Miss Monaghan’s

Long before it reached print, "Miss Monaghan's" was circulating among nineteenth-century players: it sits in the Goodman manuscripts and in the County Leitrim piper Stephen Grier's collection of around 1883, with a fragment surfacing among Goodman's pipe tunes as "Miss Manahan's." Francis O'Neill printed it in his Music of Ireland (1903) and again among the 1001 Gems (1907), fixing it as a standard D-major reel. The first sound recording was Patsy Touhey's, taken from the home cylinders O'Neill made of his playing. Séamus Ennis relished the tune — Fintan Vallely notes in Blooming Meadows that Ennis's mother came from County Monaghan — and it stays a staple of the session repertoire.