Song of the Day 3/17: Luke Kelly, “On Raglan Road”

This popular Irish ballad would not exist if a young Luke Kelly had not run into an aging Patrick Kavanaugh in the Dublin pub The Bailey one night in 1966. Kelly was the lead singer of the Dubliners, Kavanaugh a celebrated poet who 20 years before had penned a lament about an unrequited love. Kavanaugh asked Kelly if he would use it as a song.

The poem, originally titled “Dark Haired Miriam Ran Away,” appeared in a newspaper in 1946. Kavanaugh used the name of his brother’s girlfriend to disguise his true muse, a beautiful medical student named Hilda Moriarty. Kavanaugh struck up a friendship with her, but she turned down his romantic advances, mainly because she was 22 and he was 40. The verses were forgotten, never reprinted until he published his collected poems in 1964. He revised one line from the original and retitled it “On Raglan Road.”

Kelly acknowledged that Kavanaugh sang if for him to an old Irish air, “The Dawning of the Day” (Fáinne Geal an Lae in Gaelic), and that’s how Kelly subsequently performed it. Kavanaugh died the next year, before the Dubliners released “On Raglan Road” as the B-side to a single in 1971. It’s been covered by dozens of artists since, including Van Morrison, Mark Knopfler, Sinéad O’Connor and Billy Joel, but Kelly’s is the definitive rendition.

“Dawning of the Day” is the obvious precursor of “On Raglan Road.” Not only is it sung to the same tune, its subject of a lass spurning a would-be suitor is the same, too. Though just about every other Irish group recorded “On Raglan Road,” and there’s a clip of Liam Clancy reciting the poem, the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem do not sing it – they perform “The Dawning of the Day.”