Dónal Donohoe

It was Christmas eve and the night was frosty as I made my way back across the city having done the deal. I was eighteen years old and had just bought a new guitar, a decent one this time and not like the last one which fell apart on me after two years. This guitar was almost new, had a nice tone and stayed in tune when you played it up along the neck and the new guitar strings that I had purchased earlier in the day enhanced the sound even more. I spent the rest of the night with friends playing for them just about every tune I knew at the time on my new instrument. On Christmas day as soon as I got a chance I slipped off to played the guitar and after a while wrote a tune. Over the next few days I played the new tune many times and even managed to write some lyrics for it, so it was now a song with one verse.

Although I tried to finish the song over the following weeks and months I never managed to get beyond that first verse, but I liked the tune and thought that someday somewhere down the line I would finish it. There matters lay until twenty years later when I had just returned to Ireland and was living in an old farmhouse in county Wicklow. I had started to write songs in Irish and one night sitting in front of the open fire I got an idea for a song and started to write some lyrics. When I thought about a melody for the lyrics for some reason the tune I had written twenty years previous came to my head. So keeping the guitar arrangement as originally written I set the new lyrics to it and they fitted like a glove. The song is called ‘An t-Slí Go Cill Mhantáin’ and is the second track on my second album ‘Ceol ’s Rann’.

Some songs have a history.