Musical Priest

Though it's now a staple of the Irish session repertoire, "The Musical Priest" began north of the border. The Traditional Tune Archive traces its melody to William Marshall's Aberdeenshire strathspey "Belhelvie House," which the Gow family reprinted as "The North Bridge of Edinburgh." The reel surfaces in the Gunn family manuscript of County Fermanagh (1865) as "The New Bridge of Eden," and Breathnach later printed it as "The New Bridge of Erin"; O'Neill carried it into wide circulation in his Chicago collections of 1903 and 1907. The Sligo fiddler James Morrison recorded an influential setting in the 1930s.