‘The Green Fields of Canada is a song my mother had, but she had only two verses and the courant or chorus. I sat down last year and wrote three further verses starting with “Farewell to the dances in homes now deserted’’ and finishing with the one “And if you grow tired of pleasure and plenty.” I considered the song was much too short and indeed, my mother was the first to admit that she had only fragments of it’ (Paddy Tunney, The Stone Fiddle LP).

I would put The Green Fields of Canada alongside The Mountain Streams at the peak of the list of the finest of the Tunney songs. It has a splendid tune with a big range and attractive intervals and the verses which Paddy has added are among the finest he has written – indeed among the finest you will hear from any traditional singer.

It takes a mighty singer to do it justice; Paddy and John join here in solo and unison in a spirited and masterly interpretation.

This song circulated as a broadside ballad under the title The Green Fields of America, a copy of which can be found in Trinity College Dublin. This is the text that is published in Robert L. Wright’s Irish Emigrant Ballads and Songs (1975). Comparing those lyrics with what Paddy recorded for Diane Hamilton (Guggenheim) back in 1955 allows one to understand the significant arranging that he had to do to make his mother’s remembered but confused verses and fragments work as a song. At the time, he also added the four evocative lines, unmistakably Paddy in their language: 

The sheep run unsheared and the land’s gone to rushes.

The handyman’s gone and the winders of creels.

Away o’er the ocean go journeymen tailors,

And fiddlers who flaked out the ould mountain reels.

This 1955 arrangement, which appeared on The Man of Songs LP in 1962 – complete with Paddy’s quatrain, is what Planxty released in 1974 on Cold Blown and the Rainy Night. (JT)