Elvis Presley claimed that the melody we know as "Danny Boy" was written by angels. In the late twentieth century, this haunting melody seeped into far-flung corners of popular culture, by uncounted solo renditions, movie and radio soundtracks, and choral and instrumental arrangements. Yet as with so many products of "folk music," the true origins of the tune stand—and probably will continue to stand—shrouded in romantic mystery. Tradition links the composition of the piece to a blind harpist, the famous seventeenth century Irish musician named Rory Dall O'Cathan, who apparently composed a lament for the British confiscation of his ancestral estates called O'Cathan's Lament. Another blind harpist, Denis O'Hampsey, studied with a member of the O'Cathan clan, and passed along a piece called Aislean an Olgfear (The Young Man's Dream) to a musical collector and printer named Bunting. The earliest certain date is as late as 1851, the year in which one Jane Ross wrote down the notes to a melody played by "an itinerant fiddler" somewhere in the northern Irish County of Derry. The best candidate for the fiddler who gave Ross her inspiration is yet another blind musician named Jimy McCurry, who used to play for passersby in Limavady Market, outside a shipping office and across the street from Ross' home. She copied a melody in triple meter, and added the Anglophile geographic term "Londonderry"; though the first step toward the tune's international fame was at the hands of Percy Grainger, who instead called it by the Irish County Derry.

As the song traveled, it gradually also attracted lyrics, over 100 separate poems. The words of "Danny Boy," though, are the work of Frederick Edward Weatherley, early in the twentieth century, yet still within memory of the Great Potato Famine that sent so many Irish immigrants to American shores. He abbreviated into two verses an ongoing tradition of heavily political poetic stanzas, to which even into the 1960s the IRA was adding: one famous "extra" verse specifies comrades taking up arms in the place of fallen ones, and striking blows for the Irish cause. Whether politically charged or not, traditional in musical fabric or rife with nineteenth century romantic melodic traits, "authentic" to Irish history or not, the melody has become emblematic of Irish-ness. It has been recorded by artists as wildly different as Glenn Miller, Bing Crosby, Conway Twitty, Tom Waits, Harry Connick Jr., Joan Baez, Charlie Haden, Johnny Cash, and Plácido Domingo.

© Timothy Dickey, Rovi