Black is the Colour of my True Love's Hair - Choral Scholars of University College Dublin

Appalachian Air of Scottish origin arr. Desmond Earley

From the album ‘Invisible Stars – Choral Works from Ireland and Scotland’
The Choral Scholars of University College Dublin
Artistic Director: Desmond Earley
Solos: Mark Waters and Emily Doyle
Released on Signum Records
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Credits:
Director & DP Ronan Fox
Focus Puller Shane Caffrey
Camera Assistans:
Wade Enright, Sadhbh Ní Nualáin
Sound Playback Trevor Cunningham

Two American melodies from Kentucky are widely associated with the lyric Black is the colour of my true love’s hair. The younger melody was composed by Kentuckian John Jacob Niles, collector and performer of Appalachian folk songs, and an important influence on the American Folk revival in the 1950s. In a biography of Niles—I Wonder As I Wander—Professor Ron Pen of the University of Kentucky has observed that Niles created a completely different melody from the versions he had collected in Kentucky in 1916. The melody used for the choral arrangement on this disc is the version sung by Irish singer/songwriter Christy Moore, who learned the song from Scottish folk singer Hamish Imlach in 1968. This modern Scottish song is a rendering of an Appalachian antecedent of Niles’ version collected by Cecil Sharp in Kentucky and published in English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (1917).