Cathal Hayden - My Love Is In Amerikay, Lord MacDonald’s And The Foxhunters

My Love is in Amerikay, Lord MacDonald’s and The Foxhunters are three very fine reels. As with the vast majority of “traditional” tunes we simply do not know who the composers are, but composed they most certainly were. The immediate aftermath of the famine left an indelible mark on Ireland, with over a million people dying and more than a million emigrating. A very substantial percentage of those emigrating made their way to north America, and with them travelled their customs and language and music and song. The Irish émigrés often stayed together in their various adopted cities – New York, Boston and Chicago, and their music remained strong and intact. A native of Cork, Francis O’Neill made his way across the Atlantic in the 1870s and became a policeman, rising rapidly through the ranks of the Chicago Police Department to become Chief of Police in the early years of the C20th. Hugely interested in Irish music, O’Neill collected and wrote down thousands of tunes from the musicians he encountered in and around Chicago and his collections and writings have had a profound bearing on the course of Irish music ever since. The three reels played here are published in his collections.