Click on arrow to hear the song performed by Derek B. Scott, Professor of Critical Musicology, University of Leeds, to his own piano accompaniment.
According to Professor Scott, little is known of the life of the Irish poet Julia Crawford, but “Kathleen Mavourneen” set to music by the English composer Frederick Crouch became one of the most famous songs of the century. It was the subject of a drama, Kathleen Mavourneen, or St. Patrick’s Eve, produced in New York in 1865. Crouch himself was living in America at that time, having left England in 1849. He had sold his song outright for ten pounds, so it earned him no money.
Bibliography
Scott, Derek B. The Singing Bourgeois: Songs of the Victorian Drawing Room and Parlour. 2nd ed. Aldershot, Hampshire; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001.
Last modified 30 August 2011