The London People themselves beguile,
And assume they please in a capital stile;
But allow them to ask as they cross the Road,
Of any younger Virgin they occur to fulfill,
And I do know she’ll say, from behind her Fan,
That there’s none can love like an Irishman
Copied neatly right into a handwritten folio of ‘Songs and Duetts’ that Jane Austen saved on her piano is a track titled merely ‘The Irishman’. With its boastful chorus that ‘there’s none can love like an Irishman’, the piece asserts the prevalence of an Irish lover by dismissing the romantic prowess of males from a variety of different nationalities. In style fantasy has favoured the assumption that the track recalled to thoughts the dashing younger Irish lawyer Tom Lefroy with whom Austen flirted briefly in 1795. Current scholarship has demonstrated that this was in all probability not a severe relationship, however the romantic fantasy has been onerous to shake off. In reality, Austen’s copy of ‘The Irishman’ may have predated her acquaintance with Lefroy altogether, since her folio is undated and the printed music from which she should have transcribed the track was first revealed at the beginning of the 1790s.
Usually described as a people track, ‘The Irishman’ was really written for the pro-revolutionary musical The Image of Paris, which premiered at Covent Backyard Theatre in London on 20 December 1790. The play was a spirited celebration of the brand new Nationwide Meeting in France with a finale depicting the taking of the Federation Oath by King Louis XVI, however the French Revolution’s speedy descent into the violence and mass slaughter of the Reign of Terror meant that the musical’s buoyant republicanism was quickly out of step with British common opinion. One track from the manufacturing was destined to catch on, nonetheless: carried out by the favored Irish tenor John Johnstone, ‘The Irishman’ performed on stereotypes of Irish amorousness that have been simply separated from the play’s revolutionary themes. A reference to the French ‘Monsieur, a slave no extra’ within the second verse chimes with the unique musical’s remaining refrain of ‘Oppression’s heavy hour is previous’, however that is the one clue to the track’s pro-revolutionary setting. When ‘The Irishman’ was included in a profit live performance for Johnstone in 1794 the road had already been altered in order that the French lover was merely ‘from Gallia’s shore’.
Like a lot of the music in The Image of Paris, ‘The Irishman’ was the joint manufacturing of the Della Cruscan poet Robert Merry and musician William Shields, however their authorship was quickly forgotten. Austen’s copy doesn’t file this data and just a few of the printed music anthologies that reproduced the track within the 1790s bothered to determine ‘Mr Merry’ because the creator. This may need been deliberate dissociation given Merry’s revolutionary sympathies: he travelled to France in 1792 the place he was invited to attend the king’s trial (however declined) and was himself practically guillotined by mistake. He remained a determine of curiosity to the British authorities upon his return. By the early nineteenth century the origins of ‘The Irishman’ had pale additional nonetheless, however the track itself remained an everyday characteristic of common music anthologies and songbooks, notably Irish people collections corresponding to The Hibernian Cupboard (1817) and The Sprig of Shillelah: A Assortment of the Most Humorous and In style Irish Songs (1852). There have been occasional variations in lyrics – the French lover generally grew to become ‘a slave as soon as extra’ – however the majority of the track remained unchanged. On the identical time ‘The Irishman’ had crossed the Atlantic, the place it was included in a Fourth of July musical present on the New York Theatre in 1803. Reputed to be a agency favorite of President Abraham Lincoln, ‘The Irishman’ was even quoted in a speech by future president Andrew Johnson, who described it in 1858 as ‘the primary track I ever heard’.
A century later, in 1958, a brand new model of the track was recorded by the ‘King of Skiffle’ Lonnie Donegan, whose energetic interpretations of American people music kickstarted the British rock ‘n’ roll motion and put guitars into the fingers of younger folks all through the nation. However by the point the retitled ‘No one Loves Like an Irishman’ appeared as a flip aspect to Donegan’s model of the Woody Guthrie traditional ‘Massive Grand Coulee Dam’, the track’s theatrical origins had been forgotten. Donegan even added an additional verse and revealed the sheet music underneath his personal identify (a follow commonplace within the music business on the time). The melody and different lyrics remained largely unchanged and Austen would simply have recognised the track from Donegan’s recording. But it surely was one of many track’s authentic verses that brought on the BBC to instantly ban the track, because it featured a probably offensive reference to the Quran, through which a stereotyped Turkish man is imagined praying purely for private acquire. Racial tensions in Britain have been already strained in 1958. Later that very same yr Donegan would use his star energy to fight violent racism as a member of the Stars Marketing campaign for Interracial Friendship (SCIF). The group used live shows, interviews and celebrity-endorsed publications to counteract the racist ideology of Oswald Mosley’s fascists within the wake of the Notting Hill riots, and Donegan remained an lively member of SCIF till its dissolution following Mosley’s defeat within the 1959 Normal Election.
Regardless of the BBC’s ban, Donegan’s file was an enormous hit and his model of ‘The Irishman’ grew to become one in every of his hottest songs in Eire: when the Irish people duo Foster and Allen coated the track in 2000 it was Donegan’s phrases and music that they used. The current revival of ‘The Irishman’ as a memento of Austen’s legendary romance with Tom Lefroy has refocused consideration upon its origins, however it’s Donegan’s recording that preserved its place within the historical past of Irish people music.
Corrina Readioff is Honorary Analysis Fellow on the College of Liverpool.