Ballyjamesduff

DESCRIPTION: "The garden of Eden has vanished, they say, But I know the lie of it still": Its image survives in Ballyjamesduff. Paddy Reilly tells that he was a quiet baby because he knew he was born there. Now grown, every breeze tells him to come back
AUTHOR: Percy French (1854-1920) (source: Healy)
EARLIEST DATE: 1912 (date of composition, according to Healy)
KEYWORDS: home exile baby
FOUND IN: Ireland
REFERENCES (5 citations):
Kane-SongsAndSayingsOfAnUlsterChildhood, p. 175, "My mother has told me that when I was born" (1 text)
DT, BALLYJAM*
ADDITIONAL: _Sing Out_ magazine, Volume 32, #4 (1987), pp, 24-25, "Come Back, Paddy Reilly" (1 text, 1 tune)
James N. Healy, editor, _The Songs of Percy French_, 1955-1962, revised edition 1986; I use the 1996 Ossian paperback, pp. 18-20, "Come Back, Paddy Reilly" (1 text, 1 tune)
James N. Healy, _Percy French and His Songs_, The Mercier Press, 1966, pp. 24-26, "Come Back Pady Reilly" (1 text)
Roud #6327
RECORDINGS:
Margaret Barry, "Ballyjamesduff" (on IRMBarry-Fairs)
ALTERNATE TITLES:
Bally James Duff
NOTES [1080 words]: In addition to a transcription of this song, there was an interesting article about Percy French, who was an Irish-born engineer and entertainer, in Sing Out magazine, Volume 32, #4 (1987), pp, 18-20, It quotes extensively from Healy. There is a much briefer biography in Healy's other book on French, French/Healy pp. 3-4.
Boylan, p. 123, has a brief biography of French., who was a painter as well as a performer and writer. He was born at Cloonyquin in County Roscommon in Ireland, and attended Windermere College, Foyle College, and (Dublin's) Trinity College. That took a while; it wasn't until 1881 that he earned his civil engineering degree. After graduating, he became a surveyor of drains in County Cavan.
In 1887, his job was eliminated, and he had lost his savings in unwise investments, so he founded a comic paper, the Jarvey, which was not successful. He then joined a Dr. Houston Collisson to write and produce a musical comedy, The Knights of the Road. The pair went on to tour England, Canada, the United States, and the West Indies. Although French wrote the melodies for his most popular songs himself, there are a number of songs for which French wrote the words and Collisson the melody; French also occasionally borrowed older tunes.
French moved to London in 1890, and died in Lancashire three decades later.
Healy, p. 1, calls French "a remarkable person: a member of the gentry who became a wandering professional troubadour, and who had all the artistic talents at his command -- he was verse-maker and composer, artist and singer; story-teller par excellence." Born on May 1, 1854, he was named William Percy Smith (after his maternal grandfather William Percy); he was called "Willie" until he set out on his own. The family was Protestant, and were of the landlord class although they personally were not well-off; Willie French, as a second son and third child, would have to fend for himself (Healy, pp. 2-3. Indeed, one wonders if he was properly nourished as a child, since he grew up to be just five feet four inches tall; Healy, p. 37.)
It sounds as if he initially thought of himself as a minstrel show performer; his instrument was banjo (Healy, facing p. 101, has a photo of him playing the instrument; it's a five-string, and it looks like it is probably fretless), and he learned it when he was young while playing with two other young men who played bones and tambourine (Healy, pp. 3-4). He certainly had a minstrel group -- the "Kinniepottle Komics" -- as a young adult (Healy, p. 20, although it does not explicitly mention blackface). Late in life, he performed with a young woman named May Laffan; the photo of her facing 116 of Healy shows her playing a six-string fretted banjo, which implies that she also played guitar.
He went to academies of, at best, modest distinction before pursuing his engineering degree at Trinity College, Dublin, which he earned in 1880 (Healy, p.4). After this, he spent some time working as an engineer for the Cavan Board of Works, working on drains (Healy, p. 15) -- i.e. sewers.
In 1890 he married Ettie Armitage-Moore in Dublin -- a match her parents did not approve of, since Ettie's sister Priscilla had married Lord Annesley and the family had pretensions (Healy, p. 30). It probably didn't help that he had no job at the time, since Cavan had been, shall we say, drained, and his public works job was gone (Healy, p. 31). This was when he tried editing The Jarvey, but it failed at the end of 1890.
The next year brought both triumph and tragedy -- he and Houston Collisson (1865-?) produced their musical comedy "The Knight of the Road" -- but his wife Ettie died in childbirth, and the baby died soon after (Healy, p. 31).
The second French/Collisson collaboration, "Strongbow," followed; it wasn't popular, and the text does not survive, but a member of the amateur cast was Helen May Sheldon (who seems to have been fifteen or more years his junior); they married in 1894 (Healy, p. 43). Around this time, French started touring seriously. He had a number of performance tricks to enliven his shows. Not only did he sing and recite his own works, he would often make a chalk sketch of something while on stage, and show it to the audience -- and then turn it upside down and have it display a different, but still recognizable, image (Healy, p. 44).
He was successful enough that he finally was able to make tours in England by the time he reached his late forties. (It was these tours which finally caused him to stop using the name "William" and start using the name "Percy French," at the urgent suggestion of his publicist, a man named Harry Franklin who often played violin at French's shows; Healy, p. 85.) Percy and Helen had two daughters by then, Molly and Ettie, with a third, Joan, to follow (Healy, p. 79). In time, French and Collison would even manage a tour of America (Healy, pp. 88-93). French eventually left Ireland to settle in London (Healy, p. 96).
In his later years, he apparently quit writing songs, being content to use his older material. But he lived until 1920. Early in that year, after a performance in Glasgow, he became ill (Healy, p. 125), dying of heart disease on January 25, 1920 (Healy, p. 126). His wife Helen lived to the age of 88, dying in 1956 (Healy, p. 129); some of his children lived at least into the 1960s.
Houston Collisson was apparently a truly gifted musician -- he first served as a church organist at sixteen (Healy, p. 42) -- but he doesn't seem to have produced anything memorable except his collaborations with French. Nor was he the only one to write tunes for French; French sometimes used traditional tunes, or worked with other composers, including his daughter. But Collison's association with French went deep -- not only did he tour with French, and supply some of his best-loved melodies; he died in 1920 himself, unexpectedly, soon after a memorial for French (Healy p. 126).
Other songs by French in the Index include "The Mountains of Mourne" (probably his most popular song), "Phil the Fluther's Ball," and almost certainly "Abdul the Bulbul Emir (I)."
The "Sing Out!" article reports a story that French was challenged to write a song containing the name "Ballyjamesduff," and this is the result. But it may also have been based on the line of one of French's friends, who for economic reasons went the Scotland.
It seems, according to French/Healy, that the original title was "Come Back, Paddy Reilly." - RBW
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