Friday 2 December 2022
Tune of the Day: Charley the Prayermaster
Traditional Irish jig
The earliest appearance of this jig is in the large mid-19th-century music manuscript collection of County Cork cleric and uilleann piper James Goodman, under the title “O'Connell's Welcome to Clare”. The title “Charley the Prayermaster” is first seen in Francis O'Neill's 1903 collection Music of Ireland. This was a reference to Charley Murphy, a professional piper “who had a regular outdoor pitch at Tralibane Bridge, a few hundred yards from the O'Neill home” (as mentioned by Nicholas Carolan in A Harvest Saved: Francis O’Neill and Irish Music in Chicago).