rocky road to dublin (1800s)
Lyrics by D. K. Gavan. slip jig, Ireland
Performed by The Dubliners.
key: D dorian
mode: D E F G A B C D
melody: L D r m f s l t d r'
form: strophic with refrain or verse-chorus
meter: triple
English function names: tonic subtonic
Tagg (modified): home counterpoise (away)
Riemann: t dP
Scale degrees: i VII
Chords: D CmWhile a slip jig is a dance, this slip jig came about from a poem that D. K. Gavan gave to Harry Clifton to perform. Where the melody comes from, no one seems to say, but no one attributes it to Mr. Clifton or Mr. Gavan. The Session has transcriptions of the variety of ways people have played the tune. You can see that some of the transcriptions do not have the "whack a fol de ra" bit, whose omission keeps the whole song even. Many of the recordings listed below simply vamp on the tonic between verses. Just looking at the melody, I might harmonize it this way, say, for my students:
Dm C
|/ / / |/ / / |/ / / |/ / / |
Dm C
|/ / / |/ / / |/ / / |/ / / |
Dm C Dm C Dm C
|/ / / |/ / / |/ / / |/ / / |
Dm C Dm C Dm C
|/ / / |/ / / |/ / / |/ / / |
Dm C Dm
|/ / / |/ / / |/ / / |/ / / |/ / / |This is what the Dubliners play:
Dm C
|/ / / |/ / / |/ / / |/ / / |
C Dm C
|/ / / |/ / / |/ / / |/ / / |
C Dm C
|/ / / |/ / / |/ / / |/ / / |
C Dm C
|/ / / |/ / / |/ / / |/ / / |
C Dm C Dm
|/ / / |/ / / |/ / / |/ / / |/ / / |/ / / |If you want to mess with the sense of meter, this is a great way to do it! You can hear in the Dubliners' performance that they don't emphasize the downbeats; everything is very even, nothing accented — that's left up to the singer, Luke Kelly. I'll return to the topic of meter momentarily. In terms of harmony, the seemingly arbitrary placement of chords points to the fact that this song, like much of European folk music (and musics of the world), comes out of a drone-based tradition. From there we get into the old "one-chord song that's not a one-chord song," yet again.
You'll hear from the many, many recordings of this tune, it's often sung with no harmonic accompaniment (Liam Clancy, The Clancy Brothers). From there, check out The Kings of Connaught who perform it over a drone; the parallel vocal harmonies here hint at what become actual chord changes. It's clear from the Dubliners harmonization choices that there are many possibilities that work; you just need to start and end on the tonic.
Amazingly enough, this is our first post to feature a song in triple meter. No wait! We had Found a Peanut. Anyway, triple meter has become a bit of a funny thing for me to talk about. Much of how classical musicians talk about how beats are grouped — which is an aural-kinesthetic phenomenon — is based in large part in how we've come to notate it, and less so on how we hear it in our ears (aural) and feel it in our bodies (kinesthetic). Edwin Gordon has written at length about these issues in his aptly-titled book Rhythm, in which he argues against notation-based terminology and proposes new terms based around his research mainly with pre-verbal toddlers and what musical differences humans actually respond to. I will admit, some of the terminology gets confusing, but it's mainly around the more unusual rhythmic and metric phenomena.
The old way of talking about the meter would be to say that it's triple because there are three beats per measure (represented by slashes above) and "compound" because each beat is subdivided into three parts. Gordon would say that we have the beat group — the "macrobeat" — and the meter is triple because each group has three "microbeats;" how the microbeats are subdivided has no effect on the perception of the meter. Furthermore, the macrobeats are "paired,"1 that is, they are perceived as alternating units.
"Rocky Road" is paired for the most part, until the refrain, depending on how you play it. And one could most certainly argue that the way the Dubliners play it pushes against the perception of the song being in triple meter, paired or not! Of course, this is also probably why it's become a standard recording of the song — it has a particular feel, an agenda, even.
other recordings:
Liam Clancy, Irish Troubadour, Vanguard Records. C dorian. A-cappella.
The Kings of Connaught, The Rocky Road to Dublin, self-released. D dorian. Drone accompaniment.
The Dubliners, Live at Vicar Street, Celtic Airs Records. D dorian. Slightly different version.
The Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem, The First Hurrah!, Columbia. D dorian. No chords, but nice whistle playing.
The Kilkennys, The Colour of Freedom, self-released. E dorian. These folk throw in a descending bass line in the refrain going from G down to D back up to E, which implies a III chord.
Cruachan, Folk-lore, Dezpotz AB. E dorian. Metal.
Dropkick Murphys, Sing Loud Sing Proud, Hellcat/Epitaph. E dorian. Hardcore.
Seth Staton Watkins, Rocky Road to Dublin, self-released. F dorian. A-cappella.
Y.O.N.C., The Yalbum, self-released. A dorian. Women!
If we have “paired,” then we also have to have “unpaired.” "Unpaired" meter is one of those more confusing terminologies I mentioned, because the examples Gordon gives in his books are ones he makes up instead of finding ones in the repertoire. I think this is one reason why his pedagogy has not become more mainstream, nor has his terminology found a home in music theory. The other issue is that perception is a tricky beast: one person may hear paired macrobeats as being duple microbeats, another might hear the subdivisions as microbeats. But we classical music folk love to be able to point to the notation and say that is objective musical reality. This is changing, but music is a conservative field and change is slow. I have always find Gordon's ideas intriguing to say the least, but much of it is also useful.