My Little Kerry Gow (The Kerry Cow)

DESCRIPTION: "'Tis in Connacht and in Munster, you may travel far and wide... But you'll never find the likes of her... my little Kerry cow." The King of Spain, the men of Ulster, the Cardinals' College would all seek her, but she is grazing on his "good green grass"
AUTHOR: Winifred Mabel Letts (1882-1972) ?
EARLIEST DATE: 1918 (Shoemaker-MountainMinstrelsyOfPennsylvania)
KEYWORDS: animal cattle nonballad
FOUND IN: US(MA)
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Shoemaker-MountainMinstrelsyOfPennsylvania, pp. 150-151, "My Little Kerry Gow" (1 text) (pp. 127-128 in the 1919 edition)
Roud #9739
NOTES [188 words]: The only copy of this I could find with an attribution credited it to Winifred Mabel Letts. Poems by Letts seem to have been fairly widely distributed -- Granger's Index to Poetry has entries for seventeen of them (none of which I'd ever heard of; most of the citations were from just a few anthologies). I have no real reason to doubt the attribution -- Letts was half-Irish, and visited frequently in her youth, then moved there when her father died. But... Shoemaker-MountainMinstrelsyOfPennsylvania's field collection is from 1918, when Letts was just 36. According to Wikipedia, her first book of poetry, Songs from Leinster, had been published in 1913, and the musical setting, A Sheaf of Songs from Leinster with music by C. V. Stafford, came out in 1914. Was that enough time for the song to get to Pennsylvania and have its author forgotten? I don't know; I have not seen a copy of Songs from Leinster.
The title in Shoemaker's third edition is unquestionably "My Little Kerry Gow" (with a G, not a C), so I've used that ttle, but this may have been an error; in the first edition, it's "My Little Kerry Cow." - RBW
Last updated in version 6.5
File: Shoe150

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