Both words and music of The Blackbird are to be found in P. W. Joyce’s Old Irish Folk Music and Songs. Here is Joyce’s note on the song: ‘In the early half of the last century this song was known and sung all over Ireland. It was a particular favourite in Limerick and Cork, so that I learned it at a period too early for me to remember.

‘An abridged copy of the song is given in Duffy’s Ballad Poetry: but I give here the whole text, partly from memory, and partly from a ballad-sheet printed in Cork by Haly, sixty or seventy years ago. Duffy tells us that the song – i.e. the curtailed copy he has given – is found in a Scotch collection of Jacobite Relics. But the words are Irish – as much so as the splendid air, which is found in many Irish musical collections, both printed and MS., including Bunting’s volume (1840), and which was, and still is, played everywhere by Irish pipers and fiddlers. My notation of the air follows the Munster musicians and singers of sixty years ago.

‘The “Blackbird” meant the Young Pretender, Prince Charles Edward Stuart. This custom of presenting the Pretender – and much oftener Ireland itself – under allegorical names was common in Ireland in the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century; the original object of which was concealment, so that the people might be able to sing their favourite Jacobite and political songs freely in the dangerous times of the Penal Laws.’ 

Joyce is probably in error here for the text more clearly supports the song being about James Edward Stuart (1688-1766) rather than his son. Though at one time James Edward bore the title of the Prince of Wales, he never sat on the British throne. Nevertheless, he did claim the titles of James III of England and James VII of Scotland and so was referred to as ‘the Old Pretender’. (JT)