The Story of "Greg's Pipes"

O'Farrell's D version

For the convenience of the piper, O’Farrell transposed the Scottish original up to D, retaining the ABC,D, format. Alexander Sutherland of Drumreilly, Co. Leitrim, has a modified setting of the O’Farrell transposition, retaining the ABC,D, format. This is most likely to have resulted from experimentation on the O’Farrell transposition by Sutherland himself. There is the possibility that Sutherland received this adaptation from older musicians in the Leitrim area. Other celebrated tunes had received a reinterpretation in the area, such as the way “A Much Admired Hornpipe by Logier”¹ had emerged locally as “Old Man Quinn”.² If such were the case, it is possible that this was the version of “Greg’s Pipes” O’Neill heard James “Old Man” Quinn himself, play.³ A variation on this Sutherland adaptation has become a very popular setting in Leitrim, and is variously known as “The Leitrim Greg’s Pipes”, “The Leitrim Bucks” and, sometimes, “Peadar Fitzpatrick’s Reel”. The order of the parts is C,D,AB and, although they are clearly derived from Sutherland’s adaptation of O’Farrell, they differ considerably from it textually. Sutherland did further experimentation by transposing his D setting to G, and presenting it, under the title “Killarney’s Echo”, in the format ABCDC’D, where the C and D parts are not in a register lower than the A and B parts, and where C’ represents a variant of the preceding C part.

¹John Mulholland, A Collection of Ancient Irish Airs, Volume 4, (Belfast, 1810), 45
²Francis O’Neill, O’Neill’s Music of Ireland, (Chicago, 1903), 306
³Francis O’Neill, Waifs and Strays of Gaelic Melody, (Chicago, 1922), 151