The Belles Of Liscarroll jig

One of my all-time favorite Frankie Gavin selections, this beautiful jig is on his “Frankie Goes To Town” CD (a MUST- OWN CD, if ever there was one!) In the liner notes, if memory serves, he got the tune from fiddler Donal O’Connor of County Kerry. Probably the most soulful & relaxed I’ve ever heard Frankie play. Goes quite well with another jig I posted recently “The Humors of Clare”. Enjoy!

You’ve misspelt the tune’s name. It’s already listed here.

Try one of these - https://thesession.org/tunes/index/search?name=liscarrol&type_id=&mode_id=

In O’Neill’s collection, this is the “Belles,” not the “Walls” of Liscarroll, which is a different jig also in the book. The tunes are related, or at least some people think they are. See Andy Kuntz’s “Fiddlers Companion” website for abc’s and more info on both tunes.

Upon doing a bit more digging, I was able to find a printed version MUCH closer to the tune that Mr. Gavin plays on “Frankie Goes To Town” CD. It shows up in O’Neill’s “Waifs and Strays of Gaelic Melody” under the title “The Old Walls of Liscarroll”. The “Waifs” was first published some years after “1,001 Gems” & “1,850 Melodies” (O’Neill’s written introduction is dated “August 28, 1922”) & is comprised of “Forgotten Favorites, Worthy Variants and Tunes not Previously Printed”. Sadly, it has been out of print for some time, but through the miracle of the internet can be downloaded (sorry, PDF only) for FREE here: http://www.pipers.ie/NPUPublic/Archive.aspx/ I think this version “fills in the gaps” between the common version of the “Walls” & “Belles” of Liscarroll… –Jay

Yeah, sorry about that, was trying to type in the the NPU link from memory (I don’t have a “smart” phone yet; my “dumb” phone has limited web capability. That means I can’t do anything fancy like, oh, copying and pasting a webpage adress from my email. D’oh!) I added the final forward slash by accident; it was never part of the link to begin with! Try this:

http://www.pipers.ie/NPUPublic/Archive.aspx

Enjoy!

-Jay

This one comes from the above mentioned duo’s most recent CD “Deadly Buzz” (they have the title as “The Belles of Liscarroll”). It seems to sit in between Frankie Gavin’s setting and the one in “Waifs & Strays” in that the former is almost entirely in D Mixolydian, while the latter is completely D Major. This one takes a bit from both:

X:1
T:The Belles of Liscarroll
S:Mick O’Brien & Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh- “Deadly Buzz”
M:6/8
L:1/8
Q:3/8=120
R:Jig
K:D
|:~F3 DGG|~F3 DED|DEF GAG|FAA D2 E|
FEF GFG|AGA fed|ecA GFE|1 FAD D2 E:|2 FAD DAB||
|:=c3 d^cd|ecA AGE|=c3 dcB|AGE GAB|
=cBc d^cd|ede eag|edc AB=c|1 BAA A2 B:|2 BAA ABc||
d3 AFA|GAG FED|dcd AFA|GFE DFA|
dcd AFA|DFA fed|ecA GFE|FAD DFA:|
|:dFF AFF|dFF AFF|GEE =cEE|FAG FED|
d2 F AFA|DFA fed|ecA GFE|1FAD DFA:|2 FAD D2 E|]

Enjoy!

I hear a relationship between this tune and Tom Billy’s 3-part jig https://thesession.org/tunes/816 Especially between the third part of Liscarroll and the first part of Tom Billy’s, but also a bit between the first part of Liscarroll and the third part of Tom Billy’s. Am I crazy? Well, maybe.

No, not crazy. Obvious relatives!

O’Neill took his setting of The Old Walls of Liscarroll from one Prof. P D Reidy’s manuscript. He was a “Prof. of Dancing London and Castleisland”. This might explain the connection with Sliabh Luachra and Tom Billy’s jig.