Come Down the Mountain Katie Daly

Eugene Dunphy tells how a visit to a Tipperary pub inspired a German-Irish songwriter to immortalise in song an Irish-American moonshiner.

On a hot summer’s day in 1959, a forty-eight-year-old song and dance man visited a public house in Tipperary town. Supping on a cool pint and looking pensively through the window at the majestic Galtee Mountains, he overheard two elderly customers talking about the pros and cons of homemade liquor, one of them interjecting, ‘Ah, the best poteen ever was made by oul’ Mary’. The song and dance man’s name was Herman O’Shea, but this was only partially true, his actual name being Herman Gordon Weight, the son of Michael Weight, a German-born entertainer who had toured Ireland for many years with The O’Shea Dramatic Company.

Before he entered the pub, Herman already had an idea for a hit song, one which was loosely based on the driving skiffle rhythms of Lonnie Donegan’s recent success, Hang Down You Head Tom Dooley, and he hoped that this new song, once it become popular, would serve as a nice little nest-egg for when he and his wife retired. Though the two old punters remained oblivious, they had in fact given Herman a novel idea for a theme, and he now determined that his song would be about a ‘female bandit’ who made hooch on the slopes of a mountain. He would not call her Mary, for that would be far too predictable; no, he would call her ‘Katie’, and as for the surname, well, that would come a few days later, in County Cork. Herman takes up the story:

I was coming out of Jack Daly’s pub in Fermoy one moonlit night a week later, when I happened to look back at the name over the door. ‘That’s it!’, I shouted, and the two men who were with me thought the moon had influenced me, and that I was ready for the nut house.

It must be said though that Herman’s song was also inspired by a real piece of Irish-American history. There was in fact a real hooch-maker of this name, Katherine (‘Katy’) Rose Daly, who was born in 1872, in Oakland, California, the daughter of Bill Daly, a Tipperary man who was killed in a gunfight with Wyatt Earp, not long after the famous shootout at the OK Corral. This particular Katy was subsequently arrested and incarcerated in the legendary Alcatraz prison.

His lyric and melody now complete, Herman and his daughter Deirdrie were walking through Dublin in 1960, when Deirdrie urged her dad to step in out of the street and sing it for Martin Walton, who ran the Glenside publishing house and record label in Gardiner’s Row. Herman accepted the challenge, and Walton was so impressed that he signed O’Shea to his label, under the proviso that he change his first name to the more Irish-sounding ‘Eamon’. And so, November 1961 saw the release on Glenside of Come Down the Mountain Katie Daly by Eamon O’Shea, the writer and singer soon performing and promoting his song in ballrooms throughout Ireland.

In the Spring of 1962, two more versions of ‘Katie’ were recorded and released, one by Rose Brennan for the Phillips label, the other by the Royal Showband for HMV. The music reviewer for the Dublin Evening Herald was not particularly enamoured by the former, but held out great hopes for the Royal’s ‘first-class’ banjo-battering arrangement which accompanied Tom Dunphy’s ‘excellently executed’ lead vocal. This, he gushed, was groundbreaking, in that it was the first recorded single by an Irish showband. The Royal’s version became a huge hit in Ireland. The ‘School Around The Corner’ television programme, broadcast from Cork on the 23rd of December 1962, featured little Noel O’Driscoll, aged five, giving a spirited rendition of ‘Katie Daly’. 

As a performer and writer, and master player of ‘the musical saw’, Eamon O’Shea was now in high demand. Another of his songs, Heaven Around Galway Bay, was recorded by Bridie Gallagher, his friend of many year’s standing: it was Herman Weight who actually discovered Bridie back in 1942, when his travelling show staged a talent competition in Creeslough, Donegal, so it’s hardly surprising that Eamon, known to Bridie in private as Herman, was often asked to sing at Bridie’s concerts. Meanwhile, O’Shea, now with quite a few original songs under his belt, decided to write a sequel to his biggest hit, but ‘Katie Daly’s Father, John Joe’ simply faded into obscurity.

Herman Weight (‘Eamon O’Shea’) and Tom Dunphy

In December 1963, when giving an interview to the Limerick Leader, O’Shea told Tom Tobin that writing songs about his adopted country, and making a living from it, suited him perfectly. ‘I will go on writing about Ireland in words and music as long as I can’, he said, ‘and my songs will be a humble contribution to Irish life as I have seen it, indeed, as I have lived it’. Four years later, an outfit from Castleblayney in County Monaghan, Big Johnny and the Maurice Lynch Showband, recorded another of O’Shea’s ‘hooch-making songs’, Biddy Reilly’s Ould Shebeen, which O’Shea composed while listening to punters conversing in Tom McGovern’s pub, on Glebe Street, Mohill, County Leitrim.

In the early 1970s, O’Shea set up permanent residence in the south of England, all the while songwriting and doing the odd sketch in watercolours, but back in Ireland the music world was shocked to learn of the death of Tom Dunphy, who was tragically killed in a car accident on the 29th of July 1975, near Drumsna, County Leitrim. In August 1979, a reflective O’Shea sent a letter to the Nationalist, which he penned from his home at 18 Larch Close, Hordle, near Lymington, in the New Forest district of Hampshire. He wished to take this opportunity, he said, to thank all of those who had recorded Come Down the Mountain Katie Daly, including Tom Dunphy and the Royal, Rose Brennan, The Halifax Three, and Dermot O’Brien.

Following an illness, which lasted about four months, Eamon O’Shea died in Southampton in early April 1980, the Dublin Evening Press noting that he left behind a son Jason, ‘who lives in Limerick, and two other sons and a daughter who are living abroad ... He will be buried in Southampton’. Many years later, Dessie O’Halloran introduced O’Shea’s ‘Katie Daly’ to a brand new generation of folk music lovers, the song included on Dessie’s 2001 album, The Pound Road.

Chorus

Come down the mountain, Katie Daly,

Come down the mountain, Katie do;

Oh can’t you hear us callin’, Katie Daly,

We want to drink your good old mountain dew.

With her old man, Katie came from Tipperary,

In the pioneering days of ’42;

And her father, he was shot in Tombstone City,

For the making of his Irish mountain dew.

Chorus

Wake up and pay attention, Katie Daly,

I am the judge that’s a-gonna sentence you;

And all the boys in court have drunk your whiskey,

And to tell the truth, dear Katie, I drunk it too.

Chorus

And so to jail they took poor Katie Daly,

Very soon the gates were open wide;

An angel come and took poor Katie Daly,

And he took her far across the Great Divide.

Chorus



Tipperary