A beautiful evening in Paradise.  We are dining and listening to our Sonos easy listening collection.  The song Danny Boy comes on.  Now I know some background for this song as the story teller for our singing club.

I decide to go through my inventory of Danny Boy songs on Sonos and we have 5 versions.  Trivial when you think there are probably a thousand recordings.  But all or ours, and the vast majority of the versions you would ever hear, are by men.  Belefonte and Whitaker and the Il Divos etc.

The actual song was written as a lament about an Irish woman in the early 1900s where her beloved son was heading off to Australia (or the US depending on the source) as a result of poverty.  She loves her son and realizes she may never see him again but hopes one day he comes back and visits her grave.

For some reason this has become the number one song for male Irish tenors to sing.  We did not have a proper female version so I went looking and found a couple that will now join our inventory.  Ask for them if you ever visit.