Tell Her I Am

Michael Coleman's 1927 New York recording fixed the setting most players reach for today, but the jig runs much older. The Church of Ireland cleric and uilleann piper James Goodman noted a close relative in Munster in the 1860s under the title "The Humors of Ballymore," and a setting nearer Coleman's turns up in William Bradbury Ryan's "Ryan's Mammoth Collection" of 1883; O'Neill printed a different setting again in 1903. The pipers Patsy Touhey and Bernard Delaney both recorded it early in the twentieth century, Touhey on wax cylinder. Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill recorded it on "The Lonesome Touch."