Lisa,
A final thought.
You mention being intrigued by your DNA mix. Leaving aside the fact that ethnicity testing isn’t all that accurate, your mix isn’t all that puzzling. I think that sort of result is pretty common. We aren’t all distinctly Irish, Scottish etc. As has been mentioned before there has always been massive migratory movement around the British Isles and such mixed results seem unsurprising.
If you asked most people around the world what song they most associate with Ireland, many would answer “Danny Boy,” or “The Londonderry Air” as it is also known. You can’t get anything more Irish than Danny Boy, can you? The history of the song and its tune is interesting and reveals a little about the complex links between Ireland, Scotland and also England.
Nobody knows for certain where the tune was composed or first played. Lost in the mists of time. It came to public notice in 1851 in Limavady, Co Londonderry/Derry when a Miss Jane Ross – a collector of old airs – heard it being played outside the Burns & Laird shipping office, on market day, by an itinerant fiddler. She got him to play it over a few times and took the tune down, and in due course it was published. The fiddler was “blind Jimmy McCurry” from Myroe who said that the tune was very old. Reportedly when she departed he rubbed the coin she had given him against his lips and realised it was a florin (2 shillings) and not the penny that folk normally paid him. He set off in pursuit and told her she had made a mistake. Jane refused to take the florin back and asked him to keep it as an appreciation of his music. There’s a Blue Plaque on Main St, Limavady now to commemorate this “discovery” of the tune. But where did Jimmy learn it? We don’t know but possibly from his father who was another fiddle player and came from Portnahaven on the Scottish island of Islay. On a trip from Islay to Ballycastle (about 25 miles) the father had met a local lass there, married her and settled in Co Derry, where Jimmy was born in 1830. His father was descended from a long line of Scottish fiddlers, some of whom had been hereditary bards to the Lords of the Isles (whose headquarters was at Finlaggan on Islay). So perhaps the tune is Scottish?
Where did the lyrics come from? Well there’s no real dispute about that. They were written by Fred Weatherly, an eminent lawyer from Manchester whose spare time passion was writing song lyrics. His sister-in-law in San Francisco heard the tune being played by Colorado gold miners (believed to be from Co Derry). She loved it, thought of her brother-in-law in England, and in 1912 sent him the tune. He came up with the lyrics. So the most famous Irish song in the world has lyrics written by an Englishman, and possibly has a Scottish tune. Makes a very fine song for all that.
Some academics think the tune may actually be the Irish air “Aislean an Oigfear” which was first printed in a 1796 collection of Irish music. But that doesn’t suit my story at all, so I’ll ignore it.
Blind Jimmy McCurry was still around in the 1901 census. Here he is:
http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/pages/1901/Londonderry/Myroe/Myroe_Level/1523675/I mention this mostly because, as with DNA, whenever someone or, in this case, something like a tune, appears to be exclusively Irish, if you scratch the surface you sometimes find a much more complex mix below. Richer and more interesting perhaps?
