Subject: RE: Whiskey in the Jar - Irish? Appalachian?
From:
Malcolm Douglas
Date: 21 Dec 06 - 03:20 AM
I'd suggest to "fumblefingers", "Liberty_Hops", "Dazbo" and "Harlan" (why do people give themselves such daft pseudonyms?) that they take the trouble to read what has been already said about the history of this song before repeating misapprehensions and arguments that were laid to rest long ago. This particular thread isn't especially helpful, because the person who started it hadn't realised that his question had already been answered. It isn't easy to plough through all the repetitions and irrelevancies that people insist on posting (along with the usual 'thread drift') whenever songs like this are mentioned, so the real information does require a little effort to find; and many people, it seems, lack the stamina for that.
To repeat:
Once upon a time there was an Irish highwayman called Patrick Flemming. He was not a very nice man; you can read about him in The Newgate Calendar.
After terrorising the countryside for some years, committing a series of robberies, kidnaps, murders and mutilations, he was finally arrested when the landlord of his local pub shopped him and his cronies, taking the precaution of wetting their firearms first. Flemming was executed in Dublin on Wednesday 14 April, 1650.
A broadside ballad was composed to commemorate the event. It may have been called 'Patrick Flemmen he was a Valiant Souldier' (a tune of that name was prescribed for a political song of c. 1684), but the earliest example we have is rather later; around the turn of the 18th/19th century apparently. It was called 'Patrick Flemming', and you can see the text at the late Bruce Olson's website:
Patrick Flemming
The broadside press and the early Music Hall were always recycling old material, and two new songs were made, loosely based on the old story. One is known in America as 'Lovel', while the familiar 'Whiskey in the Jar' began, so far as we can tell from printed evidence, a little before 1850 as a song called 'The Sporting Hero, or Whisky in the Jar' ('Bar' in some examples); it was rapidly reprinted under varying titles. It was this song that introduced the famous chorus that has been the subject of so much (sometimes frankly bizarre) speculation.
'Musha' was used in a great many songs made for the popular stage during the 19th century, as, like 'Macree', 'Whack' and so on, it provided instant 'local colour' for songs made on Irish topics; the market for these was good throughout Britain and the USA, and not just because many urban areas had, by then, large Irish populations; they were popular with everybody who went to the Halls.
We don't know who wrote 'The Sporting Hero', or where, but we do know that it gained its initial popularity in the principal urban centres of England and Scotland; the inference is obvious. It was (very loosely) based on an earlier song (again, we don't know who wrote that, or where) about a real event that took place in Ireland two centuries previously.
Whether you prefer to consider it an Irish song because of its subject matter and ultimate (partial) derivation or an Anglo-Scottish song (or something on those lines) because of its more immediate origins, is up to you. There is no point in making stupid and ignorant remarks as "Harlan" has done. That advances the cause of truth not one whit.
For more information and broadside texts, see thread Origins: Whiskey In The Jar. It contains a lot of peripheral chat, and stuff that tells us nothing about the song (repeated postings of the words recorded by Thin Lizzy and Matallica, for one thing) but do at least read the posts from Bruce Olson, "Liam's Brother", Art Thieme, "Q", and me.
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sj
