Sailor on the Rock

This D reel surfaces in the manuscripts of Stephen Grier (c. 1824–1894), a piper and fiddler from Gortletteragh in south County Leitrim, who copied it down around 1883, among the older paper traces of a tune that lived mostly in the playing rather than in print. It answers to a tangle of names: O'Neill printed a setting as "Johnny with the Queer Thing", and it also goes by the Irish "Mairí ar an gCarraig". Michael Coleman made an early Sligo recording of it, and it later became closely tied to the Galway accordion player Joe Cooley.