“As Bob Dylan explains it --- you go to a club or a bar and you hear a song, and you think “that’s a great song” and you go home and you say “I’m gonna play that song” and you start to play it but you can’t quite remember the melody so you improvise, and you can’t remember the words so you make up your own, and you play it too fast or too slow-- and, says Bob, that’s how new songs are made, from the bones of old songs. So indulge me. Sometime around the 1690’s after the great catastrophic collapse of old Irish society, (look it up) a tune, an old Irish melody started to seep into the wider society out of the disputed borderlands where the ancient Gael faced off against the new English overlord and his Ulster Scot planters. The melody was reputedly written by a travelling harper and poet, Phelim Brady, which may have been an assumed name, and who may have once been a bishop, now a fugitive. (Cont. below)”

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