Mix Margaret Dylan Jones

This Irish tune has become famous as "Danny Boy" but those words were only fitted to it in 1913, about sixty years after the wordless melody was collected in County Derry and published in a book of traditional songs.

This melody is also known by many other titles including "In Derry Vale," "Irish Tune from County Derry" and "Londonderry Air."

My new version is called Beside the Foyle. The River Foyle and its estuary form a major waterway in Northern Ireland near where this tune was first collected in 1851.

Many years ago I began making arragements of this lovely song for my choirs using the lyrics "In Derry Vale" by W. G. Rothery, which I find match the mood of this melody better than the "Danny Boy" words. The latter were originally written for a completely different tune.

In 2018 I began re-writing "In Derry Vale" to modernise the lyrics in a similar fashion to my new versions of Amazing Grace and Greensleeves, borrowing some words from Rothery. Each of these songs will be published in multiple versions for different forces and with a choice of lyrics for different singers and audiences.

This melody is particularly difficult to harmonise (that is, it's very hard to choose a good sequence of chords). I have never yet found a convincing harmonisation of it; they all seem to have some awkward progressions and sometimes strange chords. You can almost see the arrangers pulling their hair out, trying to find chords which fit! So I am very proud to have produced a good harmonisation which I think works well.

The solo version of this arrangement has been publised in this book:
 

HMP 3223 Three Traditional Songs with inclusive lyrics. Solo voice with piano. Medium voice. Beside the Foyle (D flat major; same tune as Danny Boy); Amazing Grace, the Sweet Sound of Children (Einstein was a Refugee) (G major); Greensleeves In Love (E major/E minor). Limited edition of fifty (50) copies, but all these songs have since been revised; new editions due in 2022.

FREE  UPLOAD (soon??):
Melody edition of Beside the Foyle. Solo voice with the words and the musical notation of the tune plus very detailed chord names in C major. Guitarists can use this with a capo on the first fret to accompany singers in D flat major. The chord names show all the inversions. For example, the first phrase is given as: G7 C6/E G7/D C F6/C C F/C C/E Am F etc.

PRACTICE  RECORDINGS (soon??):

mixmargaret.com/practice-recordings.html

Original music, words and arrangements © MDJ 1989-2019.

See my other arrangements of traditional tunes:

Amazing Grace
Greensleeves