Erin's Lovely Shore

DESCRIPTION: The singer is "an Irish exile girl." She thinks about the past at home. She dreams she returns to Ireland on an ocean liner and meets her grown sister; she cannot understand the talk because it is Gaelic. She wakes. She warns others to stay in Ireland.
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1988 (McBride-FlowerOfDunaffHillAndMoreTradSongsInnishowen)
KEYWORDS: homesickness exile dream Ireland ship
FOUND IN: Ireland
REFERENCES (1 citation):
McBride-FlowerOfDunaffHillAndMoreTradSongsInnishowen 25, "Erin's Lovely Shore" (1 text, 1 tune)
NOTES [79 words]: Presumably from the late nineteenth century, since the first real ocean liner was the Great Eastern of 1858 (for background, see the notes to "The Atlantic Cable" or, e.g., Lincoln P. Paine, Ships of the World, Houghton Mifflin, 1997), and the first successful ocean liner was the Oceanic of 1870. So we must presume the song in its current form is post-1870. But Irish was already in decline by then; the sooner after that the song appeared, the more it makes sense. - RBW
Last updated in version 6.4
File: McB1025

Go to the Ballad Search form
Go to the Ballad Index Song List

Go to the Ballad Index Instructions
Go to the Ballad Index Bibliography or Discography