flaherty's Drake."

Another song to the same tune, also in Colm O Lochlann's book Irish Street Ballads, is the story of Paddy Hegarty, from near Clonmel, who fed the customers in his shebeen on a stew made out his old leather breeches.