This book deals with what is usually called ‘folk’, ‘traditional’ or ‘vernacular’ song. While the definitions of such terms are constantly being revised, the popular (and until recently, even scholarly) image of this kind of song usually includes such traits as oral transmission, relatively simple lyrics created by illiterate or semiliterate composers, and informal performance within small communities. Although all of these traits may characterize traditional song, not all are necessary to it: for while ‘folk’ or traditional song tends to be transmitted orally, it has also often been circulated via the written word; and although often simple, it is not invariably so – and its creators have included well-known poets as well as anonymous local songmakers. Performance in community, on the other hand, is integral to the song tradition, a tradition I prefer to define more in terms of context than content. The following study will therefore question the first two of these assumptions specifically in the context of the Irish song tradition; for although certainly not unique in this regard, it offers a striking example of the ways in which the oral and the written, the vernacular and elite, can interact, aesthetically and socially, to create a tradition that draws on a wide range of linguistic, poetic and musical forms and conventions.

Concentrating on the eighteenth century, when many of the songs or songgenres in the contemporary Irish traditional song repertoire first appear, I argue that while differences in poetic idiom may appear between folksong and elite or ‘educated’ poetry, there is ultimately no absolute dichotomy between oral and written forms on the one hand or folk and ‘literary’ authorship on the other, either within the song tradition itself or in the realm of literary poetry.