The Wind That Shakes the Barley

Despite the name, this reel has nothing to do with Robert Dwyer Joyce's 1798-rebellion ballad of the same title — the two are separate tunes that happen to share a name, a tangle worth keeping straight. Where the reel itself came from is contested: Henebry and Breathnach both took it for Scottish, while Bayard found almost no Scottish traditional forms and a great many Irish and Irish-American ones. It turns up early in Dublin print, in William Power's Collection of Country Dances around 1812 and Hime's a couple of years later, well before the earliest known Scottish source, Joseph Lowe's Collection of Reels of the 1840s. George Emmerson heard it as substantially a setting of "The Fairy Dance."