Firinne

just back from a visit to Dublin - including the Traditional Music Archive. The earliest trace of the Carroll Malone poem I could find was in Mac Carthy's book, where it appears under the "Coulin Forbidden" title. A later American edition has it simply as "The Coulin", as do several other 19 C. collections. It looks like the "forbidden" got dropped fairly soon. Mind you, I think McBurney had left Ireland and most likely knew nothing about it!

Rooting through the old books it is clear that apart from what we might call the mainline song collected by Hardiman, both the tune and the story about the hairstyle caught the imagination of a number of the patriotic writers for The Nation and Young Ireland - Martin McDermott, for example, wrote one.

Furlong, incidentally, did have Irish, as far as I can make out. He was one of several translators/versifiers used by Hardiman the collector - who was a native speaker.

Regards