bigsciota wrote:
benhall.1 wrote:
The words were written by Frederick Weatherly, who was English. He wrote the words in 1910 - pretty recent compared with stuff normally associated with traditional music.
I agree with most of what's been said here, but I would like to quibble a little bit with this. While a lot of people do think of trad as being a fairly old genre, 1910 would predate quite a few tunes and songs that are readily accepted as "traditional." I'd go so far as to argue that the genre as it stands today is by and large a product of the first half of the 20th century, not the 18th/19th centuries as many people would place it.
I'm not so sure about this - although you have a decent enough point in general about the tradition not being just 'old'. For the dance tunes part of the tradition, I'd say that all those 'modern' compositions are mostly from the latter half of the twentieth century rather than the first half, when it strikes me that not all much happened in terms of tune composition. Quite a lot of the more modern songs are also from later in the twentieth century rather than earlier. Mind, my feeling on this is just an impression; I don't know for sure.
s1m0n wrote:
I think there's a difference between songs that have either arisen within the tradition (Roisin Dubh), or come from outside and have been embraced (The Lakes of Pontchartrain) by trad artists. Danny Boy is neither. To the extent that traditional musicians resent it, it's because it has largely been imposed on the tradition by outsiders. There's a reason that the OP can't find a landmark recording by a famous trad artist: there isn't one. It's popularity came from touring professional "Irish Tenors" like John McCormack, as well as by Edwardian "parlour" musicians playing and singing from published sheet music around the drawing room piano. This is not traditional music. Not since 1910. Not ever. Lots of older songs than this aren't part of the tradition because they're not part of the tradition, not because of their age.
I think s1m0n has it right here. (Well, apart from the redundant apostrophe in the possessive pronoun "its"

.)
Meanwhile,
here's the seminal performance of Danny Boy for you.