- Style
- Celtic
- Tradition
- Irish, American
- Form
- Reel
- Key
- G
- Level
- 2
- Played on
- Fiddle and Mandolin
In the public domain. Source
Music
90bpm
Click any note to start from there
Chord chart
History
The reel shares its name and melody with an emigration song, thought to come from Ulster, that Paddy Moloney of the Chieftains counted among the finest of its kind. P. W. Joyce linked the air to a group of Munster song tunes of the mid-18th century, and Samuel Bayard thought the song came first and the reel grew from it.
It crossed the Atlantic early. The painter and fiddler William Sidney Mount of Setauket, Long Island, wrote it into his manuscript in the 1840s in a form close to today's, and Bayard collected it from fiddlers in southwestern Pennsylvania as late as the 1960s. In Quebec it was printed in 1933 as "Le Rire Moqueur."