The Walton firm was successful
from the beginning
While the scope of the Glenside label broadened over the years to include instrumental music - the ceili music of Jack Barrett's Boyne Quartet or of the Jackie Hearst Ceili Band, for example, or the traditional fiddle playing of Sean McLaughlin, or the patriotic marching music of the Banba Brass and Reed Band - the core of the label's repertory was song. The Glenside songs belong for the most part to the large, widely known, disparate and often under-estimated body of Irish popular song in the English language, the songs that Irish people have been singing for more than two hundred years. By contrast with Irish traditional song in the English language, which it closely resembles in form and subject matter, Irish popular song is more high-flown and more literary in its language, and it employs a wider vocabulary. In its music, it is also more elaborate and belongs in its origins to the domain of the trained singer; being usually accompanied by piano or small ensemble, it is more harmonically based.
In reality however singers do not care whether songs can be classified as traditional or popular; they follow their own tastes and interests, and
perform the songs of what they perceive as being their own music communities. The history of Irish popular song in the English language is not a very long one, because a song must be widely understood to become popular. English was only in the process of becoming the language of common currency in Ireland during the 18th century, and it only became dominant in the second half of the 19th. But in spite of its relatively recent origins an enormous body of Irish popular song was created during these two centuries and the 20th century.
The writers of the songs were aiming at an increasing English-speaking constituency within Ireland, and also at an audience in Britain, and, especially after the Famine, at a large audience in the United States. Their motives were mixed:
personal, cultural, political, and commercial.Irish popular songs like 'The Dear Little Shamrock' and a whole host of comic songs featuring stage-Irishmen appeared in the 18th century, but the first major writer of Irish popular songs was the poet and musician Thomas Moore, a Dublin grocer's son who was one of the first Catholics to attend university, and who belonged to that English-speaking professional world which began to emerge in Ireland with the abatement of the Penal Laws.
