Rosanne Cash inspired me to look further into the song "Arthur McBride." In December 2013 I was able to show her some traditional songs from our archive, including this disc sleeve from "Rock Island Line," which was the first song on her father's first LP. Photo by Biljana Regan.
Arthur McBride, Carrie Grover, Paul Brady, and Rosanne Cash: More About a Classic Song
In a previous post, I discussed one of AFC’s most influential field recordings, Carrie Grover’s “Arthur McBride,” and the popular tracks it inspired: versions by Paul Brady and by Bob Dylan. I was inspired to write about the song again by Rosanne Cash, a fan of both Dylan and Brady, who enthused about “Arthur McBride” in the New York Times. (I was also inspired by the approach of Christmas, since the song takes place “on Christmas morning.)
In this post, I’ll look further into the early history of the song, its transmission to Grover and Brady, and the way Brady adapted it. Let’s listen again to Carrie Grover, in the player below:
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The evidence for the ballad we call “Arthur McBride” probably begins with Patrick Weston Joyce, who was born in 1827 and grew up in Limerick, Ireland. Joyce printed the earliest known set of words to the song, which he called “Arthur MacBride,” as #428 in his book Old Irish Folk Music and Songs. He observed:
Patrick Weston Joyce collected the earliest known text of “Arthur McBride.”
The words have never been published: but I have a dim recollection of seeing them in early days printed on a ballad-sheet. There is a setting of the air (different from mine) in Stanford-Petrie, and marked there (by Petrie) as from Donegal. Coupling this record with the phraseology, I am inclined to think that the whole song belongs to Donegal, but how it made its way to Limerick is more than I can tell.
As Joyce pointed out, the earlier collector George Petrie printed an air called “Art MacBride,” but he noted neither the words nor the date he collected it. Petrie was active both before and after Joyce’s childhood, so there is no way to know which version is older, but Joyce’s remains the oldest known set of words.
Some commentators, including the folksinger Martin Carthy, have expressed the opinion that the song is English. This isn’t that farfetched, since an early version was collected in Mary Tavy, Devon, England, by Sabine Baring Gould, in the 1890s. Baring Gould collected it from a mason named Samuel Fone, who also said he learned it in childhood. According to census records, Fone was 47 in 1881, so he was born in about 1834. Because of this, Fone’s version could possibly predate even Joyce’s.
Carthy learned his version from his friend Redd Sullivan, and it’s a reasonable guess that it stems from A.L. Lloyd’s version. (Carthy and Sullivan learned many songs from Lloyd, and “Arthur McBride” is reputed to have been one of Lloyd’s favorites.) Carthy’s song is certainl
