Paddy Tunney says ‘Highland Mary is a song my mother sang frequently, with her other Scottish songs. I believe Robbie Burns himself composed this one, but she listed it along with her other big songs.’ 

The text used by Brigid Tunney and her granddaughter, Sr Brigid, follows very closely if not quite exactly what Burns wrote. This might suggest that the song was learned from a written rather than an oral source, or perhaps, during her years in Scotland, Brigid picked it up listening to her sister Minnie, a woman who was very careful about the correctness of the words she sang. (JT)

I understand that the famed McNulty Family recorded Highland Mary back in the 1940s or thereabouts. Bridie O’ Sullivan of Ennis (nee Burke of Kilmaley) used to sing it very well indeed at sessions in Clare in the 1950s and 1960s, and she tells me that she learned it from the McNulty family recording. It is rarely heard nowadays.