Four comments
Cool Jig, REALLY Cool Book!
Found this little beauty while I was thumbing through the "Double Jigs" section of my favorite tunebook of the moment, Francis O’Neill’s "Waifs and Strays of Gaelic Melody". While it is sadly out of print, it can be downloaded (sorry, PDF only) for free here:
http://www.pipers.ie/NPUPublic/Archive.aspx
Even if you have "1,001 gems" & "1,850 Melodies" already, this book is definitely worth adding to your collection. It was published almost 20 years after the first book & is comprised of "Forgotten Favorites, Worthy Variants, and Tunes Not Previously Printed". Case in point, this tune was originally printed as "The Merry Old Woman" in one of O’Neill’s earlier books, but he decided that this setting warranted being published on its own merits. The book also has extensive notes for some of the tunes where the good Captain thought it important. Cool stuff!
Enjoy!
-Jay
Walls of Enniscorthy
The version in DMI (72) is infinitely nicer and the more common one. I learned it during the eighties from Martin Rochford. Martin said he got it ‘from O’Neill’s book’ but played it one tone down on the fiddle.
Walls of Enniscorthy
Fair enough, Prof.- I just think the "Walls" is different enough to stand on its own. But thank you for pointing out a deficiency in the tune database; I have corrected the absence of "The Merry Old Woman" thus:
https://thesession.org/tunes/11555
Let the masses decide the "better" of the two (this oughtta be fun!)…
This one is more like Strop the Razor https://thesession.org/tunes/693 than the Merry Old Woman (which by the way is already in the database).