Ireland Is My Danny Boy

Joe Feeney sings “Danny Boy”

I grew up loving Ireland.

My fraternal grandmother, whom we called MawMaw, instilled that love in me with her constant longing to see the legendary country of fairies and leprechauns. Someone had told her that Ireland’s landscapes were similar to North Carolina’s, where we lived. She was certain that if I visited that beautiful country I would immediately fall in love with Ireland, find my purpose, and meet my one true love. I believed everything she said.

All of it came true.

Every Sunday night, sitting on MawMaw’s threadbare couch, the two of us would watch The Lawrence Welk Show, hoping that Irish tenor, Joe Feeney, would be one of the show's featured singers.

What we really hoped was that he would sing “Danny Boy,” as he does here.

When he did, we would hold hands, tears streaming down our faces, and believe that that song perfectly portrayed the hearts and souls of the Irish.

MawMaw believed Ireland was Danny Boy. That it was a valley of “summer on the meadow,” that it was sometimes “hushed and white with snow.” And she trusted that true love would prevail, no matter what happened.

It wasn’t just MawMaw who inspired me to travel to Ireland in search of Danny Boy - it was also my best friend, Marygray. After graduating from Maryville College in Maryville, Tennessee, the two of us were determined to have a life-changing adventure. We imagined ourselve mature young women ready to take on the world, and since Ireland had no language barrier (other than a thick Irish brogue in the southwest of the Republic), we decided working there might be the perfect answer to our dream.

Her grandmother had taken her on a world tour after high school graduation, but Marygray had never been to Ireland and had a firm desire to go, The two of us shared that appetite to travel to Ireland, and so it became our destination. When we discovered an ad on the college bulletin board seeking Americans to work in an Irish Castle, we thought we had died and gone to heaven. We applied to work at Ballyseede Castle in Tralee and were accepted.

Once we arrived in the Emerald Isle, it didn’t take long for us to learn the truth … Ireland was not the answer to our prayers. At least not with the English proprietors who’d hired us. In the end, they fired us and we were forced to thumb our way across the country in search of new jobs. It wasn’t easy.

We grew to love it anyway. - grew to love Danny Boy country.

The song “Danny Boy” encompasses everything about my search for purpose and for my one true love while I was in Ireland.

That is why I named my memoir “Searching For Danny Boy.”

I still recall the first stanza to “Danny Boy” that Feeney sang:

Oh, Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling

From glen to glen and down the mountain side

The summer's gone and all the roses falling

Tis you, Tis you, must go and I must bide

But come ye back when summer's in the meadow

Or when the valley's hushed and white with snow

Tis I'll be here in sunshine or in shadow

Oh, Danny boy, oh, Danny boy, I love you so

 Oh, Ireland, you are Danny Boy - the country where I discovered myself.

Oh, Marygray - the friend who discovered Danny Boy with me.

Oh, Paudie O’Connor - my “Danny Boy,” the man I fell in love with the moment I met him.

I love all of you so.