“Easter Snow”

I have loved this song ever since, years ago, an Irish friend gave me a CD containing it. This is an instrumental version with Seamus Ennis on uilleann pipes, also called “Irish bagpipes,” accompanied by his daughter Catherine Ennis on the organ.  I have a recorded version but found this live version; I’ve started the video at 3:08 when the song begins.  I find it mournful but not depressing, and incredibly beautiful, even though the melody repeats itself many times. The uilleann pipes, to me, are far more mellifluous than Scottish bagpipes. And here they meld perfectly with the organ.

As far as I can find out, “Easter Snow” is a traditional Irish song whose name has been corrupted. It also apparently had words.  One site says this:

“Paddy Tunney’s mother Brigid appears to have been the oral the source of this in Ireland; another version was recorded in New Brunswick, Canada. Sam Henry included a 1925 version in his ‘Songs of the People’ column in the ‘Northern Constitution’ newspaper under the title Westersnow and an earlier one was discovered in J.P. McCall’s unpublished songbook, where it was said to have come from ‘County Carlow/County Wicklow’, there given the title Esther Snow. Collector Sean O’Boyle wrote of it:

‘Estersnowe is the name of a townland in Roscommon. Originally the place was known by its Gaelic name Diseart Nuadhan (St. Nuadha’s Hermitage) but in the process of adaptation to the English language in Elizabethan times, it became known as Issertnowne. By the nineteenth century the people, when speaking English, called it Estersnowe and rationalised that strange name into Easter Snow. In County Antrim where there is a strong Scots influence, the song is known as Wester Snow.

An instrumental version of the tune is in the Standford-Petrie Collection with two titles in Irish- Sneachta Casga (a literal translation of Easter Snow) and Diseart Nuadhan (the original Gaelic name of the district). The final folk etymology of the name was one I heard from the Donegal Fiddler John Doherty, who played the tune for me but did not know the words of the song. He called the tune Esther Snow and told me that Esther was “a most beautiful lady, with skin as white as the snow.” And then with equal authority, he added: “She was six foot one.” The prosody of the song is particularly interesting, being an echo of the Ochtfhoclach form with double assonantal rhymes (Aicill Dubalta). The double rhymes occur in this song only at the line endings:

Start at the song by pressing the arrow below. There are other instrumental as well as vocal versions on the Internet, but to me this one is by far the best (Seamus was largely responsible for reviving the uilleann pipes as an instrument).  If you have a cat, I’d be interested in knowing how it reacts when it hears this song.