The Mountains of Mourne

The Story Behind The Song

Percy French was born in 1854, in Cloonyquin House, close to the small town of Tulsk, in Co. Roscommon, in the west of Ireland. He went to school in Derry, and then to Trinity College in Dublin, where he studied to be a civil engineer. He joined the Board of Works, which oversaw public building operations in Co. Cavan, as an inspector of drains. It was during this period that he began painting watercolours, an artistic endeavour that, for a time at least, he considered his true vocation. He sold his paintings in the Royal Hibernian Academy and, while he couldn’t earn a living from his art, in the long run his success as a songwriter and performer ensured that his work became sought-after. He has gained new fans over the past few decades for what are considered highly atmospheric landscapes.

However, it is primarily as a songwriter that he made his mark, both in Ireland and across the world. He wrote his first known song, ‘Abdul Abulbul Amir’ for what was termed a “smoking concert” – a men-only affair of a type that was popular in Victorian times – while he was still a student at Trinity College. It was intended as a parody, incorporating references to the chambermaids in the college in a discussion between two competing heroes, whose competitive boasting ends in a duel – in which both of them die. According to French’s biographer, James N. Healy, the youthful songwriter sold his rights to the song for £5, only to discover that it had been taken on by a London-based publisher and turned into a hit. Dozens of different versions were recorded, using various spellings of the names of the main characters. In 1941 an MGM cartoon was created, telling the yarn in a way that was sympathetic to the Russian character Ivan “Skavinsky” Skavar.

In a sense, that was just a skittish prelude to what proved to be a hugely productive career as a songsmith for Percy. He had hits with lyrically deft songs like ’Slattery’s Mounted Fut’ – a send-up of would-be Nationalist volunteers that has so many zingers it should come with a health warning. "Ye preferred the soldier's maxim, when desisting from the strife,” Slattery, the leader of the would-be platoon, addresses his troops after a night’s foray. "'Best be a coward for five minutes than a dead man all your life’."

That was just one among many hits. There was the hilarious ‘Are You Right There Michael?’, about the unreliability of the West Clare Railway; ‘Come Back, Paddy Reilly, to Ballyjamesduff’, with its gorgeous evocation of the local areas of Cavan that French knew well through his time with the Board of Works and telling the tale of an emigrant who imagines his family’s call to come home; 'Eileen Óg (The Pride of Petravore)’, in which a local lad confesses to the recalcitrance of young Irish men in matters romantic, and bemoans the fact that none of them had the courage to captivate the local beauty (“Oh her beauty/ Made us so so shy/ Divil a man among us/ Could look her in the eye”); ‘Whistlin Phil McHugh’, a tale of unrequited love that sees Little Mary Anne Mulcahy pining for the eponymous Phil, leading to the immortal lines about the perils of love: “For every girl’s a fool/ And every man’s a liar.” And the rambunctious ‘Phil The Fluter’s Ball’, which – in its chorus – provided one of the greatest ever descriptions of the joys of an Irish session, influencing artists and songwriters like Christy Moore, Shane MacGowan of The Pogues and Kevin Rowlands of Dexys Midnight Runners: "With the toot of the flute, and the twiddle of the fiddle-O!/ Hopping in the middle, like a herrin' on the griddle-O!/ Up! down, hands around, crossing to the wall-O!/ Hadn't we the gaiety at Phil the Fluter's Ball.”

Percy French’s songs were widely bought as sheet music, and later recorded, and extensively played, on Irish radio. All of that tongue-in-cheek hooley-ing and send-upery was surpassed, however, by the gentler, less Rabelaisian tone of ’The Mountains of Mourne’. The song successfully played up the naivety of the young Irish emigrant negotiating his way around London near the turn of the century, while also capturing the feelings of loneliness and loss that, far too often, were at the heart of the exile's experience. In its wry observations, the song becomes more a send-up of the vacuousness of London society life than of the Irish narrator’s guileless innocence.

The music for ’The Mountains of Mourne' is credited to the Dublin writer and Anglican priest, Houston Collisson, who also wrote four comic operas with French, beginning with The Knight of the Road in 1891. However, the melody is derived from the Irish traditional tune ‘Carrigdhoun’, which translates as ‘Brown Rock’ – also used for Thomas Moore’s ‘Bendemeer's Stream’.

‘The Mountains of Mourne' was used as the basis for a song entitled ‘Old Gallipoli’s A Wonderful Place’, sung during the First World War. It was further popularised on the global stage by the famous Australian baritone Peter Dawson, in the 1920s. It was recorded by a litany of Ireland's best known artists, including Ruby Murray, Brendan O’Dowda, Bridie Gallagher, Johnny McEvoy, Jim McCann, Finbar Furey, Daniel O’Donnell, The Irish Tenors, Phil Coulter and Celtic Thunder, the latter as late as 2008. It was a common party-piece at house gatherings and had become so  ubiquitous by the late 1950s that it was used as the original signature tune for the regional commercial station, Ulster Television, part of the UK-based ITV network. Philip Lynott of Thin Lizzy referred to it in the lyrics of ‘Black Rose’ on Lizzy's 1979 album, Black Rose: A Rock Legend. Internationally, it was recorded by the Scottish Broadway star and Hollywood actress, Ella Logan, the celebrated Scottish tenor Kenneth McKellar, and by US folk revivalist heroes The Kingston Trio.