51. With Kitty I’ll Go For a Ramble

Traditional, arranged and adapted by Robbie O’Connell with added verse by Jean Ritchie ©Slievenamon Music (BMI), Geordie Music Pub. Inc. (ASCAP)

Along with her husband, photographer, George Pickow, Jean Ritchie,¹ the great singer, songwriter, and mountain dulcimer player, made a Fulbright funded field trip to Ireland in the 1952 to trace the Irish origins of the folksongs she learned in her native Kentucky. She first heard With Kitty I’ll Go for a Ramble sung in Irish by Jerry Hicks, a schoolteacher in Armagh. Later she included a recording in English by Dermot Barry, also from Armagh, on the 1959 Folkways Records LP, As I Roved Out (A Field Trip). She was very taken with the song and recorded it herself on her 1965 LP Mountain Hearth and Home, adding the middle verse which she wrote. Norma Waterson also recorded a version on the 1994 Waterson:Carthy album.

On that trip and a subsequent one, they also recorded Sarah Makem and Elizabeth Cronin, two of the most influential source singers for the folk revival of the 1960s. Both of them had a huge store of songs and were lovely singers. No doubt inspired by the earlier work of Alan Lomax, Séamus Ennis and Robin Roberts, these collections were hugely important in preserving a large part of our musical heritage. It’s scary to think how many great songs might otherwise have been lost forever.

I was very taken with the song too when I first heard Jean’s recording of it. Waterford uilleann piper, Tommy Keane, (now a long time resident in County Galway), and I worked up this more modal arrangement of it for my Close to the Bone album released on Green Linnet Records in 1982. My guitar was in Open D tuning with the bottom string raised to E but played in a modal A fingering with a capo on the fourth fret.

Lyrics:

WITH KITTY I’LL GO FOR A RAMBLE

Traditional, arranged and adapted by Robbie O’Connell with added verse by Jean Ritchie ©Slievenamon Music (BMI), Geordie Music Pub. Inc. (ASCAP)²

It's with Kitty I'll go for a ramble
Over the mountains wild
Where the blackbirds nest in the brambles
In the home where the eagle chides
Or in some lonely valley
Where the birds in the evening nest
And mine with their prayers would mingle
For the sun to hurry west

Oh, my darling wee lark of the heather
Your voice is as dear to me
As the stars all singing together
Where the mountains sweep down to the sea
And all of Erin's bright treasures
Her beautiful locks and rills
Cannot equal one smile from my Caitlín
My queen of the heathery hills

Oh, I'll buy me the roughest of raiments
To last out the life of man
Let my beard go unkempt and unshaven
Till the reach is a mile and a span
Like the fleece of the grey mountain wether
Let it tumble and dangle around
If I don't get a wife in the heather
I'll try in the new-mown ground

1. For another song from Jean Ritchie sung by Robbie, see

2. PRODUCTION INFORMATION
Robbie O’Connell: Vocals and Guitar
Tommy Keane: Tin Whistle, low whistle and mandolin
Produced by Tom Phillips
Recorded at Ivy Lane Studios, Hopkinson, MA in 1981
Engineered by Larry Minnis
Mixed at Ivy Lane Studios by Tom Phillips and Robbie O’Connell